ICT in Schools - contribute to the survey

The Danish company, Skoleskyen (school cloud) is conducting a EU-wide survey of parents on the use of ICT in schools. The aim of the survey is to find out how much technology is used at schools in Europe. The topic is in line with our conference in Lisbon. This is the reason why we are happy to the share information about the survey to get more parents to participate on request of our Danish member, SOF.

Challenges for Parents in the Digital Age - conference report

The last EPA conference and GA so far was held in Lisbon on 4th and 5th April 2014. The speakers and participants were dealing with a hot topic, the various aspects of the digital age in connection with families, parents and schools. The few paragraphs below will try to give a very short insight to this very interesting and lively conference. You will also find the presentations of all the speakers with their contact details if you want to work on with these topics.

Opening Up Education: mainstreaming digital access in education and training - EUCIS-LLL policy paper

“Disruptive innovation”, “tsunami”, “first genuine revolution since Gutenberg”… a lot of hopes and fears have emerged in the past years on Open Educational Resources (OERs), making more vivid than ever the debate on harnessing the potential of ICT for education and training. While the 2013 Commission’s Communication on “Opening Up Education” strives for a new learning ecosystem enriched with digital environments and contents, we see that in reality not everyone benefits from these new possibilities. In 2010 only 39% of Europeans used the Internet for any training and education related activity with huge disparities across countries. We know that the main barriers to access to ICT are technological but also linked to attitudes, interests and abilities. In this context there is a huge potential for progress, and there are more open questions than solid answers and reliable solutions in the field; therefore a critical and responsible approach is recommended. While the European Council recently discussed the digital economy, innovation and services, it is timely for European decision-makers to reflect on what digital learning can really do to modernise our education and training systems, unveiling its expected impact in terms of both growth and social cohesion. EUCIS-LLL thus supports the plea made by the European Commission for an integrated and collective approach to the digital agenda seen both as a challenge and a great opportunity especially to support a cultural shift in the way we teach and learn in Europe.

More:

• EUCIS-LLL policy paper on Opening Up Education
• EAEA position on Opening Up Education

• EUCIS-LLL database of good practices
• European Commission communication “Opening Up Education“, 25 October 2013
• Open Education Europa: an EU portal to provide a single gateway to European OER

Source: EUCIS-LLL website

Commission launched 'Opening up Education' to boost innovation and digital skills in schools and universities

More than 60% of nine year olds in the EU are in schools which are still not digitally equipped. The European Commission unveiled 'Opening up Education', an action plan on 25 September 2013 to tackle this and other digital problems which are hampering schools and universities from delivering high quality education and the digital skills which 90% of jobs will require by 2020. To help kick-off the initiative, the Commission launched a new website, Open Education Europa, which will allow students, practitioners and educational institutions to share free-to-use open educational resources.