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Are you looking for courses and workshops for yourself or for your school's teachers? Popular two-day workshops on different topics as well as comprehensive five-day courses will be organised at the Future Classroom Lab in Brussels. The workshops and courses are open to teachers from across Europe, so view here our training programme for 2014:
Five-day courses 2014-2015
Two-day workshops 2014
Read also about Erasmus+ funding for school staff mobility projects, application deadline 17 March 2014
European Schoolnet spoke to some of the leading thinkers in European education to get their ideas on how develops in society and technology would impact on how we teach and learn.
How are emerging trends in technology and education impacting on how we train teachers? What needs to be put in place to allow teachers to innovate within their professional development? These were some of the questions discussed and explored at the European Schoolnet’s annual conference, EMINENT, on 4-5 December 2013 in Helsinki, under the theme of ‘Teacher training for the 21st century’. As in previous years, the conference brought together over 130 policymakers, researchers, teachers, and industry providers from across the entire education spectrum.
The opening address of EMINENT 2013 was delivered by Krista Kiuru, Finnish Minister for Education and Science. The keynote address was delivered by Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies in the Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy, University of London, on the theme of teaching as a design science.
To view all of the conference videos, go to the EMINENT 2013 playlist on Youtube.
As part of its mainstreaming activities, the iTEC project has been entering into new collaborations with educational institutions and organisations around Europe to facilitate the uptake of iTEC Learning Activities and technologies on a wider scale. Four new organisations have joined iTEC as Associate Partners, to share their expertise, and help make the future classroom a reality.
The new Associate Partners are:
To learn more about the partners involved in the iTEC project, click here.
When Gloria Huerta decided to implement the iTEC's 'Tell a story' with her students, she wanted to do an inter-disciplinary project, to measure student competences and skills in a number of areas.
For the project, teachers Gloria Huerta, Araceli Catón and José Carlos Sánchez and their Year 8 class decided to create comics which illustrated the differences between life in the 19th and 21st centuries. During the project, students used online tools such as Mindomo and TeamUp, used their audio-visual skills to build narratives, improved their English-language skills, and used the class blog to reflect on their progress. The students also received from feedback from outside experts, including from Marta Herranz Calvo, a past-pupil of the school who has studied History of Art.
The project was carried out with iTEC partners Promethean and Innova&Educación. The class blog is available to view here (Spanish language).
In the final interview from the 'Every classroom a future classroom' conference, Niel McLean, formerly with Britain's National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and now Head of Education at eSkills UK, speaks on how the huge increase in access to information brought about by the Web 2.0 is changing the dynamic between teacher and pupils.
Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education, University of London, gives her views on the trends that are impacting on education including technology infrastructure in schools, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), teachers as drivers for innovation, and the classroom of 2025. The interview was filmed during the Eminent conference at Helsinki on 4-5 December 2013.
SEK Atlántico can truly be said to be an iTEC success story. Located in Pontevedra, Galicia, along Spain’s north-western coast, the school has over 600 students, from infants through to 12th grade. Since its founding in 1989, the school has always sought ways to introduce innovation to its teaching and learning.
SEK Atlántico has been involved in the iTEC project since the launch of the project in 2010, and started off with just one teacher. Since then, 18 pilot classes have taken part in all four of the project’s cycles. At SEK Atlántico, the success of iTEC can be traced back to the enthusiasm that students have shown towards the project. Gonzalo Garcia, a mathematics teacher who was the first teacher in the project, says that the more involved in the project the school was, the more motivated the students were. According to Gonzalo, the students’ enthusiasm for the project is down to the fact that iTEC Learning Activities take place in a non-traditional classroom dynamic: “The iTEC activities design gives great importance to teamwork: this meant that the students were involved in an engaging dynamic in which individual work contributes to a common goal, continuously assessed by teammates. It is often the case that students are actually more demanding on their peers than us teachers”.
Students also experienced an improvement of their test results, a higher level of engagement in classroom activities, and a greater awareness of their own learning management. “Probably the most impacting change in my teaching is that today I share more responsibility with my students”, Gonzalo continues. “I can be confident and trust in my students’ maturity, as I know they’ll take that responsibility.”
According to Cristina Márquez, Deputy Head of Learning and Development at SEK Atlántico, the iTEC experience has been very rich for the whole school community. “iTEC provides an opportunity to explore, innovate, and develop teachers professionally; working together and collaborating between different teams of teachers and students.”
She has also seen that iTEC provides opportunities for students to enrich their skills for the future and to be more reflective, active learners and participative students. Exploring, checking facts and theories, developing students’ scientific thinking, working together and connecting learning with real life matters and questions are all part of iTEC.
Pablo Martínez, a 10th grade student who was part of one of the pilot classes at the school, also feels that iTEC has benefited his everyday learning. “What a great project! It has been an incredible experience. The thing I liked most was to work in teams. I would never have thought that my classmates were so creative. I would recommend every teacher in Europe join the project; iTEC is really worth it.”
Read more success stories and other articles in the iTEC magazine
Gill Leahy, Head of European Teaching and Learning Consultants, Promethean, and Maria Florenzano, Head of Education at Innova&Educación, speak about the role that technology will play in developing scenarios for the future classroom.
The interviews were recorded during the 'Every classroom a future classroom' conference that took place in Brussels in October.
Peter Claxton is Senior Manager for Educational Policy & Practice with SMART Technologies, one of the educational technology providers that are partners in the iTEC project.
He gave his insights on the speaks about the role that industry can play in bringing innovation into teaching learning during the 'Every classroom a future classroom' conference in Brussels, October 2013.
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