Introduction to learning repositories in Europe and elsewhere

No 141942-LLP-1-2008-1-GR-COMENIUS-CMP

Metaschool: Towards Teacher Competence on Metadata and Online Resources

D1.2 “European State-of-Art Report”

Project: No 141942-LLP-1-2008-1-GR-COMENIUS-CMP Work package: WP 1 Current Needs Analysis Lead Participant: EA Authors: Petru Dumitru, Jim Ayre, Roger Blamire, Riina Vuorikari Document Type: Document Distribution: Project consortium / Restricted (Project and EC) / Public Status: Draft / Final / Submitted Document file: Metaschool_DeliverableTemplate.doc Version: 1.0 Date: 28 February 2009 Number of pages: 80


European State-of-Art Report

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0.1 About this document

This METASCHOOL project Deliverable is D1.2 European state of the art report. It arises from Task1.2.1 of the project: review state of the art in metadata and repositories for school resources, to include training programs existing that include modules on relevant subjects, leading to D1.2 European state of the art report. The report presents the state-of-the-art in Europe concerning learning repositories and metadata tools and relevant modules in teacher training. Furthermore, it includes a feasibility analysis concerning the implementation of the project in participating countries in terms of equipment and other constraints. This concludes with suggestions for the Training Framework.

0.2 Version

Version Date / Contributor Summary of Changes 1.0 February 2009/ PD Basic structure 1.1 February 2009/RB Enhanced structure 1.2 March 2009/PD Country Overview 1.3 March 2009/RB Implementation prospects 1.4 March 2009/JA Update on country overview and pan-European

repositories 1.5 March 2009/RV Metadata and methodology 1.6 April 2009/RB Introduction and conclusion added 1.7 April 2009/PD Editing and adding partner contributions/comments 1.8 April 2009/PD Integrating final updates and screen captures



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0.3. Table of contents 0.1 About this document.............................................................................................. 2 0.2 Version .................................................................................................................... 2

1.1. Scope .................................................................................................................... 8 1.2. Audience............................................................................................................... 8 1.3. Definitions............................................................................................................ 8 1.4. Structure ............................................................................................................... 8

2. An overview of educational digital repositories in Europe ................................... 9 2.1. Current national digital repositories..................................................................... 9

2.1.1. Austria........................................................................................................... 9 2.1.2. Belgium: Flemish community..................................................................... 20 2.1.3. Belgium: French community ...................................................................... 21 2.1.4. Cyprus ......................................................................................................... 23 2.1.5. Denmark...................................................................................................... 23 2.1.6. Estonia......................................................................................................... 28 2.1.7. Finland ........................................................................................................ 32 2.1.8. France.......................................................................................................... 38 2.1.9. Germany...................................................................................................... 43 2.1.10. Greece...................................................................................................... 48 2.1.11. Hungary................................................................................................... 60 2.1.12. Iceland ..................................................................................................... 61 2.1.13. Ireland...................................................................................................... 62 2.1.14. Italy.......................................................................................................... 66 2.1.15. Latvia....................................................................................................... 68 2.1.16. Lithuania.................................................................................................. 69 2.1.17. Luxembourg ............................................................................................ 70 2.1.18. The Netherlands ...................................................................................... 72 2.1.19. Norway.................................................................................................... 76 2.1.20. Poland...................................................................................................... 81 2.1.21. Portugal ................................................................................................... 83 2.1.22. Romania .................................................................................................. 86 2.1.23. Slovenia................................................................................................... 88 2.1.24. Spain........................................................................................................ 89 2.1.25. Sweden.......................................................................................................... 91 2.1.26. Switzerland ................................................................................................... 97 2.1.27. United Kingdom............................................................................................ 98

3. Pan-European Repositories.................................................................................. 103 3.1 Background information .................................................................................. 103



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3.2 Repositories...................................................................................................... 103 3.2.1. CELEBRATE ........................................................................................... 103 3.2.2. CALIBRATE ............................................................................................ 104 3.2.3. MELT........................................................................................................ 104 3.2.4. ASPECT.................................................................................................... 105 3.2.5. The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) ................................................. 105 3.2.6. Xplora ....................................................................................................... 108 3.2.7. myEUROPE.............................................................................................. 109 3.2.8. COSMOS .................................................................................................. 110 3.2.9. Organic Edunet ......................................................................................... 112 3.2.10. Discovery Space.................................................................................... 113

4. Metadata ................................................................................................................ 114 4.1. Background information .................................................................................. 114

4.1.1. Metadata role and purpose ........................................................................ 114 4.2. Metadata in the context of pan-European repositories..................................... 115

4.2.1. Practice examples...................................................................................... 115 4.2.2. International standardisation bodies active in e-learning.......................... 117

5. Implementation prospects for the METASCHOOL project in participating countries......................................................................................................................... 118

5.1. Introduction and scope ..................................................................................... 118 5.2. Analytical Framework...................................................................................... 120

5.2.1. Systemic.................................................................................................... 120 5.2.2. Institutional ............................................................................................... 121 5.2.3. Pedagogical ............................................................................................... 121 5.2.4. Technological............................................................................................ 121 5.2.5. Economic .................................................................................................. 121 5.2.6. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 121

5.3. Austria .............................................................................................................. 127 5.3.1. System....................................................................................................... 127 5.3.2. School ....................................................................................................... 129 5.3.3. Teaching.................................................................................................... 129 5.3.4. Technology ............................................................................................... 131 5.3.5. Economic .................................................................................................. 133 5.3.6. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 133 5.3.7. Recommendations..................................................................................... 133

5.4. Czech Republic ................................................................................................ 133 5.4.1. System....................................................................................................... 133 5.4.2. School ....................................................................................................... 135 5.4.3. Teaching.................................................................................................... 135



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5.4.4. Technology ............................................................................................... 137 5.4.5. Economic .................................................................................................. 139 5.4.6. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 139 5.4.7. Recommendations..................................................................................... 139

5.5. Germany ........................................................................................................... 140 5.5.1. Teaching.................................................................................................... 140 5.5.2. Technology ............................................................................................... 142 5.5.3. Economic .................................................................................................. 143 5.5.3. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 144 5.5.3. Recommendations..................................................................................... 144

5.6. Greece............................................................................................................... 144 5.6.1. System....................................................................................................... 144 5.6.2. School ....................................................................................................... 146 5.6.2. Teaching.................................................................................................... 146 5.6.3. Technology ............................................................................................... 149 5.6.4. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 151 5.6.5. Recommendations..................................................................................... 151

5.7. Sweden ............................................................................................................. 151 5.7.1. System....................................................................................................... 151 5.7.2. School ....................................................................................................... 153 5.7.3. Teaching.................................................................................................... 153 5.7.4. Technology ............................................................................................... 155 5.7.5. Cultural ..................................................................................................... 157 5.7.6. Recommendations..................................................................................... 157

6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 157 List of figures Figure 1: Screen capture"bilding.at"................................................................................. 11 Figure 2: Screen capture "Bildungspool" ......................................................................... 13 Figure 3: Screen capture "e-teaching" .............................................................................. 14 Figure 4: Screen capture "edumoodle" ............................................................................. 15 Figure 5: Screen capture "Virtuellen Schule" ................................................................... 16 Figure 6: Screen capture "Education Highway" ............................................................... 18 Figure 7: Screen capture "LearnMit" ................................................................................ 19 Figure 8: Screen capture "KlasCement" ........................................................................... 21 Figure 9: Screen capture "Enseignement.Be"................................................................... 22 Figure 10: Screen Capture "Eyliko" ................................................................................. 23 Figure 11: Danish Model .................................................................................................. 24



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Figure 12: Screen Capture "Fagenes Infoguide" .............................................................. 25 Figure 13: Screen Capture "Materialeplatformen" ........................................................... 27 Figure 14: Screen Capture "E-museum"........................................................................... 28 Figure 15: Screen capture "Koolielu" ............................................................................... 29 Figure 16: Screen Capture "Edu.fi" .................................................................................. 33 Figure 17: Screen Capture "Vetamix" .............................................................................. 34 Figure 18: Screen Capture "Opettaja.tv" .......................................................................... 35 Figure 19: Screen Capture "Opetushallitus" ..................................................................... 37 Figure 20: Screen Capture "WSOY" ................................................................................ 38 Figure 21: Screen Capture "Éducasources" ...................................................................... 40 Figure 22: Screen Capture "Sialle" ................................................................................... 41 Figure 23: Screen Capture "EDU'bases"........................................................................... 42 Figure 24: Screen Capture "Deutscher Bildungsserver"................................................... 45 Figure 25: Screen Capture "SODIS"................................................................................. 46 Figure 26: Screen Capture "Lehrer Online"...................................................................... 47 Figure 27: Screen Capture "e-yliko.gr" ............................................................................ 49 Figure 28: Screen Capture "www.pi-schools.gr".............................................................. 50 Figure 29: Screen Capture "Greek Schools Network"...................................................... 51 Figure 30: Screen Capture "epaideia.net" ......................................................................... 52 Figure 31: Screen Capture "eclass.sch.gr" ........................................................................ 54 Figure 32: Screen Capture "hellenichistory.gr" ................................................................ 55 Figure 33: Screen Capture "www.greek-language.gr" ..................................................... 56 Figure 34: http://isocrates.gr ............................................................................................. 57 Figure 35: http://odysseus.culture.gr................................................................................. 57 Figure 36: www.medialiteracy-iom.gr.............................................................................. 58 Figure 37: http://www.ekebi.gr......................................................................................... 59 Figure 38: http://www.epyna.gr/....................................................................................... 60 Figure 39: Sulinet.............................................................................................................. 61 Figure 40: Scoilnet............................................................................................................ 63 Figure 41: ImageBank....................................................................................................... 64 Figure 42: Ask About Ireland ........................................................................................... 65 Figure 43: Gold ................................................................................................................. 66 Figure 44: Innova Scuola .................................................................................................. 68 Figure 45: Skolotajs .......................................................................................................... 69 Figure 46: Mokymosi object! metaduomen! saugykla .................................................... 70 Figure 47: MySchool! ....................................................................................................... 71 Figure 48: EDUREP ......................................................................................................... 73 Figure 49: ENTRÉE.......................................................................................................... 74 Figure 50: Teleblik............................................................................................................ 75



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Figure 51: Davindi ............................................................................................................ 76 Figure 52: Utdanning.no ................................................................................................... 78 Figure 53: Skolenettet.no .................................................................................................. 79 Figure 54: DigLib ............................................................................................................. 80 Figure 55: Interklasa ......................................................................................................... 81 Figure 56: Young Digital Planet ....................................................................................... 82 Figure 57: Escolavirtual.................................................................................................... 84 Figure 58: Repositório e-Learning.................................................................................... 85 Figure 59: AeL Educational.............................................................................................. 87 Figure 60: ISFTIC............................................................................................................. 90 Figure 61: EDU365........................................................................................................... 91 Figure 62: Länkskafferiet.................................................................................................. 92 Figure 63: Multimediabyrån ............................................................................................. 94 Figure 64: Svenska Museifönstret .................................................................................... 95 Figure 65: Kunskapsnavet................................................................................................. 96 Figure 66: Digital School Library..................................................................................... 98 Figure 67: BECTA............................................................................................................ 99 Figure 68: TDA............................................................................................................... 100 Figure 69: Teacher Resource Exchange ......................................................................... 101 Figure 70: Inclusion ........................................................................................................ 102 Figure 71: LRE for schools............................................................................................. 107 Figure 72: myEUROPE LLE Repository ....................................................................... 110 Figure 73: COSMOS - Users' Distribution ..................................................................... 112



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1. Introduction

1.1. Scope This METASCHOOL project Deliverable is D1.2 European state of the art report. It arises from Task1.2.1 of the project: review state of the art in metadata and repositories for school resources, to include training programs existing that include modules on relevant subjects, leading to D1.2 European state of the art report. The report presents the state-of-the-art in Europe concerning learning repositories and metadata tools and relevant modules in teacher training. Furthermore, it includes a feasibility analysis concerning the implementation of the project in participating countries in terms of equipment and other constraints. The Deliverable concludes with suggestions for the Training Framework.

1.2. Audience This report is addressed to project partners in the first instance but is relevant to a wider audience of ICT decision-makers in Europe.

1.3. Definitions Terms are defined when first used throughout.

1.4. Structure Chapter 1: is the introduction to the study, containing an overview of this document, providing its Scope, Audience, Structure and References.

Chapter 2: describes existing digital learning resource repositories in Europe. The chapter is divided into 27 sections describing the repositories in each country.

Chapter 3: provides an overview of seven pan-European repositories.

Chapter 4 examines metadata and discusses them in terms of educational resource repositories.

Chapter 5 moves on to describe a validation framework and to apply it to assess the conditions and prospects for the uptake of repositories in schools in the countries taking part in the METASCHOOL training, i.e. Austria, Czech Republic, Germany and Greece. Chapter 6 draws some conclusions from this report.



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2. An overview of educational digital repositories in Europe

This report is based on the information that is available on the Web as well as on the information existing in the referential literature. The report team took also into consideration a review which was published by Maybe you should include a paragraph here saying that the deliverable draws upon an existing survey of repositories carried out by the EdReNeThematic Network, whose work is available on the Web at the following address: http://edrene.org/ The team performed a review on the existing digital repositories in European countries. The report features basic information such as a description of each repository, its URL and its basic attributes. The report also defines the national context, the purpose of the repository as well as which audience it addresses.

2.1. Current national digital repositories

2.1.1. Austria

In Austria, educational content and services are available distributed via a number of online repositories and online services that are managed by nine regions. The content stored in the digital repositories is classified based on a set of standards such as IEEE LOM, SCORM and Dublin Core (including use of the LOM-based application profile from European Schoolnet) to make the latest repositories in Europe compatible and enable sharing content at European level. Bildung.at



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Bildung.at (http://www.bildung.at) is a portal whose audience includes teachers, students, administrators and other educationalists. According to EdReNe1 the portal provides access to information and services to about 500,000 registered users who can access online content which is structured according to three main areas: Education, Higher Education and Adult Education. The portal is available in German and enables users to search for content which is located on a number of servers in Austria which are interconnected and share information.

1!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/austria.html!!



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Figure 1: Screen capture"bilding.at"

The portal, which is designed by “bit media” Austria, also lists a set of services grouped around curriculum-related subjects and levels and allows searches to be filtered according to multiple criteria . In addition to the more conventional educational content, the portal provides news services focusing on the latest research outcomes in education and also



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oncurrent elearning events. Lately the portal has secured the support of a number of sponsors such as Sun andOracle, with the aim of supporting and enhancing its content and services. Bildungspool Bildungspool (http://bildungspool.bildung.at) is a gateway that enables users to access digital content via a federated search facility to the Learning Resource Exchange service developed by European Schoolnet within two EU co-funded projects, CALIBRATE2 and MELT3. The gateway provides access to digital content stored on a number of servers in Europe that are interconnected with the aim of encouraging multilingual content sharing. On "Bildungspool", teachers and other potential users can download content resulting from a number of e-content programmes managed by the Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture. The programmes are directly focused on responding to the needs and expectations of Austrian schools. The digital content is structured according to existing languages of the objects, curriculum subjects, classroom activity, as well as the source and location of the objects.

2!http://calibrate.eun.org/!!3!http://info.melt"project.eu/!!



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Figure 2: Screen capture "Bildungspool"

On the home page, the portal administration states that the Bildungspool provides access to 62,901 teaching and learning digital resources. According to EdReNe, "Bildungspool" features "AEIOU", an online encyclopaedia comprising about 15,000 digital entities - texts, pictures, sounds and videos. The encyclopaedia also harvests approximately 15,000 pictures (assets) from the Institute for Cultural Sciences of the Medieval Age and around 8.000 pictures (assets) in low resolution from the art gallery "Albertina". eTeaching Austria eTeaching Austria (http://www.e-teaching-austria.at) has been designed, developed and maintained to support the notebook classes initiative that is currently enabling about 1,000 teachers and 10,000 pupils/students to use their personal notebook computers in school for all subjects (Source: EdReNe). The website focuses on developing and



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extending a repository especially designed for students and teachers who are exploring a number of methods and strategies on how to best use a notebook computer for teaching and learning purposes in classes.

Figure 3: Screen capture "e-teaching"

EDUMOODLE EDUMOODLE (http://www.edumoodle.at) is a portal that mainly promotes Moodle as a learning and teaching medium in schools. The portal also provides guidance on how to integrate open source solutions in schools. According to EdReNe there are more than 2,200 schools that benefit from the services of EDUMOODLE.



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Figure 4: Screen capture "edumoodle"

Virtuelle Schule Österreich Virtuellen Schule Österreich (http://www.virtuelleschule.at/) is the Austrian section of the European project Virtual School, one of the pioneer projects dedicated to teachers who were encouraged to integrate ICT into the curriculum since 1997. The Austrian section continues the European tradition of this long-standing project. The purpose of the project is to select, recommend and adapt existing digital resources to teaching. The resources are managed by a group of experienced teachers that is organised in teams representing all school subjects at all school levels, from primary to upper-secondary school and even in higher education.



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Figure 5: Screen capture "Virtuellen Schule"

Virtuellen Schule Österreich also features project opportunities at national and European level, by encouraging collaborative work where teachers can integrate tools and services provided on the portal. The project encourages the production of user-generated content resulting from classroom-based project, an outcomes that, according to the project philosophy, may serve as practice examples to inspire fellow teachers to make use of modern tools and technologies while teaching. National subject orientated portals The subject related portals refer to the education ministry‘s guideline Electronic Content for Austrian Schools: Creation, Distribution and Maintenance from 2003 and to the eContent initiative of the Ministry of Education. The Subject Oriented Portal is organised by BM:UKK and Eduhi



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! the Subject Oriented Portal (Gegenstandsportal) was established in 1997 and is financed now by the Ministry of education

! there are 40 subject oriented portals: http://www.schule.at/gegenstand ! they publish and link quality proved content ! one part of the national subject oriented portal is ViS:EU an EXCHANGE Portal

for eContent between Austrian Eductional Platforms and EU Projects; Its purpose is: to exchange existing materials between regular subjects and projects, to disseminate results and information in standard/regular subjects; to encourage networking with other initiatives in eLearning and to use, re-use und enrichment of existing eContent.

Education Highway According to the EdReNe Report4 Education Highway (http://www.eduhi.at) is “by far the biggest educational repository in Austria”. The portal offers a set of complete tools and services such as: searching content by categories; Intranet service; a set of links pointing to the latest developments in the field of eLearning; different types of educational software. All the content is managed and maintained by a group of teachers and other educationalists. There are more than 80,000 items that are also interconnected to and shared via the Schule.at, a portal managed in cooperation of the Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture and the Federal Government of Upper Austria.

4!http://edrene.org/results/deliverables/EdReNe%20D%202.6%20SoA%20"%20II.pdf!!



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Figure 6: Screen capture "Education Highway" The format of the digital content varies from text-based to visual resources. Most of the digital content is enhanced with basic pedagogical elements which encourage users to find quick and appropriate solutions of integrating it into their daily teaching practice. Lernmit Lernmit (http://www.edumoodle.at/lernmit/) proposes another model for an online digital repository which features a large number of best practice examples in the field of e-learning that may inspire teachers and students to enhance their curriculum in all levels, from primary to lower and upper secondary schools.



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Figure 7: Screen capture "LearnMit" The repository is organised around specific school subjects and for each proposed content category there are suggestions on how to handle the online content and which educational objectives are expected to be accomplished during a lesson. Each unit was proposed and maintained by a teacher who was willing to share concrete steps on how to deliver such a lesson in the classroom. It is suggested that teachers will be more motivated to use content embedded into a pedagogical framework like this because they see the immediate benefits of enhancing traditional teaching with new approaches using digital resources. The portal also incorporates a searching tool which, when displaying the searched items, lists all the related metadata and information such as curriculum, age group, language and the curriculum category. Other digital repositories in Austria



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Burgenländischer Bildungsserver: http://www.bildungsserver.com Vorarlberger Bildungsservice: http://www.vobs.at Tiroler Bildungsservice: http://content.tibs.at/ Padagogische Hochschule Salzburg: http://schule.salzburg.at Bildung4you: http://www.bildung4you.at Wiener Bildungsserver: http://www.wiener-bildungsserver.at Styrian Education Server: http://www.asn-graz.ac.at Bildungsland: http://www.bildungsland.at

2.1.2. Belgium: Flemish community

KlasCement KlasCement is part of European Schoolnet’s Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) federation of repositories. All KlasCement content is collected, described and shared by users of the educational portal of Flanders in Belgium. It covers virtually all curriculum subjects and can be freely used by anyone and in some cases resources can also be adapted and redistributed.



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Figure 8: Screen capture "KlasCement" Each item contains licensing information that provides details on how to use and acknowledge the source of the resources. Some digital resources are tagged as being 'universal', which means that they can “travel well across all European countries”. The portal also contains an innovative “points” system. Teachers receive 500 points when the join and subsequently lose two points every time they click on a resource. Once they have exhausted their initial allocation of points, they then can only continue to use the portal if they gain additional credits by sharing resources and links to web sites.

2.1.3. Belgium: French community

Enseignement.be



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Enseignement.be (http://www.enseignement.be/) is a complete portal dedicated to school life in the French Community of Belgium. It does not have a repository format, but it collects curriculum-based news, features teacher training opportunities and provides external links to existing repositories with learning objects in other French speaking countries such as France, Switzerland and Canada. These links are periodically advertised in relation to school subjects and online and offline events.

Figure 9: Screen capture "Enseignement.Be" A special section of the portal is dedicated to ICT in education (TICE), which features a number of online resources that are classified in different categories: open source software, project opportunities, latest news in the field of elearning, online communities where teachers can get support and training, as well as a set of digital teaching modules.



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2.1.4. Cyprus

Eyliko In Cyprus there are no dedicated repositories with digital content addressing teachers. The Ministry of Education manages an educational portal where teachers are encouraged to share teaching and learning resources in a dedicated area.

Figure 10: Screen Capture "Eyliko"

The portal (http://www.schools.ac.cy/eyliko/mesi/) features lessons plans and other related materials that are created by a number of teachers and supervised by the Ministry’s advisors.

2.1.5. Denmark



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There are three major repositories in Denmark. According to EdReNe5 the three repositories are interconnected and complement each other. The content is classified according to the Dublin Core set of metadata standards. The managing team is composed of educators and content providers, who add, describe and maintain a large library of digital resources. Some external collections of digital resources are involved and their related metadata is automatically transferred to the system.

Figure 11: Danish Model Source: EdReNe http://edrene.org/results/currentState/denmark.html

5!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/denmark.html!!



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Fagenes Infoguide Fagenes Infoguide (http://infoguide.emu.dk) is an initiative of the Danish Ministry of Education. The repository’s primary purpose is to harvest Web links that are recommended for use in the Danish schools. At the moment there are about 10,000 items. A team of 45 people enhance and maintain the repository. The reason for collecting and storing Web links into this repository is to save teachers’ time by organising the links according to the Danish curriculum.

Figure 12: Screen Capture "Fagenes Infoguide" Materialeplatformen



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Materialeplatformen (http://materialeplatform.emu.dk) is another initiative of the Danish Ministry of Education. The repository was implemented together with a number of Danish publishers. The Materialeplatform was launched in April 2006. According to EdReNe6 there were about 20,000 Danish learning resources and 4,000 media clips in November 2008.

6!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/denmark.html!!



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Figure 13: Screen Capture "Materialeplatformen" It is worth mentioning that the repository stores both digital and analogue resources such as books, chemistry sets, exhibitions and others. The contributors are obliged to recommend relevant metadata and a description for each item. E-museum emuseum.dk (http://emuseum.dk) is a joint initiative of the Danish Ministry of Education and The Danish Ministry of Culture. The portal was launched in October 2006 and aims to harvest digital units that focus on a large number of subjects: history, environment, ethnography, archaeology, languages and literature and others.



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Figure 14: Screen Capture "E-museum" The E-museum repository is interconnected to the “materialeplatform.dk” and this enables visitors to retrieve all the E-museum items via this portal. In addition to a classic search interface, the E-museum also enables users to access resources based on a map that visualises the Danish regions and the related information which is organised according to this criterion. More information about the Danish experience in the field of educational digital resources: http://edrene.org/results/currentState/denmark.html

2.1.6. Estonia

Koolielu



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The educational national portal, “Koolielu” (http://www.koolielu.ee/) provides day-to-day information to schools in Estonia and includes over 5,000 resources created by teachers.

Figure 15: Screen capture "Koolielu" Koolielu (meaning‘school life’) is also an electronic meeting place for school staff, students and parents, and anyone else with an interest in schools. It contains information about different events in the educational life in Estonia and elsewhere: conferences, competitions, the possibilities of supplementary education and leisure activities. The portal is available in both Estonian and Russian since more than 30% of schools in Estonia use Russian as a main language.



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Tiger Leap Foundation (TLF), that manages the Koolielu portal, has been an active partner of European Schoolnet in a number of projects such as CALIBRATE 7and MELT8. Both projects were been designed to provide users of learning content in schools with access to more useful types of metadata that will allow them to find resources that fit their needs, language, cultures and preferred ways of teaching and learning. Work is also currently underway to build a more sophisticated Learning Object Repository. The EdReNe Report9 states that:

TLF looked at open source systems with the possibility to connect to the EuN systems. Several platforms support the needs TLF have. They tested the "Minor" system suggested by EUN (minor.sourceforge.net [http://minor.sourceforge.net]). However, half a year ago it was not possible to mass upload metadata to it. The solution was therefore based on SCAM-Nimble from Sweden (www.skolutveckling.se/wiki/display/SLASK/Home). SCAM-Nimble is LOR management system compatible with standards and federation of LOR’s. Because the development of metadata harvesting was late TLF decided to develop its own LOR Waramu. Waramu is connected to the LRE network of repositories and supports metadata harvesting. The next steps include user management and integration of the LOR with the educational portal (Koolielu.ee) interface.

DiPo DiPo (http://htk.tlu.ee/dipo) eportfolio system is provided as a free service to all teacher students, in-service teachers and teacher educators nationwide in Estonia. DiPo has been integrated with social learning object repository LeMill (http://lemill.net), social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us, photo sharing tool Flickr, and some other social sofware

7!http://calibrate.eun.org/!!8!http://info.melt"project.eu/!!9!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/estonia.html!!



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tools. DiPo is The DiPo software is built as an add-on module for Plone CMS (http://plone.org). DiPo integrates personal ePortfolios and the community portal at organizational level. Personal ePortfolios are used for storing individual data, evidences of person’s competences and EuroPass-styled Curriculum Vitae. The owners of DiPo portfolio can reflect regularly on personal learning experiences using blog-based Diary tool and get feedback from the mentor or peers. All knowledge-objects in DiPo are tagged and can be linked to certain competency in the professional qualification standard. The institution- and community-based functionalities of DiPo are different retrieval and aggregation tools for knowledge-objects, persons and networks. Within DiPo system, teachers can form virtual communities that are based either on institutional hierarchies (e.g. teachers from one school), job profile, geographical location or even hobbies. DiPo has been used nationwide in Estonia as a support system for cross-institutional learning in the context of all three levels of teacher education: pre-service studies in the university (especially school practice), induction year and continuous professional development of in-service teachers. DiPo has been systematically implemented in the context of teacher education, having almost 1000 registered users (about 7% of all teachers in Estonia). The implementation of DiPo comprises the possibility to provide the ICT support for new teachers adopting the innovative methods at science classrooms. The tool can be used for intermediate communication between the teachers’ community, as well as, for reflective activities of teachers’ and teacher training organizations. Potentially the tool enables teachers to evaluate their competences related to innovative teaching practices. Distributed learning environments - with the arrival of Web 2.0, the social software and services and social media tools have become mainstream technologies in the web environments and can be effectively used in science teacher communication and in the reflective and argumentative inquiry practices at schools. CET has been investigating the applicability and interoperability of social media tools as distributed learning systems in teacher education in national and cross-cultural international settings and in the inquiry practices at basic and secondary schools. The distributed learning management systems can be used as the democratic and user-managed medium for teachers’ collaborative action to implement inquiry-based innovative methods into science classrooms and enhancing dialogic teaching and self-reflection practices of teachers and students. Waramu Waramu is an open-source repository for learning objects. It is licensed under BSD license. Waramu is developed using Java, it runs on Glassfish using Mysql database.



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It supports IEEE LOM and Dublin Core metadata standards, but these schemas can be expanded/adapted or alternative metadata schemas can be added. It interacts with other applications (e.g. Virtual Learning Environments) through SOAP Webservice. The repository is connected to FIRE federation (European Learning Resource Exchange, see http://fire.eun.org), which makes it possible to search Learning Objects from Waramu via Calbrate LRE portal http://calibrate.eun.org. The repository supports OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting. In terms of metadata Waramu itself does not have an UI, full-featured client is being developed. MetadataPortal is a portal where people can put their resources only, manage metadata, browse content that is in Waramu etc. More information on Estonian attempts to standardise digital content: EdReNe Report on Estonia: http://edrene.org/results/currentState/estonia.html Tiger Leap Foundation (TLF): http://www.tiigrihype.ee/?setlang=eng Tallinn University of Technology (TLU): http://htk.tlu.ee/htk/in-english/ - LOR-EST LOs Repository in Estonia: http://edrene.org/presentations/Estonia-TLF-part2.ppt Tallinn University, C Ed. Technology: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/361.pdf LeMill & Waramu Projects: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/353.ppt

2.1.7. Finland

National Board of Education has made learning resources available to primary and secondary education based on Finnish curriculum through http://www.edu.fi/SubPage.asp?path=498,1329 and http://www.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/peruskoulu/ Yle, the Finnish National Broadcasting company offers a portal with learning resources at http://oppiminen.yle.fi/ and specific portal for teachers: http://opettajatv.yle.fi/ Resources can be either independent study material or they are support material to some of the educational programmes ran on TV. Peda.net Schoolnet



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Peda.net Schoolnet (http://www.peda.net/) is a research and development project coordinated by University of Jyväskylä, Finland and offers resources for teachers, like this http://www.peda.net/img/portal/591316/moon.swf National Finnish Educational Portal: Edu.fi The National Finnish Educational Portal (http://www.edu.fi/) is a gateway that provides access to all the existing repositories with digital content in Finland: Vetamix, Opettaja.tv, Opetushallitus and some others.

Figure 16: Screen Capture "Edu.fi" Vetamix



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Vetamix is the result of a joint initiative of the Finnish National Broadcasting Company (http://svenska.yle.fi/) and the National Board of Education (http://www.oph.fi/svenska). The portal is intended to harvest both educational content and tools which are organised in three main areas: storage, a virtual desktop with related tools, and a social hub for educators.

Figure 17: Screen Capture "Vetamix" Opettaja.tv Opettaja.tv is a service for teachers both on TV and on-line, a joint effort of head teachers and the Finnish National Board of Education. YLE Teema is broadcasting Opettaja.tv for a few hours on five days of the week, offering teaching material for class work as well as



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to serve teachers' further education and professional development. Most Opettaja.tv TV programmes are also available online.

Figure 18: Screen Capture "Opettaja.tv"



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The website offers a large qualtity of audiovisual teaching material and tools for its use in class. It also serves as a discussion forum for teachers and as a platform for the exchange of teaching material. The repository comprises more than 7,300 digital resources such as media clips and learning objects published by YLE’s educational broadcasting division in the following formats: sound clips, video clips, photos, pictures, exercises and recommended websites. According to the EdReNe Report10 “the resources are indexed based on a Finnish version of LOM metadata. The search can be made based on a keyword, a subject (or subject area) and the level of school”. Opetushallitus Opetushallitus (http://www.oph.fi/SubPage.asp?path=1,436) features a set of digital units that are indexed according to the Finnish educational metadata model (FEM) that is based on Dublin core but also mappable with LOM. The indexing started with the resources of FNBE but will be broadened to include also materials of other publishers and organizations. Commercial materials are not included. The indexing is in progress and the database includes at the moment 3.500 resources. Most of these are either pictures and photos or online learning materials (from learning objects to wider educational web sites). The searches can be either simple Google-type searches targeted on all indexing text or a more refined search on certain fields of the metadata model.

10!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/finland.html!!



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Figure 19: Screen Capture "Opetushallitus" WSOY, Sanoma Learning and Literature WSOY, Sanoma Learning and Literature, a private publisher, has launched three combined repository Web services: 1) Company home pages & web shop [http://www.wsoy.fi/]; 2). Koulukanava [http://www.koulukanava.fi/] (School channel) with free material, closely connected to the company’s books. Pupils’ content is open, but the access to teachers’ content requires a password; 3) OPIT e-learning service [http://www.opit.fi/] on an annual subscription basis. The e-learning service is provided through a virtual learning environment (VLE), and includes web2, GSM, GPS, content (more that 24 mill. LOs, other materials, curriculum based), and services (hosting, training, call centre).



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Figure 20: Screen Capture "WSOY"

2.1.8. France

The French Ministry of Education has been encouraging and promoting the use of new technologies in schools and related standards since 2003. A number of French institutions expressed their interest in setting up and maintaining digital repositories: the national agency of ICTE, universities, professional training institutions and publishers. The repositories managed by Centre national de documentation pédagogique (CNDP) Éducasources



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Éducasources (http://www.educasources.education.fr/) is a national repository hosting digital online resources that are selected and described by the SCÉRÉN Network in France. The resources are compatible with LOM, LOM-FR and Dublin Core Standards. Éducasources does not work as a search engine, but it manages resources that are selected and inserted by specialised teams at CNDP and CRDP. The resources are selected according to the French curriculum with the aim that they can be used in connection for school subjects.



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Figure 21: Screen Capture "Éducasources"

In terms of metadata interoperability, Éducasources makes the resources compatible with LOM-FR, at national level, and with LOM and Dublin Core at European level. According to EdReNe Report11 the Éducasources repository harvests around 7,000 online references. 11!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/france.html!!



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Sialle Sialle (http://www.sialle.education.fr/) is a repository that provides schools with free access to trusted, open source software that has been evaluated as being suitable for teachers.

Figure 22: Screen Capture "Sialle"

The software resources are for classroom use and allow students to experience a variety of learning opportunities such as discovering information, learning to structure it, evaluation and self-evaluation. The resources combine text, audio and video and require a certain degree of interaction. MURENE



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MURENE (http://murene.education.fr/) is a federated search engine managed by the French Ministry of Education. The service is intended to be a gateway to a number of thematic repositories as well as to a number of websites publishing digital content that can be used for cross-curricular approaches in schools. The metadata is based on LOMFR. At present the portal is under construction and will be ready for use in 2009. EDU'bases EDU'bases (http://www.educnet.education.fr/secondaire/usages/edubases/) is a collection of educational materials coming from different sources that are expected to encourage teachers to integrate practice examples, teaching scenarios, suggestions for lessons and guidelines into teaching.

Figure 23: Screen Capture "EDU'bases"



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According to EdReNe12 there are about 11,000 digital which are described according to the LOM FR application profile. Other repositories in France Lesite.tv: http://www.lesite.tv/ Correlyce: http://www.regionpaca.fr/index.php?id=correlyce PrimTICE: http://primtice.education.fr/ UNIT: http://www.unit.eu/ AUNEGE: http://www.aunege.org/infos/search_XML?schemaID=LOM UNISCIEL: http://trouver.unisciel.fr/ UMVF : http://www.umvf.prd.fr/index.php UOH: http://www.uoh.fr/ UVED: http://www.uved.fr/index.php?id=412 Canal-U: http://www.canal-u.education.fr/ CERIMES: http://www.cerimes.education.fr/ Edumedia: http://www.edumedia-sciences.com/ Presentations Scérén – CNDP: http://edrene.org/presentations/France-CNDP.ppt Educasources repository: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO19/508.ppt

2.1.9. Germany

According to its federal structure and the educational policy, no national repository aiming exists with a focus to unify and standardize contents. In education, the Länder

12!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/france.html!!



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(states) are independent from the federal government. Despite of that and despite of any lack of power, there is still a Federal Ministry of Education including a minster. In terms of digital resources for schools, the major repositories are as follows: Deutscher Bildungsserver, SODIS Online Content Pool and Lehrer Online. Deutscher Bildungsserver The Deutscher Bildungsserver (http://www.eduserver.de/, German Education Server) is the main internet guide to education related information on the internet, providing high quality information on internet resources to all those concerned. As a meta-server it primarily refers to resources on the German education system, which are mainly provided by the federal (Bund) and state (Länder) authorities, the European Union, higher education institutions, schools, state institutes, non-university research or service institutes, scientific societies, media providers and libraries. The German Education Server is a joint service by the federal government and the states.



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Figure 24: Screen Capture "Deutscher Bildungsserver" Apart from research options in several data bases, the information pool can be accessed via two structured types of entry: subject catalogues and target groups. There are about 30,000 entries which are indexed according to Dublin Core. SODIS Online Content Pool The SODIS Online Content Pool gathers together digital content, about 66,812 resources, which come from four major online sources: MELT (FWU contribution to the MELT Project of European Schoolnet), Lehrer Online, Contake - a collection of learning objects in Austria - and Elixier.



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Figure 25: Screen Capture "SODIS"

Lehrer Online Lehrer Online is an online platform that offers different services and tools to teachers. In addition to news, newsletters, open source software recommendations, the portal provides access to about 1,500 non-commercial lessons plans which come mainly from teachers that are willing to share them online.



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Figure 26: Screen Capture "Lehrer Online" The portal also maintains a powerful search engine which enables visitors to look for items that are not necessarily highlighted, but stored in different sections of the portal. FWU FWU http://www.fwu.de/ is Germany’s leading producer of media for schools and other educational organisations. It produces educational video-films, didactic DVDs and learning software on CD-ROMs as well as internet applications and keeps on stock approximately 2,200 titles for almost all school subjects and cross-area topics, as well as fictional movies for children and young people. All productions are accompanied by handbooks for teachers and educators. Every year about 100 new titles are produced. FWU is cofounder of the German Education Server and responsible for the content of the



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sector “school”. It has also contributed educational content to European Schoolnet’s Learning Resource Exchange service in the CALIBRATE and MELT projects. Related information Connecting Different German Metadata Communities - Towards a National LOM Available at: http://melt.fwu.de/080108_EdReNe.html

2.1.10. Greece

Official sites e-yliko.gr e-yliko (http://www.e-yliko.gr) is the official Educational Portal of the Greek Ministry of Education. It has been established in 2002 and comprises a network based environment that supports the educational practice and comprises a meeting point of all members of the educational community (e.g. students, teachers, parents, administrators and other educationalists). The portal is available in Greek and enables users to search for proposals of teaching, educational software, educational material (educational proposals, articles, texts of pedagogic concern, information about educational software as well as links to educational sites), related congresses, events, statements and competitions. On "E-yliko" teachers and other potential users can download content resulting from a number of e-content programmes managed by the Ministry for Education.



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Figure 27: Screen Capture "e-yliko.gr" www.pi-schools.gr pi-school (www.pi-schools.gr) is the official Educational Portal of the the Pedagogical Institute. It is called upon to national demands for an educational reform that will meet the challenges of the 21st century, as well as those inherited by the historical role of Greece. It contains all the official lessons and books of the Greek schools.



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Figure 28: Screen Capture "www.pi-schools.gr"

Greek Schools Network The Greek Schools' Network (GSN - www.sch.gr) is the educational intranet of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs (www.ypepth.gr), which interlinks all schools and provides basic and advanced telematics' services. Thus, it contributes to the creation of a new generation of educational communities, which takes advantage of the new Informatics' and Communication Technologies in the educational procedure. The implementation of the Greek Schools' Network is funded by the Framework Programme for the Information Society (www.infosoc.gr), in close cooperation between the Ministry of Education as well as 12 Research Centers and Highest Education Institutes, specialized in network and Internet technologies. Educational Exploitation of the Greek Schools Network



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The current design and implementation of the Greek Schools Network focuses in providing useful services to all members of the basic and middle education community, fulfilling among others the following goals: * Access to telecommunication and informatics services * Access to digitized educational material * Distance learning, e-learning * Encourage collaboration * Information and opinion exchange * Conduct of thematic discussions, seminars, lectures, etc. * Access to digital library services * Communication and Cooperation of all educational degrees * Communication with European educational networks * Facilitate complimentary educational programs * Provide education to individuals with special needs or disabilities * Inform, educate, and entertain

Figure 29: Screen Capture "Greek Schools Network" Figure xx

European Programs or private initiative



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epaideia.net epaideia.net (http://www.e-paideia.net/) is an educational website that has been specially designed to serve the current needs of the school communities in Greece making use of recent developments in education. It seeks to make classroom learning more interesting and more effective for children, while helping them become more familiar with new technology and deepen their understanding of Greek culture. It aims to continuously evolve in order to meet the ever-changing needs and changes within the educational system.

Figure 30: Screen Capture "epaideia.net"

The e-paideia.net portal is a project of the Lambrakis foundation whose Greek and European partners include the Greek Ministry of Education, the European Experts Network for Educational Technology (EENet), the European Distance Education



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Network (EDEN) and the pioneering MENON Network of European education & e-learning research bodies, of which the foundation is a founding member. The portal offers educational material in the form of: lesson plans; suggestions for using modern technological tools for inter-school collaboration; communication between schools-teachers and students; information on issues of interest for prospective university applicants; and detailed outlines of lifelong-learning opportunities and careers in Greece. It also provides useful information on how young people and adults can take advantage of their free time. Moreover, a daily news service keeps the school community (teachers and parents) very well informed on current educational issues in Greece and the world. The e-paideia.net metadata comply with IEEE LOM and SCORM standards. eclass.sch.gr eclass.sch.gr (http://eclass.sch.gr) is an educational portal whose audience includes students and basic and middle education teachers. It provides access to educational content according to the national curriculum. E-class is a service of the Greek Schools Network (GSN-www.sch.gr) based on asynchronous e-learning. Up till now, it supports 5,407 registered teachers from 2,582 different schools all around Greece. For the school period of 2008-2009 2,088 registered electronic courses are provided. The portal provides free access to students.



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Figure 31: Screen Capture "eclass.sch.gr"

hellenichistory.gr hellenichistory.gr (http://www.hellenichistory.gr) is an educational portal which has been produced to present Hellenic history on the Internet to students and teachers of schools in Greece and to adapt its content to their educational needs, so that they can derive the maximum possible gain from historic information.



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Figure 32: Screen Capture "hellenichistory.gr"

It has been produced by the Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW - www.ime.gr) and can be utilised by the Greek educational system and abroad. Its content has been created by distinguished historians, researchers, archaeologists and information scientists of Greece. It deals with all aspects of the Greek activity: politics, military, history, literature, culture, private life, society, economy etc, from Prehistory to the present day. It is also accompanied by extensive bibliography, timetables and abundant photographic material.

www.greek-language.gr The Centre for the Greek Language (www.greek-language.gr) has designed and implemented this Internet portal to support the study and teaching of the Greek language. It is addressed to researchers, university students, teachers, pupils, and everyone interested in the Greek language, within and outside of Greece. It attempts to cover the Greek language both diachronically and synchronically (Ancient Greek, Medieval Greek, and Modern Greek). Our aim is for the Portal to constitute a useful, reliable, and effective environment:

! for the support and dissemination of the Greek language in the digital age, ! for the teaching of Greek as a native and second/foreign language, ! for the support of research,



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! for the productive use of Information and Communication Technologies in the teaching of the Greek language.

Figure 33: Screen Capture "www.greek-language.gr"

Teachers Portals Other related educational portals in Greece: http://isocrates.gr



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Figure 34: http://isocrates.gr

http://odysseus.culture.gr

Figure 35: http://odysseus.culture.gr



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www.medialiteracy-iom.gr

Figure 36: www.medialiteracy-iom.gr

http://www.ekebi.gr



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Figure 37: http://www.ekebi.gr

Figure xx http://www.epyna.gr/



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Figure 38: http://www.epyna.gr/

2.1.11. Hungary

Sulinet Digital Knowledge Base The Sulinet Digital Knowledge Base (SDT) (http://sdt.sulinet.hu) provides Internet connection and computer labs for schools, teaching materials on the Sulinet Educational portal and trainings for teachers.



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Figure 39: Sulinet

Sulinet Digital Knowledge Base is a digital curriculum database which is managed through a content management system that allows development of e-learning materials according to the knowledge areas and subjects specified by the National Core Curriculum and customization of content for the Hungarian educational system.

2.1.12. Iceland

Skólavefurinn The Skólavefurinn website (http://www.skolavefurinn.is) was founded by a group of Icelandic teachers in 1999 with the objective of producing online teaching material and learning resources for teachers and students equally available throughout the country.



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With the support of leading experts, teachers, the Ministry of Education and other non-profit organizations, as well as private companies, Skólavefurinn has become the leading provider of online teaching material in the country. Although Skólavefurinn is a paid subscription site, it offers around 30% of its material as ‘open content’ that is freely available to everyone. Skólavefurinn produces online educational material in all categories – web pages, audio books, multimedia and interactive exercises, video, printed material, books and CD’s.

2.1.13. Ireland

Scoilnet Scoilnet (http://www.scoilnet.ie/) is the education portal of the Department of Education and Science (DES) in Ireland. Launched in 1998, the website is managed on behalf of the DES by the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE). Scoilnet’s current interface was launched in March 2003.



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Figure 40: Scoilnet

Resources referenced from Scoilnet mainly comprise lesson plans, interactive and printable worksheets, notes and multimedia content. These are aimed at students, teachers, school managers and parents. Resources are also curriculum focused and have been selected and reviewed by curriculum specialists and teachers. Scoilnet actively promotes the integration of ICT in teaching and learning and as a result has been involved in developing a number of sites with specific relevance to the Irish curricula. Sciolnet has also been a partner in the European Schoolnet MELT project and is providing content to the Learning Resource Exchange service for school. It is also the first organisation to have implemented a federated search of the LRE from within a national school portal. ImageBank



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ImageBank (http://www.scoilnet.ie/imagebank) is a photo library website where people can search for and share photos for educational use. It has been developed by the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE) and Scoilnet, the portal for Irish education ImageBank focuses on providing photos of Irish places and spaces but other subjects are also included. ImageBank is intended as a supportive resource for students and teachers in Irish education. NCTE use Creative Commons licensing to allow users to share their photos and specify how others may use them.

Figure 41: ImageBank

Ask About Ireland “Ask About Ireland” (http://www.askaboutireland.ie/) is an initiative of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna, funded by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local



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Government through the Information Society Fund and The Heritage Council. The website is design by the Digital Media Centre, DIT.

Figure 42: Ask About Ireland

According to a statement on the website, “Ask About Ireland” provides an unique access to new information, rare images and documents from Irish public libraries, museums and archives. Copyright material loaded onto the website is available for the purposes of research and private study or criticism or review within the terms of individual licenses for each page on this site. All users must acknowledge that the contents of this website will not be extracted or re-utilised for any competing or commercial purpose without the written consent of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna and the copyright holder. Further information: NCTE: http://www.ncte.ie/



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Digital Content Creation: http://www.ucd.ie/ivrla/workbook/wrepintroduction.html

2.1.14. Italy

Gold Gold (http://gold.indire.it/) is an educational repository which is managed by Indire, the Italian national agency responsible for teachers’ training in the field of new technologies.

Figure 43: Gold

The GOLD team encourages teachers to share experiences and digital material by offering periodic awards to contributors. The contributors are familiarised with the metadata and the repository entries are indexed according to LOM.



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Innova Scuola Innova Scuola (http://www.innovascuola.gov.it/) is the public access point to online platform which is promoted and financed by the Cabinet’s Department for Innovation and Technology (DIT) with the collaboration of Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). It belongs to a series of initiatives for the promotion and integration of the use of new technologies in teaching. The didactic digital content library (Libreria Digitale Aperta, Open Digital Library) allows teachers to seek the desired digital content among those offered upon payment by publishers through the marketplace and those freely accessible and re-usable available both on the platform and other public portals, whether national or not. The library also harvests text-based entries which can be accessed in eBook format.



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Figure 44: Innova Scuola The portal also maintains a set of tools that help teachers collaboratively create digital content by combining existing resources available on the marketplace with free material.

2.1.15. Latvia

There are no digital repositories in Latvia, but an attempt has been made to organise some user-generated digital content within a portal dedicated to teachers. Skolotajs Skolotajs (http://www.skolotajs.lv) is a portal managed by Microsoft Latvia and addresses teachers. The portal has three major areas: teaching materials; books; and different teaching examples as best practice solutions. Teachers can also find other related information for teaching purposes, events connected with teacher life, different competitions and a forum.



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Figure 45: Skolotajs

2.1.16. Lithuania

Mokymosi object! metaduomen! saugykla Mokymosi object! metaduomen! saugykla (in English Central LOM repository for schools http://lom.emokykla.lt) is the Lithuanian LOM content repository which is part of national ICT in Education Strategy and Program for 2008-2012. The aim is to create a content repository consisting of reusable Learning Objects (based on international standards) and to allow teachers to create, modify and reuse these resources in open source learning platforms.



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Figure 46: Mokymosi object! metaduomen! saugykla

Related information Centre of Information Technologies of Education: http://www.ipc.lt/english.htm A presentation of the Lithuanian library: http://edrene.org/presentations/Lithuania-ITC.ppt

2.1.17. Luxembourg

MySchool! The MySchool! (http://www.myschool.lu/) portal developed by the Luxembourg Ministry of Education includes workspaces, documents, reference works, communities, personal web sites and school intranets. MySchool! allows both students and teachers to access



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educational information, anywhere and anytime, through a browser environment, without having to install any client software on their PCs.

Figure 47: MySchool!



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The portal covers three main issues: Information and knowledge distribution; Communication and collaboration, for both students and teachers; and application sharing. According to the portal manager, Daniel Weiler,13 the management team tries to better optimise searching functions to help user to find what they need easier. The portal in figures: 122,738 online books, 3,163 LOs, 71,604 multimedia files, 585 communities, 50,733 documents, 11,484 virtual working spaces, 1,086 shared forums. It is estimated that 20,086 active users benefit from the services and content provided by the portal.

2.1.18. The Netherlands

EDUREP EDUREP (http://edurep.kennisnet.nl/) is an online service managed by Kennisnet (http://www.kennisnet.nl/) which is a public ICT support organization in the Netherlands. Kennisnet aims at national and regional cooperation with schools, branch organizations and governments to provide tailor-made ICT support within a broad spectrum of educational target groups in primary, secondary and adult education.

13!http://www.myschool.lu/home/Downloads/Press/Oct%2002%20Intranet%20Strategist%20"%20mySchool!.pdf!!



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Figure 48: EDUREP

EDUREP connects a number of electronic libraries such as museums or other Dutch cultural heritage institutions as well as repositories from schools featuring teacher-developed content. It is essentially a metadata exchange platform connecting repositories that have an OAI-PMH interface and that provide metadata based on a national LOM-based application profile. ENTRÉE ENTRÉE (http://entree.kennisnet.nl/) is a federated authentication and authorization services that enables users to access educational portals based on their personal profile. Certain content can be accessed only by authorised users.



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Figure 49: ENTRÉE

Teleblik Teleblik (http://www.teleblik.nl/) provides schools with access to cultural heritage resources. The service has evolved partly as a reaction of teachers to the low quality and the restricted IPR of commercially available resources.



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Figure 50: Teleblik

According to EdReNe14, currently Teleblik, contains 15.000 hours of Dutch streaming media heritage selected for the educational field. The service is behind login but free for schools because it is paid by the Ministry of Education. Teleblik has won already several prices and the quality content is a key element that attracts schools. 14!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/netherlands.html!!



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Davindi Davindi (http://www.davindi.nl/) is a portal that is a joint effort of Kennisnet and the Dutch Public Libraries. Davindi publishes more than 40,000 objects and is interconnected with EDUREP.

Figure 51: Davindi

Other repositories in The Netherlands Digischool: http://www.digischool.nl/ Repositories in the Netherlands: http://edrene.org/presentations/TheNetherlands-Kennisnet.ppt

2.1.19. Norway



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Utdanning.no Utdanning.no is managed by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and is the national educational gateway providing access to a number of services and tools: a national repository covering all school subjects; a national repository of learning object metadata; and a framework for learning content publishing. The repository features about 5,700 objects organised according to school level, school subjects and type of learning.



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Figure 52: Utdanning.no According to EdReNe15 Utdanning.no is completely based on open source software where the key software used is: Fedora.info repository software, Drupal CMS, FEZ

15!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/norway.html!!



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fedora GUI and more. The Utdanning.no portal is being completely redesigned at the beginning of 2009. Skolenettet.no The Norwegian Schoolnet, Skolenettet.no (http://www.skolenettet.no/) is a service provided by the Directorate for Primary and Secondary Education in Norway. The portal benefits from GREP, an initiative, which provides the national curriculum online as a common, controlled vocabulary. In terms of storage, the GREP initiative considers the structure of the various subject curriculums very similar and therefore they can be unified in a common data structure.

Figure 53: Skolenettet.no



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GREP also serves in the process of labeling and retrieval of educational resources to ensure consistency. DigLib DigLib (http://www.diglib.no/) is a joint activity of a number of digital content producers that are committed to providing free access to primary, lower, upper secondary schools and in higher education.

Figure 54: DigLib The portal content is indexed by using international standards like SRU/SRW, OAI-PMH, NORLOM, Dublin Core, SCORM, IMS Content Packaging and others.



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2.1.20. Poland

Interklasa Interklasa (http://www.interklasa.pl) is one of the most popular portals for teachers in Poland. The portal does not contain a content repositories, but features educational information on all school subjects including teaching materials, tests, school competitions, lesson plans, guidelines for new teachers, information for parents and students.

Figure 55: Interklasa

The purpose of the portal is to support teachers by providing them with ideas and best practice examples in the field of ICT at school. Young Digital Planet



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Young Digital Planet (http://www.ydp.eu/en/) is a private educational eContent publisher and eLearning technology provider. The YDP portal, among other things, offers educational digital content for teachers in schools and colleges, with an important focus on Science and Maths teaching and digital language learning courses for schools and home-based learners.

Figure 56: Young Digital Planet yTeach is a Web service is incorporated into Young Digital Planet and is an initiative addressing teachers' needs. Based on the YDP Universal Curriculum's resources covering Science, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, the portal provides teachers with access to thousands of high quality digital resources. The resources also give teachers the opportunity to create their individual presentations and create assignments for students.



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According to the statistics published by Young Digital Planet16 the portal provides: 30,000, high-quality, interactive, curriculum mapped resources from Maths and Science; variety of search tools; home access; an easy-to-use presentation builder; online assignments and results verification; editing tools; advanced interactive whiteboard presentation tools and VLE interoperability. Scholaris Scholaris http://www.scholaris.pl is a free, publicly available portal created by the Polish Ministry of Education with Young Digital Planet and contains some educational content based on YDP’s Universal Curriculum content. Scholaris is also currently the largest database of teaching aids, multimedia resources for teachers, students and parents. The repository was partly developed within the European Schoolnet CALIBRATE project and will be subject to further revisions during 2009.

2.1.21. Portugal

Escolavirtual Escolavirtual (http://www.escolavirtual.pt/index), in English Virtual School, is managed by Porto Editora, which is one of the major Portuguese educational publishers. The publisher produces and updates a number of multimedia products and one of them is the Portuguese digital encyclopaedia. Porto Editora also maintains the largest collection of digital resources covering all school subjects in the Portuguese curriculum under Escolavirtual.

16!http://www.ydp.eu/en/education/yteach/!!



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Figure 57: Escolavirtual Repositório e-Learning Repositório e-Learning (http://e-repository.tecminho.uminho.pt/) is a large database of educational resources that are managed and maintained by the University of Minho.



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Figure 58: Repositório e-Learning

The purpose of the repository is to promote digital resources designed in-house and which can be used by external users free of charge. Other repositories Instituto Camões: http://www.instituto-camoes.pt/ Biblioteca Nacional Digital: http://bnd.bn.pt/ DGEMN: http://www.monumentos.pt/Monumentos/forms/000_B.aspx?Idioma=en-GB Directorate-General for innovation & Curriculum Development /Ministry of Education The web site of the Directorate-General for innovation & Curriculum Development of the Ministry of Education currently has a basic central repository of resources http://sitio.dgidc.min-edu.pt/Recursos/Paginas/default2.aspx.



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With support from European Schoolnet, and as a result of the Ministry’s participation in the ASPECT project, a more fully featured repository (using international standards) is being developed in 2009.

2.1.22. Romania

AeL Educational AeL Educational (http://advancedelearning.com) is a portal in Romania which is managed by SIVECO. AeL is a national program for introducing IT into pre-university education and provides schools with both equipment and econtent which is stored on a local school server. The aim is that the quality of the learning process will increase as a result of teachers and students using intuitive and interactive didactic materials.



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Figure 59: AeL Educational

The portal harvests all learning objects and is enriched and updated regularly. Teachers, parents and students all have access to the portal which includes 1,700 AeL multimedia lessons, dictionaries and encyclopaedia, interactive materials, tutorials, exercises, simulations and educational games.



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According to SIVECO17 over seven million people benefit directly or indirectly from the services they provide including: 3 million pupils; over 11,000 teachers and instructors; 4,800 IT laboratories.

2.1.23. Slovenia

The Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (Arnes, http://www.arnes.si) is a public institute which provides network services for research, educational and cultural organizations and enables them to connect and cooperate with each other and with related organizations abroad. In 1994, the Slovenian government started a six-year project (RO) aiming to contribute toward problem oriented, more efficient and friendlier schools18. The following factors were identified as crucial for the success of the project: informatization of curricula, networking and multimedia, teachers' education, staff support for the IT at schools and establishing the lifecycle of IT equipment. According to the EdReNe Report19, the RO project coordinators in Slovenia managed to find a solution to merge existing metadata into a new scheme as a result of their participation in the European Schoolnet CALIBRATE Project20:

“After the end of the RO programme there was no regular funding provided for functioning of SIO. Only occasional actions to maintain certain sections and perform quality checks were performed. As a result of the lack of regular maintenance quite a lot of resources are outdated and without quality control. The metadata consists of three level descriptions: basic data, detailed technical and pedagogical description and evaluations. Also metadata scheme was not totally

17!http://portal.edu.ro/index.php?module=uploads&func=download&fileId=2813!!18!http://www.educa.fmf.uni"lj.si/ro/izomre/novice/html/sen96.htm!!19!http://edrene.org/results/currentState/slovenia.html!!20!http://calibrate.eun.org/!!



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congruent with the LOM. In project Calibrate both schemes were merged into a new scheme.”

Further information http://www.fmf.uni-lj.si/fmfen.html http://edrene.org/presentations/Slovenia-UNI-LJ-FMF.ppt

2.1.24. Spain

ISFTIC (http://www.isftic.mepsyd.es/profesores/) is currently running an educational portal of the Ministry of Education in Madrid that harvests a large number of digital learning resources. The resources are stored into two major areas: Educational resources – curriculum-based; and Distance Education – adult education and teacher training. The Ministry’s agency for IT in education (CNICE) has also been a partner in the European Schoolnet MELT project and is currently contributing resources to the EUN’s Learning Resource Exchange service which consists of a federation of 20 repositories. At a national level, the central government in Spain is developing Agrega +, a Spanish federation of 18 repositories (one of which is provided by CNICE), the initial version of which was launched in July 2008. All repositories linked by the Agrega federation will include SCORM compliant content with Creative Commons licenses and use a LOM-based application profile. Like the LRE, all content searches will be based on the Simple Query Interface (SQI) specification. Future versions of Agrega will provide Web 2.0 functionalities and an offline version will also enable content creators to package and catalogue learning resources using international standards.



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Figure 60: ISFTIC XTEC/EDU365 /EDU3 XTEC stands for "Xarxa Telemàtica Educativa de Catalunya", or Online Catalan Educational Network which covers all ICT aspects in Education in Catalonia. It is represented by its three portals/websites: XTEC, EDU365 and EDU3. XTEC is a portal for teachers, with teaching resources, tutorials, tools training courses and administrative procedures. EDU365 is a portal for students and families, with lots of applications, mini didactic units FAQs and online tools, such as a word processor, web mail service, personal storage or a scientific calculator. EDU3 is the product of an agreement with the Catalan Public Television TV3, whereby all educational materials produced by TV3 are catalogued and can be streamed or downloaded by teachers. XTEC supports the European Schoolnet Learning Resource Exchange as part of its policy of cataloguing materials and disseminating them more widely to all teachers.



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EDU365 (http://www.edu365.cat/) is the educational portal of the Catalonia Region in Spain. The portal audience is represented by children, mostly primary and secondary level and teachers. Some of the digital learning resources are available in Catalan. The portal also publishes the JClic platform for the creation, playing and evaluation of multimedia educational activities, developed in Java which features a set of digital units.

Figure 61: EDU365 Further information Spanish Educational Repository https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/327.ppt

2.1.25. Sweden



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Länkskafferiet Länkskafferiet, the Swedish Link Library (http://lankskafferiet.skolverket.se/) is a database for educational use and is meant to be a pedagogical aid for Swedish pupils, especially those between 10 and 15 years of age, in their search for useful information on the Internet. Länkskafferiet consists of subject structured and quality-assessed Internet information resources. All the web sites are classified and arranged in 12 main groups. The classification is based upon the traditional Swedish classification system for public and school libraries.

Figure 62: Länkskafferiet All the websites are selected, quality assessed and described by eight subject editors. They are teachers or school librarians with considerable knowledge of working methods in schools and how the Internet can be used as an educational medium. The subject



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editors use a form to add new records to the database. They are also responsible for checking existing links within their subject area. Included web sites are evaluated according to a set of quality criteria concerning form and content. Every web site must have source information and must not conflict with Swedish law. The presentation must be clear, easy to navigate and reliable.. Other criteria deal with general interest, language and access requirements. Every Internet web site has its own record which contains information about the title, a short description, keyword(s) and language. From each title there is a link, with point-and-click access, direct to the cited web site. The latest 50 records are available in a special list of new links. A form provides users with a means to interact with the system. We get a lot of email every week with suggestions for new Internet web sites as well as general questions. Multimediabyrån This is an online repository that stores multimedia items that can be used in schools such as sound effects, mood music, videos and photographs. Most of the items are accompanied by explanatory text.



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Figure 63: Multimediabyrån Svenska Museifönstret publishes a number of digital resources that come from Swedish museums. The portal is operated by the Historical Museum on behalf of the Agency for School, under the Swedish Schoolnet and supported by the National Agency for School and National Council for Cultural Affairs.



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Figure 64: Svenska Museifönstret Kunskapsnavet or The Knowledge Hub (http://www.kunskapsnavet.se/portal/) is open to anyone who wants to use digital resources while teaching. In addition to the published resources, there are tools that help select and create content, which can then be stored or exported to an LMS, such as Fronter, Moodle, It's Learning, Via Ecole and others.



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Figure 65: Kunskapsnavet Kunskapsnavet is both a tool and repository for resources that have been used by teachers to collaboratively develop digital resources. Spindeln (The Spider) http://vix.iml.umu.se/projects/scam-repository is a new search service developed by MSU and IML for Swedish Schools and allows them to carry out federated searches for content from within their own school web site. The underlying technology is the SCAM repository development platform. The Spider - a brokerage service for learning resources in Sweden: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/345.ppt The Spider – Technical details https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO15/422.pdf Other repositories or portals in Sweden



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Lektion.se: http://www.lektion.se Further information Presentations Swedish National Agency: http://edrene.org/presentations/Sweden-MSU.ppt IML: http://edrene.org/presentations/Sweden-IML.ppt

2.1.26. Switzerland

Digital School Library Digital School Library (http://bsn.educa.ch/) provides access to digital learning resources that come from regional sources and focus on local regional curricula. According to the news items published on the portal, at present there are 456 items whose sources are: educational institutions (360), official institutions (2) and cantons and regions (1), schools (1) and other institutions (94), namely CERN (94).



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Figure 66: Digital School Library The portal enables users to search and also contribute with digital resources. This portal is available in the following languages: Deutsch English Français Italiano Español.

2.1.27. United Kingdom

The BECTA School Web portal The BECTA Schools portal (http://schools.becta.org.uk/) aims to offer information, advice and guidance to school leadership teams on how technology can be built into teaching, learning and management.



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The challenge is to ensure that the use of technology within schools raises standards, increases efficiency and gives everyone the chance to learn in the way that best suit them.

Figure 67: BECTA Becta has worked with schools and key partners such as the National Strategies, Training and Development Agency (TDA), National College of School Leadership (NCSL), Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) and Ofsted to develop a self-review framework to help schools develop a sustainable vision for technology, and get the most out of their investment. The website introduces the self-review framework and provides supporting, advice and guidance to schools on how to work through it. Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA)



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The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) is the national agency and recognised sector body responsible for the training and development of the school workforce. The website can be visited at: http://www.tda.gov.uk/partners/quality/ict/ictresources.aspx?keywords=ICT TDA’a work is to ensure high quality teaching and learning in every classroom, by securing a sufficient supply of new teachers and effective continuing professional development, ongoing workforce reform in schools to secure effective staff deployment that addresses local needs so teachers, schools and children realise the benefits, closer cooperation between, and integration of, schools and other children’s services to meet the needs of children and families and support for the development and roll out of extended schools.

Figure 68: TDA



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TDA is also responsible for increasing the number and quality of science, technology, engineering and maths teachers, leading on the development of a new qualification for teachers: the masters in teaching and learning, supporting special educational needs and disability training for the workforce, providing training and development opportunities to support staff and supporting the implementation of the national agreement. Teacher Resource Exchange The Teacher Resource Exchange or shortly TRE (http://tre.ngfl.gov.uk/server.php) is a moderated database of resources and activities created by teachers. All resources on the TRE are checked by subject specialists to ensure they are of the highest possible quality.

Figure 69: Teacher Resource Exchange



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The Teacher Resource Exchange is designed to help teachers develop and share ideas for activities and resources. Contributions will be many and varied from simple ideas and questions, to complete contributions/lesson plans or schemes of work, which will enable other teachers to use these resources within their own lessons. Inclusion Inclusion (http://inclusion.ngfl.gov.uk/) is an online catalogue of resources to support individual learning needs for teaching professionals, parents, carers and learners. Resources include publications, software, equipment and online information. This site is managed by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES).

Figure 70: Inclusion



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The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) is the owner of all copyright and other intellectual property rights in the Inclusion website, including its design, text, graphics and their arrangements, and the underlying technology and executable code. Other websites featuring digital resources for teachers QCA has guidance on planning, teaching and assessing the curriculum for pupils with learning difficulties: http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_11583.aspx The Standards site has information, guidance and links to resources for the Primary and Secondary National Strategies: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/?version=1 NAACE publishes a free newsletter focusing on ICT in education, as well as journals available on subscription: http://www.naace.co.uk/newsletter NAACE Primary has articles on using ICT in the curriculum as well as product reviews: http://primary.naace.co.uk/ LTS (Scotland) hand picked resources: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/resources/index.asp Glow searchable database (Scotland): http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/glowscotland/whatsinglow/procuredcontent/index.asp The National Digital Resource Bank – One Step Closer (News on a forthcoming repository): http://www.nen.gov.uk/news/64/the-national-digital-resource-bank-one-step-closer.html

3. Pan-European Repositories

3.1 Background information Over the last six years, European Schoolnet has been involved in a number of major projects related to the interoperability of educational repositories and content exchange at European level. Collectively, these have helped EUN develop a strategy for a Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service for schools that was launched in December 2008.

3.2 Repositories

3.2.1. CELEBRATE



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CELEBRATE was a large-scale IST demonstration project, ending in Nov. 2004, that addressed all parts of the educational content value chain and involved 23 participants including Ministries of Education, universities, leading educational publishers, content developers, VLE vendors and technology suppliers from 11 countries. The project particularly demonstrated the viability of an open source, ‘brokerage system’ architecture and federated search capability. The lessons learned in CELEBRATE can be found in the project deliverables at: http://celebrate.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/index_celebrate.cfm

3.2.2. CALIBRATE

CALIBRATE was an IST project ending in March 2008, that particularly involved partners from new member states http://calibrate.eun.org. The project connected repositories from Ministries of Education in Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia and provided a test bed of 40 schools with access to both this network of repositories and a new web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources http://lemill.net. Research was also carried out in CALIBRATE related to semantic interoperability. As well as further developing the LOM-based Application Profile developed in the CELEBRATE project, CALIBRATE carried out research into the curriculum mapping of learning resources from four countries (Austria, Belgium/Flanders, Czech Republic, Poland) involving the development of both Topic and Action-verb vocabularies and the development of a curriculum mapping tool.

3.2.3. MELT

MELT is an eContentplus ‘content enrichment project’ ending in March 2009, http://info.melt-project.eu. The aim is to enrich approximately 40,000 learning resources and 100,000 learning assets (from a network of linked repositories) with semantically well-defined metadata. In the first phase of the project, experienced indexers enriched MELT content with new metadata using a LOM-based Application Profile. Content has also been enriched using automatic metadata generation approaches. In a second phase, teachers in up to 40 schools are using MELT social tagging tools to further enrich content with additional tags. An evaluation will then be carried out of these various content enrichment approaches. The MELT portal was re-branded as the Learning Resource Exchange service for schools when a public version of the LRE was launched in December 2008. If they choose to connect to the LRE architecture, ministries of education and LRE Associate Partners can enable their teachers and users to access LRE content from within their own national/local repository or learning environment. This



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feature has already been implemented by ScoilNet (see above). This is, in fact, a key part of the LRE strategy that has been developed with ministries of education participating in EUN projects.

3.2.4. ASPECT

ASPECT is an eContentplus 30-month Best Practice Network (BPN) ending in December 2010, http://aspect-project.org. It involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), four commercial content developers and leading technology providers. For the first time, experts from all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) are working together in order to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications. Technology providers and standards’ experts in the project will work with ASPECT content providers to develop best practice approaches to implementing standards for both educational content discovery and use. Content providers will then apply these best practice approaches to a critical mass of resources in an expanded version of the LRE. Later in the project, these resources will be validated with up to 40 schools in four countries in order to determine how the implementation of standards and specifications in the project leads to greater usability of LRE content. Based on this practical implementation of standards, which will be independently evaluated, ASPECT partners will feed the project’s experience into pre-standardisation activities and run an extensive set of dissemination actions that include international workshops, plugfests, regional events and an award. The aim is to involve a wider group of organisations in ASPECT BPN activities and to develop a unique co-operation framework for all stakeholders who will also benefit from a set of new support services that include: a LOR registry; Vocabulary Bank for Education; Application Profile registry; automatic translation service for LOM and content packaging formats; compliance testing; transformer services; and access to known interoperability issues.

3.2.5. The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE)

The Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools includes a re-branded version of the MELT portal. However, it is not a centralised portal but a framework that supports interoperability of content repositories. http://lre.eun.org. The LRE was officially launched as a public service for schools in December 2008, building on the results of the



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CELEBRATE, CALIBRATE and MELT projects. Initially it contains a almost 120,000 open educational resources/assets with Creative Commons’ licenses from approximately 20 repositories in the LRE federation (including those of 16 Ministries of Education). LRE resources include content for both primary and secondary school pupils and cover all curriculum subjects. As part of the LRE initiative, EUN is also working with both public and private sector Associate Partners that wish to make resources available to schools. Associate Partners are provided with a first level of free advice and support including attendance at workshops and access to tools that show them how to: connect a portal or VLE to the LRE federation; implement the LRE application profile and use multilingual vocabularies; automatically translate LOM metadata, automatically generate metadata from given learning resources and organise metadata tagging workflows; make their metadata available for harvesting; build, install and manage open source turnkey solutions for building learning resources repositories. Existing Associate Partners include: OER Commons, Cité des Sciences, Dunelm e-Learning, Global Grid for Learning, Intel, Promethean.



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Figure 71: LRE for schools

Work in a succession of EUN content projects, therefore, has resulted in a unique content exchange service to schools ay European level. It has included:

! the development of an open source brokerage system architecture and approach to ‘federated search’ that is being taken up and adapted by ministries of education at national level (Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland and others);

! a LOM-Based application profile http://lre.eun.org/node/6 that has been taken up and adapted for national use by many of the repositories listed above recognition that, “the most important Europe-wide (and potential global) player in e-learning content may become the European Schoolnet (EUN) through their European Learning Resource Exchange which is currently under development.” Open Educational Resources and Practices: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, OLCOS, March 2007.



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The main trends reflected in EUN’s work are:

! Recognition of the importance of supporting multiple strategies, such as federated search (SQI, SRU/SRW), harvesting (OAI-PMH), publishing (SPI), mass upload, syndication (RSS/ATOM) and automatic metadata generation to collect metadata whatever their formats: LOM, DC, or others.

! Use of “standard metadata” as exchange formats rather than as a working format.

! Growing importance of metadata automatic validation and enrichment. ! Building new communities of practice via social tagging of resources – moving

beyond content discovery to linking groups of like-minded teachers and learners to content found in repositories.

! Contributing to (including taking a lead role in some instances) the development of open learning-related standards and specifications:

3.2.6. Xplora

Xplora (http://www.xplora.org/) at European Schoolnet provides services that are focused on serving teachers of science, as a resource to stimulate compelling, innovative teaching, to raise interest in science acting and scientific careers among young people. The online resources for science teaching and learning include website links, lesson plans, learning objects and more. The repository can be searched by age, keyword, language and subject. At present the number of resources available in the Xplora resource database are in English (1189), French (612), German (634) and other 22 languages (5602). According to European Schoolnet a number of 4885 registered users benefit from the portal services. The resources section is publicly available for reading and downloading. Uploading of new resources is available for registered users only. The subjects listed in the search-engine are as followed: art, biology, chemistry, citizenship, cross-curricular education, culture, economics, educational administration, environmental education, ethics, foreign languages, geography, history, informatics/ICT, language and literature, mathematics, media education, music, natural sciences, philosophy, physical education, physics, politics, psychology, religion, school-community relationship, social sciences, special (needs) education and technology.



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When uploading resources, the (registered) users need to provide ”metadata” (keywords) about the resource. To ensure a consistent use of keywords, a multilingual thesaurus (EUN thesaurus) is provided.

3.2.7. myEUROPE

The myEUROPE Web portal (http://myeurope.eun.org/) has a dedicated section with an online repository containing learning objects (LOs), which focus on teaching European citizenship at school in a cross-curricular manner (involving more school subjects): http://myeurope.eun.org/ww/en/pub/myeurope/home/resources/los.cfm



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Figure 72: myEUROPE LLE Repository The goal of setting up the repository was to fulfil teachers’ needs and expectations in terms of free access to a multilingual collection of learning and teaching resources on European citizenship. A group of experienced teachers produced a set of about 300 LOs in 26 languages. They used specific templates and tools to allow creation of attractive applications.

3.2.8. COSMOS



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COSMOS Portal (http://www.cosmosportal.eu/) Registered Users: 560, Registered Schools: 110, <Time on Site>=9,5 minutes, <Pages per Visit>=10,3 (Optimum path on site: 6 pages/clicks) COSMOS Portal was developed to serve as the educational digital library of the DSPACE service. The COSMOS educational repository currently includes more than 20,000 science education learning objects and activities connected to the science curriculum. It provides access to data and tools (e.g. simulations of physical phenomena), teacher resources (e.g. learning scenarios and lesson plans, professional development materials, exams), student-centred materials (e.g. data library, communication area, students’ worksheets), applications for observations and collaborative activities. The COSMOS repository includes numerous astronomical images, scientific data and associated educational projects, lesson plans, simulations, videos and animations which have been developed in the framework of international initiatives in the recent years, like the Discovery Space, www.discoveryspace.net and the Schools Observatory, www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk. These educational materials offer a “feel and interact” user experience, allowing for learning “anytime, anywhere” by employing advanced and highly interactive visualization technologies and also personalised ubiquitous learning paradigms in order to enhance the effectiveness and quality of the teaching and learning process. COSMOS system is using an IEEE LOM Science Education Application Profile that is used for tagging science education resources. To this end the Guidelines for building application profiles in e- Learning provided by CEN/ISSS-LTW are applied. More specifically, based on the characteristics of the science curriculum, COSMOS has identified controlled vocabularies that indicate possible extensions to the IEEE LOM Standard concerning science curriculum properties. Using the COSMOS system students and teachers are able to directly apply the theories learned and taught in the classroom to real, interactive research. They personally experience the procedures involved in an authentic research project and thereby gain a far better understanding of science and engineering. The COSMOS initiative contributes in changing the present situation in science teaching and learning by implementing the following benefits:

! Teaching science through the use of a network of advanced scientific instruments. ! Reinforcing interdisciplinary approaches. ! Promoting inquiry based learning.

Detailed Guidelines have been developed setting out the conditions and protocols for the submission of content to be posted to the COSMOS Portal: Templates for the development of Learning Activities (based on different pedagogical models, Inquiry Based, Guided Research, Learning Cycle)



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http://www.cosmosportal.eu/cosmos/files/help/COSMOS_Learning_Activities_Templates.pdf Guidelines for the development of Science Education Content http://www.cosmosportal.eu/cosmos/files/help/Metadata_Authoring.pdf Guidelines for the development of Science Education Learning Activities http://www.cosmosportal.eu/cosmos/files/help/Learning_Activities_Authoring.pdf

Figure 73: COSMOS - Users' Distribution

3.2.9. Organic Edunet

Organic.Edunet (www.organic-edunet.eu) Content for the Awareness and Education of European Youth about Organic Agriculture and Agroecology. The Organic.Edunet portal aims to facilitate access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to Organic Agriculture (OA) and Agroecology. It deploys a multilingual online environment that facilitates end-users’ search, retrieval, access and use of the content in the learning repositories. It also studies educational scenarios that introduce the use of the Organic.Edunet portal and content to support teaching of topics related to OA and Agroecology in two cases of



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formal educational systems, i.e., high-schools and agricultural universities. Organic.Edunet portal focuses on achieving interoperability between the digital collections of OA and Agroecology content that producers in various EU countries have developed, as well as facilitating publication, access, and use of this content in multilingual learning contexts through a single European reference point. In this way, digital content that can be used to educate European Youth about the benefits of OA and Agroecology, is easily accessible, usable and exploitable.

3.2.10. Discovery Space

Discovery Space (http://www.discoveryspace.net/) Registered Users: 3800, Registered Schools: 900, <Time on Site>=5,5 minutes, <Pages per Visit>=6,4 (Optimum path on site: 5 pages/clicks) The Discovery Space Service offers access to 16 robotic telescopes (located in Europe, Israel, US and Australia) seamlessly into one virtual observatory and provides the services required to operate this facility, including a scheduling service, tools for data manipulation and access to related educational materials. Additionally the Discovery Space facilitates the usage of broadband communication channels as a means of interaction and data transfer mechanism between the telescopes and the remotely located users around the world. In this way the effective and fast response of the service is safeguarded. The Discovery Space is a distributed network of robotic telescopes accessed by students, educators, researchers and the wider public (e.g. visitors of science parks) via Internet. A network of robotic telescopes has several advantages. Weather is less likely to cancel or delay an observing session if automated telescopes are available in widely different geographical locations. More telescopes serve more users with fewer delays and on the preferred schedules. The telescopes network (http://www.discoveryspace.net/telescopes/telescopes.html) is expanding since 2007 (delivery date) and currently includes 16 robotic telescopes that are used in the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 from numerous users across the world. The Discovery Space services portfolio consists of:

! on-line access to the network of the robotic telescopes (on-line or scheduled requests)

! access to scientific data and resource archives (data and images)



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! access to a central data archive, making use of a common archive and distribution system

! access to educational material and interactive tools (allow for data representation and analysis)

! access to teacher resources (e.g. professional development materials, lesson plans) ! student-centred materials (e.g. data library, communication area, student’s

magazines) ! on-line training courses at different levels (for school students, for university

students, for the wider public) ! participation contests (the contests will cover the levels of all targeted groups of

users, e.g. scientific contests, best science project contests for students, best photo contest for the wider public)

! participation to conferences, workshops and summer schools (the users of the service will have the opportunity to visit the observatories during different events)

! information on specific events (e.g. transit of Mercury or Venus, Solar and Lunar Eclipses)

A User friendly Interface has been developed to be an adding tool that bridges science teaching and technology. This educational software supports teachers and students in an innovative learning environment while at the same time is compatible with graphics and analysis software components, so that students can easily investigate trends and patterns of the data they collect by using the telescope. The Discovery Space platform gives students around Europe the opportunity to use remotely controlled telescopes in a real-time, hands-on, interactive environment. In this way it enables students to increase their knowledge on astronomy, astrophysics, mathematics and other science subjects and improve their computer literacy while strengthening their critical thinking skills. Students are able to graphically view all quantities under study and the data correlations.

4. Metadata

4.1. Background information

4.1.1. Metadata role and purpose

Metadata plays an essential role for the discovery, exchange and reuse digital learning material. The use of metadata helps indexing learning material, which makes it more accessible and reusable. There are a number of metadata standards used for digital



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educational resources which attempts to standardise the way these resources are described, they do not attempt to standardise the content of learning material itself. Metadata is like an ingredients label on the side of a cereal box. The effort to standardise metadata means that the ingredients label is supposed to displayed certain things in a certain way, like who is the producer, the date the content was produced, the copyright, and so on. People still remain free to produce the content the way they want, i.e. editorial independence remains intact. Probably the most commonly used standards for learning resources are Dublin Core and Learning Object Metadata (LOMv1.0). Traditionally, metadata was produced by librarians to catalogue all the books in terms of their data in index cards. Nowadays the indexing is done in a digital format, and many stakeholders are in play, such as teachers, publishing houses, government agencies, corporations, and other organisations involved in education and training produce metadata about the digital learning content to make it available for a larger audience.

4.2. Metadata in the context of pan-European repositories

4.2.1. Practice examples

The Learning Resource Exchange, run by European Schoolnet (EUN), uses the IEEE LOM standard for expressing metadata about learning resources. EUN provides an Application Profile which is based on the LOM. An application profile is a description of how a standard, in our case the IEEE LOM. This helps sharing learning resources within a particular community, in this case the school community in Europe. You can view the LRE Application profile 3.0 here: http://insight.eun.org/intern/shared/data/insight/lre/AppProfilev3p0.pdf As part of the application profile, a number of multilingual vocabularies may be used. The most extended one is the vocabulary to describe the subject of a learning resource. For this the multilingual LRE thesaurus is suggested, as it will enhance the so called semantic interoperability. The LRE Thesaurus was first created in early 2000 as an outcome of the European Schoolnet ETB project. It has been used also in the CELEBRATE project to index multilingual learning objects and is also continuously also used in European Schoolnet's services.



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Multilingual controlled vocabularies are useful as they can help to automate part of the translation work for learning resources that have been indexed in one language. The LRE Thesaurus is particularly important as it is now available in 15 languages! One of the most recent languages in the LRE family is Friulan. The other languages are Arabic, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, and Greek. You can find the multilingual thesaurus here: http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/interoperability/learning_resource_exchange/metadata.htm More information about e-Learning specifications and awareness raising organisations on the learning technologies: Europe: Learning Technologies Workshop under CEN/ISSS http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/lt/ International: IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) http://ltsc.ieee.org/ Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) http://www.adlnet.org/ Vision: "Provide access to the highest quality education and training, tailored to individual needs, delivered cost efficiently, anywhere anytime" and develops SCORM (Sharable Course Object Reference Model), which is LOM compliant, and software to go with it. The Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC) http://www.aicc.org/ The AICC has developed a CMI (LMS) specification that was used by the ADL as the foundation for their SCORM specifications. The activities of the AICC are targeted to the definition of software and hardware requirements for student computers, needed peripherals, multimedia formats for course contents, and user interface properties. The CEN/ISSS WS-LT Learning Technology Standards Observatory http://www.cen-ltso.net/ An accessible and sustainable web based repository that acts as a focal access point to projects, results, activities and organisations that are relevant to the development and adoption of e-learning technology standards.



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Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DC or CDMI), Education group http://www.dublincore.org/groups/education/ It develops DC (Dublin Core) metadata for the description of educational resources which works also on different domains like library. European Schoolnet (EUN) http://www.eun.org/ It develops metadata infrastructures to share and collaborate on the (re)use of educational web resources and contributes to the work in the field of standardisation through CEN/ISSS LTWS and European IMS Network. IMS Global Learning Consortium http://www.imsproject.org/ It develops and promotes open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities; Metadata specifications follow LOM, deals with content packaging, run time environments, Learning Design, etc. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3c.org/ It develops interoperable technologies (Specifications (NOT STANDARDS), guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. There are over 40 recommendations published covering a range of Web technologies: multimedia, privacy, XML, and metadata. Maybe the most important is the Semantic Web initiative that intends to make the Web even more intelligent and more machine-readable. The buzzword is Resource Description Framework, RDF.

4.2.2. International standardisation bodies active in e-learning

CEN/ISSS European Committee for Standardization/Information Society Standardization System http://www.cenorm.be/isss/ ! Internationalisation and availability of alternative language versions of LOM ! Description of language capabilities ! Quality assurance ! Educational modeling languages ! Repository of taxonomies/vocabularies for a European Learning Society



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! Educational Copyright License Conditions ! Translation of LOM into various European Languages ISO, International Organisation for Standardization http://www.iso.org/ This is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 140 countries, one from each. Its role is to assure the standards in emerging technologies, and also to secure that the needs of disadvantages (impaired, development countries, ...) are not overdriven. The 36 subcommittee of the first joint International Standardization Organization and International Electrotechnical Commission Committee (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) was launched in 1999 to cover all aspects related to the standardization in the field of learning technologies. Its focus is on interoperability, not only at the technical level, but also taking into account social and cultural issues.

5. Implementation prospects for the METASCHOOL project in participating countries

5.1. Introduction and scope This section is part of Task1.2.1 Review state of the art in metadata and repositories for school resources, to include training programs existing that include modules on relevant subjects, leading to D1.2 European state of the art report: "The report will present the state-of-the-art in Europe concerning learning repositories and metadata tools and relevant modules in teacher training. Furthermore, it will include a feasibility analysis concerning the implementation of the project in participating countries in terms of equipment and other constraints. This is expected to conclude to a number of suggestions for the Training Framework." To assess the implementation prospects it is necessary to consider what the optimal pre-conditions for implementation need to be, to examine how fertile the ground is for the change to take root. While the readiness of teachers themselves is important there are contextual factors that influence the likelihood of success of ICT training. Considerable work has taken place to describe the elements for successful ICT use in schools, based around factor clusters, for example: ! People, Resources, Processes



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! Provision of ICT infrastructure, teacher training and suitable content The first part of this section describes three such pre-conditions used successfully in European projects and sets out a framework and indicators that can be applied to the META-SCHOOL project. The second part analyses available data for each country taking part in the training for META-SCHOOL. It comprises ! A description of the state of the art in ICT in schools in Austria, the Czech

Republic, Germany, Greece and Sweden ! An analysis of the prospects for success in terms of equipment and other

constraints, enablers and inhibitors in each country ! Suggestions for the Training Framework on a country by country

The final part makes a number of suggestions for the training framework that apply to all countries in the project. The analysis is based on evidence frameworks developed in EUN projects and draws heavily on evidence from a range of sources, notably: ! EUN Insight country reports21 ! Benchmarking ICT in Schools 200622 (note: while the analysis is highly detailed

and valid, it was collected in 2006 and may not fully represent the current situation).

21!http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/misc/country_report.cfm!!22 Korte, W., Hüsing, T., Benchmarking Access and Use of ICT in European Schools 2006: Results from Head Teacher and A Classroom Teacher Surveys in 27 European Countries: http://www.empirica.biz/empirica/publikationen/documents/Learnind_paper_Korte_Huesing_Code_427_final.pdf.



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5.2. Analytical Framework The META-SCHOOL project aims to improve in-service training on topics related to the organisation, sharing, use and re-use of digital learning resources that can be accessed online through learning repositories across Europe, in particular to: ! Improve teachers’ practice in all areas of their work, combining ICT skills with

innovations in pedagogy, curriculum, and school organization ! Develop teachers’ use of ICT skills and resources to improve their teaching, to

collaborate with colleagues, and ultimately to become innovation leaders in their institutions

! Train technically competent school staff (such as ICT personnel or teachers of Informatics) about the ways they can select some of the existing, easy-to-use, and free-of-cost software tools that various organisations around Europe offer, in order set up their own learning repository (on a school or regional level) and to interconnect it with LRE.

In order for the training to take place successfully it is important to appreciate the context in which it will take place and the enablers and inhibitors that operate. The factors are common to all countries but there is always local variation. The so-called SIPTEC framework derives from validation work undertaken by European Schoolnet since 2000 with schools in six large-scale EC-funded projects. There are six components in the framework: Systemic, Institutional, Pedagogical, Technological, Economic and Cultural; hence the acronym SIPTEC. SIPTEC offers a three tier view of change in schools: meta (system), mesa (school) and micro (the learning event). Enablers and inhibitors of change can exist at any of the levels and therefore it is important to consider all the dimensions of the framework in planning and managing change.

5.2.1. Systemic

This dimension concerns aspects of the national schooling system that are largely the domain of ministries of education and policy-making, and so are outside the control of the individual school, but which affect what happens in schools, for example education policy, the legal context, the curriculum, external examinations, teacher education, workforce supply and employment conditions, the educational content market, and how funding is allocated between schools, region and state.



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5.2.2. Institutional

In this dimension we look at the school as a whole, for example, the timetable, buildings, physical spaces, leadership, teacher recruitment and management. It also encompasses the notion of the e-maturity of the school as a whole.

5.2.3. Pedagogical

This aspect covers the micro-level of teaching and learning, at the individual teacher, student, lesson and class level, including how ICT impacts teaching and learning, use of (digital) resources by teachers and learners, new media/ICT skills for both teachers and learners. This area looks at what defines E-mature teachers which develop pupils’ ICT capabilities, use of ICT to enhance teaching and demonstrate competence and confidence in using ICT devices. E-mature learners are often more commonplace, due to well-documented generational differences in ICT competency. They should however demonstrate the following competences: Development/improvement of ICT skills, Enhancement of learning such as teamwork and knowledge sharing with a wider learning community both in and outside of the school.

5.2.4. Technological

This component is about the technology used in the school and its performance in real situations, e.g. the user interface, training and support requirements, installation and integration with legacy provision. This includes how ICT works in practice, implication of using ICT in the school (support) and Adaptability to needs of the school

5.2.5. Economic

This component brings together financial issues related to ICT in schools, e.g. equipment, tools, services and connectivity, set-up and usage costs, total cost of implementation and whether scalability is affordable. The economic aspects include costs for schools and municipalities (purchase and leasing, maintenance, integration, training, support) and costs for government (scalability).

5.2.6. Cultural



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This is an important but often neglected aspect. It covers issues related to different political and educational cultures across European countries and specific linguistic concerns. This includes aspects such as intercultural issues (what aspects of national or local educational culture does ICT support well or not well?), aspects linked to transnational collaboration (does ICT facilitate exchanges), cultural aspects (do innovation aligned with cultural values and beliefs of the school?). This last aspect in peer learning echoes issues linked to transferability of innovative practices. Finally the issue of language and localisation can also be a crucial element in supporting adoption of innovation. In this paper we group together three of these elements – Institutional, Pedagogical and Technological – and analyse them using a second framework, The ICT quality framework, valorised in the P2V project (http://peerlearning.eun.org). This is a framework to assess the e-maturity of schools developed by inspectorates in six countries under the auspices of the Standing International Conference of Inspectorates (SICI) The tool can also be used as an audit tool for self-evaluation and as a roadmap for institutional change towards the e-confident school; its application is not limited to those inspectorates, nor to inspecting authorities only. It can also be used by individual schools to self-assess their ICT use and by groups of schools to carry out peer evaluations. The framework consists of three main themes: Conditions, Use, Outcomes. Quality areas have been defined within each theme, eight in total. Quality indicators (QIs) with corresponding evidence pointers are identified within each quality area. The inspectors used scores (1-4) for each indicator, enabling schools to see where they were on the road towards e-maturity. Theme 1: Conditions:

Quality area C1. Leadership, C2. Infrastructure and access, C3. Curriculum planning, C4. Quality assurance and improvement

Theme 2: Use: Quality area: U1. Pupil use, U2. The teaching process, U3. Administrative use

Theme 3: Outcomes: Quality area:



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O1. Impact on learning and standards Theme 1: Conditions: Quality area C1. Leadership This area is concerned with the extent to which

leadership can be identified at all levels in the school to develop and realise a vision for ICT.

C2. Infrastructure and access This area is concerned with infrastructure and resources to support learning, teaching and administration.

C3. Curriculum planning This area is concerned with how schools and colleges plan for the use of ICT by their pupils as they progress.

C4. Quality assurance and improvement

This area is concerned with the cyclical process that schools implement to review, plan and revise the use of ICT in learning, in teaching and in administration.

Theme 2: Use: Quality area U1. Pupil use This indicator allows the evaluation of the use of ICT by

pupils. In lessons observed there is evidence that pupils are acquiring ICT skills, and of the use of ICT across the curriculum to enhance learning.

U2. The teaching process This area is concerned with how teaching staff support pupils in developing their capabilities in the use of ICT and how effectively teachers use ICT in delivering the curriculum.

U3. Administrative use This area is concerned with how schools and other educational establishments use ICT for administration, with particular reference to processes contributing to effective learning and teaching.

Theme 3: Outcomes Quality area O1. Impact on learning and

standards This area looks at the impact of ICT on learning and teaching across the curriculum. Its focus is on the outcomes of teachers’ and pupils’ use of ICT in the curriculum.

The ICT quality framework can be downloaded (with guidelines on how to use it effectively) at http://peerlearning.eun.org. Indicators, as in the table below, have been formulated for each item in framework against which inspectors or schools themselves can assess their progress (using a five-



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point scale 1-4 where 0 = no evidence and 4 = positive evidence – the chart shows an example of scoring for a school). Leadership Score 0|1|2|3|4 C1.1There is a clear vision for the use of ICT 0|1|2|3|4 C1.2 There is a strategy to realise the vision 0|1|2|3|4 Infrastructure and access Score C2.1 The available resources reflect the needs and vision of the school 0|1|2|3|4 C2.2 The deployment of ICT resources enables efficient use of them 0|1|2|3|4 C2.3 Support systems optimise the use of ICT 0|1|2|3|4 Curriculum planning Score C3.1 Meeting local, regional and national requirements 0|1|2|3|4 C3.2 Coherence, balance and consistency 0|1|2|3|4 C3.3 New developments in ICT and pedagogy 0|1|2|3|4 Quality assurance and improvement Score C4.1 Review and self-evaluation of ICT policy and practice 0|1|2|3|4 C4.2 Action planning and implementation 0|1|2|3|4 C4.3 Action monitoring and revision 0|1|2|3|4 Pupil use Score U1.1 Development of ICT skills 0|1|2|3|4 U1.2 Enhancement of learning 0|1|2|3|4 The teaching process Score U2.1 Developing pupils’ ICT capabilities 0|1|2|3|4 U2.2 Use of ICT to enhance teaching 0|1|2|3|4 U2.3 Teaching staff competence and confidence 0|1|2|3|4 Administrative use Score U3.1 Identifying issues impacting learning and teaching 0|1|2|3|4 U3.2 Communication is supported. 0|1|2|3|4 Impact on learning and standards Score O1.1 Gains in broad learner achievement 0|1|2|3|4



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O1.2 Effects of ICT use on pupil attainment 0|1|2|3|4 A third element of this study is the ACM model. The ACM model as developed by Viherä and Nurmela (2001)23 described the “propensity to the use of computers and internet by teachers in classroom situations at schools”. The typology takes account of the three main categories of pre-conditions which need to be given for a school to make use of computers and the internet in the teaching process in classrooms, computer labs etc. These are: access (to computers and the internet at school); competence (in using the computer software and the internet, and applying it for teaching purposes); and motivation (gauged through the attitude that using computers in classrooms results in significant learning benefits). Any attempt to group the classroom teachers according to their propensity to becoming users of computers and the internet in their teaching processes needs to take account of these three dimensions.

38% of European teachers dispose of sufficient access to the internet at school, the necessary competence in using ICT in class and are motivated to its use. Overall the UK

23 Viherä, M-L, Nurmela, J (2001) “Communication Capability Is an Intrinsic Determinant for Information Age”, in Futures, Volume 33, Issue 3-4:245-265



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with 60% ranks top and Latvia with 15% finds itself at the very end. The as yet insufficient internet connection in many schools and a lack of motivation of teachers for using ICT are the most critical issues for a wider uptake of computers and the internet in schools in Europe. 20% of European teachers indicate insufficient computer equipment and the low speed of internet connection at their school as key barriers. 14% show a lack of motivation, i.e., they are of the opinion that using computers in class does not result in significant learning benefits. Not all the elements of SIPTEC and the ICT Assessment Framework are relevant to this part of the META-SCHOOL project because the task is to assess the implementation prospects of the training, i.e. what is it about the existing conditions that enable or inhibit the implementation of the training programme? Accordingly, the report examines, for each participating country, the implementation prospects under these nine headings and 25 indicators. System

1. The education system has a distinct and funded ICT policy 2. The curriculum includes the use of ICT in all subjects 3. External examinations encourage the use of ICT 4. Teacher education policies include ICT use 5. Teacher training programmes enable new entrants to use ICT in teaching and

learning 6. Teachers are encouraged to innovate with ICT.

Institution

Leadership 7. There is a clear vision for the use of ICT 8. There is a strategy to realise the vision

Curriculum planning

9. Provision meets local, regional and national requirements 10. The curriculum is coherent, balanced and consistent 11. New developments in ICT and pedagogy are visible

Quality assurance and improvement

12. Review and self-evaluation of ICT policy and practice takes place 13. There is action planning and implementation 14. Action monitoring and revision is evident



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Pedagogy Teaching

15. Teachers use ICT to enhance teaching 16. The teachers have the required digital competence and confidence to use ICT in

teaching 17. Teachers are motivated to use technology

Administrative use

18. Communication is supported. Technological infrastructure

19. The school provides adequate access to technology 20. The available resources reflect the needs and vision of the school 21. The deployment of ICT resources enables efficient use of them 22. Support systems optimise the use of ICT

Economic

23. There is adequate funding of equipment, tools, services and connectivity, set-up and usage

Cultural

24. Transnational collaboration is encouraged and regularly takes place 25. There is an openness towards digital content from other countries and in other

languages. Evidence on all these elements may not exist in every county and some can only be gathered at the individual school level. Nevertheless, taken together, the indicators are a useful checklist for chances of success of the META-SCHOOL training programme. Evidence in the following country assessments is drawn from a range of sources listed at the end of the report.

5.3. Austria

5.3.1. System

The Federal Ministry of Education has the overall responsibility for primary and secondary education. The Federation is responsible for legislation and the individual Länder are responsible for the implementation.



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In Austria the curriculum is nationally set and includes all the EU key competencies. In particular, digital competence is a supplement to the curriculum. ICT is taught in a cross-curricular way and should be part of all subjects when applicable. ICT is part of a specific ICT in education policy called FutureLearning Programme. Teachers are appointed by the Länder or Vienna Board of Education, after having applied. Courses and seminars for teacher professional development are offered by the University College of Education, depending on school authorities’ approval. The priority fields in which ICT has a key role to play are disengagement, low pupil achievement, diversity of learning opportunities, maths, science and technology, teachers’ pedagogical skills, management of learning, remote areas, administrative issues, communication and collaboration. ICT responsibility is shared at national level as regards the curriculum and at municipal level as regards infrastructure (hardware, etc.). High policy priorities are information search tools and resources for special needs pupils. Some interest is shown for word processing, audio, video and imaging tools, and administration, while computer games, interactive whiteboards, mind-mapping, presentation and social software are of no interest at all. Currently there is no real debate about ICT in education as it si not on the agenda of the government. The eFit initiative (2000-2006) by the Austrian Ministry of Education aimed at consolidating and specifically funding the implementation of new media in education and culture. Its basis were laid down with the so called Computer Billion programme (in ATS, 2000) founded by the federal government and providing the education system with IT infrastructure. Other two projects linked to the eFit initiative were put in place: the EContent Initiative, aiming at developing teaching/learning software and e-learning materials, and the eLearning Cluster Initiative, where pilot schools in each of the Austrian provinces collaborated in clusters to implement practical models of eLearning. The FutureLearning Programme (2007-2010) is the development of the eFit initiative. It fosters a new concept of ICT, which is strictly linked to the opportunities provided by Web 2.0. Interactive whiteboards as well play a central role but mainly in secondary education. FutureLearning aims at connecting pupils, teachers and students to a web-driven communication and learning tool (“Mobile Computing Interface”) and to adapt learning to individual and school needs. With a budget of €15m, it targets pupils and school students aged 6 to 19, adult learners, teachers and special target groups such as isolated children and children in hospitals – project IICC, migration pupils, and mentally and physically disabled pupils. It involves schools, service providers, public-private



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partnership with ICT and ICT training companies. The FutureLearning project strands of activity are: eContent and mid-term ICT services for complete education, social software and Web 2.0 at school, new equipment (sub-laptops, mobile phones for learning, PDAs, iPods), teacher training (e-learning didactic courses, online academies, eBuddy/eTutor concepts, real time platforms, eGovernment content for teachers), equipment guidelines and initiatives for all schools, educational offers for adult learners and employed persons, reduction of barriers for specific target groups, quality projects in schools and integrative use of ICT, arts and creative projects together with institutes such as Ars Electronica Center Linz.

5.3.2. School

Since school year 1993/1994, the 14th amendment to the School Organisation Act has been empowering the school partnership body (school committees or forums comprising teachers’, pupils’ and parents’ representatives) to issue its own curricular regulations autonomously. Schools have considerable autonomy in assessing their ICT needs according to common regulations. Almost all Austrian schools now use computers for teaching and have internet access.

5.3.3. Teaching

ICT is part of initial teacher training but still it needs to be implemented, while no ICT in-service training is available for teachers. A very high 88% of Austrian classroom teachers have used computers in class in the 12 months prior to the survey, with little variation across school types and between urban and rural areas, placing Austria at a good 6th place in Europe.



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Very surprisingly, the older the teachers, the more they make use of computers and the internet in schools in Austria. While only 14% of the younger teachers with less than 10 years of teaching experience use ICT in class in more than a quarter of their lessons, the corresponding figure reaches 34% among those with more than 20 years of teaching experience. Only 12% of teachers do not use computers in class in Austria. Asked for the most important barrier, a rather high 55% state a lack of computers in their schools as an important barrier. Only 14% are not convinced of any benefits of using computers in class and a very low 8% express the opinion that teachers lack the necessary skills to utilize computers in their teaching. With these figures, Austria ranks among the best performers on perceived ICT competence in Europe. However, the problem in Austria seems to be the lower levels of motivation for ICT use in class by teachers, since a high 21% (compared to an EU25 average of 14%) of teachers with the necessary access and competence are not motivated to use ICT in class. Another 15% (compared to 10% at EU25 level) with the necessary ICT skills lack motivation and access to ICT. ICT readiness of Austrian teachers



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The majority of Austrian teachers are more or less satisfied with the technical access means at their schools: 75% state that their school is well equipped with computers and 78% express the opinion that their internet connection is fast enough. 53% wish there were better support and maintenance actions taken. In terms of content a minority states problems with respect to finding adequate learning materials (24%) and argue that existing material are of poor quality (26%). Austrian teachers feel most competent at using e-mail and using a text processor programme but are less confident with downloading and installing software and with using presentation software packages. Primary and lower school teachers (39%) seem to be only slightly less ICT competent than those in upper secondary (35%) and vocational schools (33%). Motivation. 78% of Austrian teachers see significant learning benefits for pupils using computers in class and say that pupils are more motivated and attentive when computers and the internet are used in class. This figure is highest among primary school teachers (85%) but overall below the European average. However, 28% compared to a EU25 average of 21% believe in significant learning benefits for pupils when using ICT in class.

5.3.4. Technology



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The overall computer per pupil ratio in Austrian schools is 16/100, while 59% of schools have broadband. Usually computers are located in the classroom. The pilot project One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) involves 415 schools. There is no central technical and pedagogical support, but it is locally organised by school authorities. 68% use the internet via a broadband connection. With this figure Austria ranks at number 18 of the 27 countries participating in the survey. There is a large variation between school types: while only 59% of primary schools have a broadband internet connection, the penetration is highest among upper secondary schools, with 83% and vocational schools reaching 86%. There is hardly any variation with regard to broadband access between urban and rural areas.

The learning material that is used most by Austrian teachers includes offline learning materials such as CD-ROMs. This applies to almost 90% of teachers. While in 2001 one hundred pupils had to share 11 computers the figure rose to 16 by 2006, a substantial improvement bringing Austria beyond the European average of 12 and ranking it in a very good 8th place. Vocational schools in Austria are best equipped with computers with 100 pupils sharing 24 computers, putting Austria at rank 6 in Europe. The situation in Austria is very similar to the overall situation in the EU25 with respect to the results on insufficient ICT equipment in schools with figures very close to the European ones.



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5.3.5. Economic

Governance and financing are provided at national, regional and local levels, which cooperate for setting up special projects.

5.3.6. Cultural

The language of instruction is German. The Austrian ministry of education and many schools (particularly members of the European Network of Innovative Schools) are active participants in European projects. Schools make use of digital learning resources produced in German-speaking countries, i.e. Germany as well as Austria.

5.3.7. Recommendations

The indicators for prospects for implementation of META-SCHOOL training in Austria are generally positive: ! There is government support for ICT in schools ! Schools are empowered to make decisions about ICT ! Teachers are competent and confident in ICT but lack motivation ! Recommendation: the training should include case studies and examples of peers

using ICT effectively ! The access to equipment and broadband is adequate but perhaps unevenly

distributed (according to the teacher survey) ! Recommendation: Ensure that schools have the access pre-conditions before

embarking on training ! Funding is generally adequate ! Teachers will naturally use German-language resources and networks although

many are competent in English.

5.4. Czech Republic

5.4.1. System



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In the Czech Republic the curriculum is set both at national and school level. The subject 'Informatics' is compulsory from the 6th grade, but from 2009 it will be compulsory from the first. Teachers' professional development is recommended but not mandatory. It depends on headmasters what kind of courses (and course providers) are paid to teachers, who can use 8 days of paid time off for their professional development. Sometimes they have as support staff also ICT coordinators. Currently, the main field of reform is the transition from national to school curriculum. Governance and financing are provided at regional and local level. Schools are supervised by the State school inspection (subordinate to the Ministry of Education) and by founders (e.g. local / regional authorities). Teachers and other staff are normally paid by the Ministry of Education via local / regional authorities that receive the money. Equipment (including ICT) is funded in a similar manner. ICT is seen as an important aspect for communication and collaboration, which are supported in national and international projects as well as during regular lessons. Schools are independent institutions with their own educational programmes, but they have to comply with the national curriculum in the area of ICT. ICT is both taught as a separate subject and as support in all the other subjects. The main topic of debates on ICT is how to finance ICT equipment in schools. At the moment there are no specific education policies for ICT, as the programme 'The State Information Policy in Education' (SIPVZ) has been cancelled. High policy priorities are word processing, communication software, information search tools, presentation software, databases and spreadsheets, while no interest is shown for computer games, handheld devices and laptops. The 'State Information Policy in Education' (SIPVZ Program) is the document ratified by the Government of the Czech Republic in April 2000. This policy has been planned to last till 2010. Many Czech schools had already invested in ICT equipment, applied ICT in school practice and participated in international ICT projects before 2000. SIPVZ program was to be realised via four partial programs: ! Program 1 - Information Literacy; ! Program 2 - Educational Software and Information Resources; ! Program 3 - IT Infrastructure; ! Program 4 - Coordination Centre.



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The targets specified in single SIPVZ projects and the obligations of the Czech Republic resulting from its participation to the initiative eEurope+ were: ! to increase the accessibility of ICT, namely infrastructure for schools and general

public, in particular for targeted citizen groups; ! to support the establishment of a corresponding offer of information literacy

programmes and opportunities for electronic education; ! to develop information literacy, motivation and confidence in electronic

communication with the government and local government authorities; ! as part of increasing 'information literacy', to create and intensify confidence in

electronic contents and services; ! to achieve the coordination of individual government departments' initiatives and

cooperation on projects of the departments involved. The programme SIPVZ has not been officially evaluated. The Czech media gave a mainly negative evaluation because of allegations of corruption and inefficient investments in some strands of the programme. But thanks to it, schools could fund internet connection, HW and SW purchase and ICT teacher training, in order to set their own ICT policy and curriculum.

5.4.2. School

Since 2003 School heads have given full responsibility for the quality of educational process, for financial management of the school, for appointing and dismissing teachers and for relations with the community and the public.

5.4.3. Teaching

36% of the teachers using computers use them in less than 10% of all lessons. A substantial 18% of Czech teachers (compared to 17% at the EU25 level) state, that they use computers in more than half of their lessons. Teachers in vocational schools use computers in class much more frequently than their colleagues in general education.



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22% of teachers in the Czech Republic still do not use computers in class. 44% state a lack of computers in their schools as an important barrier but only 16% express the opinion that teachers lack the necessary skills to utilize computers in their teaching. The as yet sub-optimal quality of the internet connection in many schools requires some improvement. Czech schools could probably also benefit from higher levels of integration of ICT in teaching subjects in class as opposed to mostly using ICT only in dedicated computer labs, although the intensity of ICT use in Czech schools is at a level above the European average with hardly any differences according to the age of teachers. Even older teachers belong to the group of ICT users in school. Compared to some other European countries, lack of motivation of teachers in using ICT still does not seem to be the most critical issue for a wider uptake of computers and the internet in schools in the Czech Republic.



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The majority of Czech teachers are more or less satisfied with the technical access means at their schools: 73% state that their school is well equipped with computers and 72% express the opinion that their internet connection is fast enough. However, 53% wish there were better support and maintenance actions taken. In terms of content 35% state problems with respect to finding adequate learning materials and 33% argue that existing materials are of poor quality. Czech teachers feel most competent at using e-mail and using a text processor programme but are less confident with downloading and installing software and with using presentation software packages. There are hardly any differences in the ICT competence according to school types, with around a third of the teachers in all school types agreeing to the statement that teachers lack sufficient computer skills. Motivation. 80% of Czech teachers see significant learning benefits for pupils using computers in class and state that pupils are more motivated and attentive when computers and the internet are used in class.

5.4.4. Technology

The computer per pupil ratio is 1/12, 80-100% of schools have broadband while less than 30% have LMS or VLE. More than 95% of computers are located in labs, while 1 or 2 also in the 50% of classrooms. 50% of schools are also equipped with laptops with 1-5 ntbs per school, while less than 10% have an online system. Maximum 30% of schools have little ICT, while no schools have any ICT.



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Before 2006, there was a special government programme called 'The State Information Policy in Education' (SIPVZ), aiming at supporting ICT development in education. An important part of this programme was teacher training for the use of ICT in education. This programme was meant to last till 2010, but after the parliamentary elections in 2006 it has been canceled without any substitute. There is no institutional ICT support at school; it is a competence of head masters. ICT technical support is usually provided by ICT teachers (as special half-time job), external commercial companies, etc., while pedagogical support is provided by ICT teachers. The first national repository for schools, the so called 'Evaluation Web', was created by the Ministry of Education within the framework of the SIPVZ Program in 2003. (Almost) all Czech schools are equipped with computers and internet connection. 63% use the internet via a broadband connection. With this figure the Czech Republic ranks at number 22 of the 27 countries participating in the survey. There is a large variation between school types: while only 55% of primary schools have a broadband internet connection, at 77% the penetration is highest among upper secondary schools. Rural areas also lag behind urban ones in terms of broadband access, with 56% of the former connected to the internet via broadband as opposed to 74% of the latter.

48% of Czech schools use computers in classrooms, with little variation across school types. This compares to a European average of 62%. But when considering only the new member states, the figure is down to 30%. With this result, the Czech Republic ranks in the top one third of the new member states but still significantly below the EU25 average.



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Surprisingly little variation on this indicator can be found in this respect according to the subjects of teaching. The vast majority of schools use ICT in computer labs (91%). This seems to be the typical location where most pupils are confronted with ICT in schools.

5.4.5. Economic

The financial support of ICT in education was totally and unforeseeably interrupted by the new Czech government established after the elections held in June 2006. The SIPVZ budget for the year 2007 was not approved, neither the first proposal of €25 million nor the second “minimal” proposal of €15 million.

5.4.6. Cultural

The official language of instruction is Czech. A small number of schools (47) teach in Polish.


The indicators for prospects for implementation of META-SCHOOL training in the Czech Republic are not all positive: ! There appears to be little government support on leadership for ICT in schools ! Recommendation: Participating schools should be carefully selected and prepared ! Schools are empowered to make many decisions but may be poorly advised about

ICT and not make it a priority ! Recommendation: as above ! Teachers are ICT-ready ! Recommendation: Check that this is still the case in 2009 ! Access to equipment and broadband is adequate but perhaps unevenly distributed

(according to the teacher survey) ! Recommendation: Ensure that schools have the access pre-conditions before

embarking on training ! Funding is generally inadequate ! Recommendation: Ensure that the schools have the financial means to provide the

required conditions and activities ! Teachers will naturally use Czech-language resources and networks and most lack

competence in English resources in class.



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5.5. Germany

5.5.1. Teaching

A majority (56%) of these teachers using computers use them in less than 10% of all lessons. Only 6% state that they use computers in more than half of their lessons. Teachers in vocational schools use computers in class much more frequently than their colleagues in general education. 22% of teachers in Germany still do not use computers in class. 49% state a lack of computers in their schools as an important barrier, a very high 48% of teachers not using ICT are not convinced of any benefits of using computers in class and 46% express the opinion that teachers lack the necessary skills to utilize computers in their teaching. Here we seem to have a problem in German schools since the figures on “lack of skills”, “no or unclear benefits in using ICT” and “lack of interest” are two to three times higher than the European average. It appears that action is urgently required in the area of motivation towards, and teacher training in, ICT use in German schools. The still sub-optimal quality of the internet connection in many schools and very importantly the lack of motivation of teachers not using computers for using ICT are the most critical issues for a wider uptake of computers and the internet in schools in Germany. Despite these negative aspects but with 41% of German teachers disposing of sufficient access to the internet at school, the necessary competence in using ICT in class and the motivation to its use, Germany ranks at 7th on ICT readiness of teachers in Europe, placing the country just in the top quarter of European countries. Most importantly action is urgently required to successfully counter the apparent and very significant lack of motivation of teachers not already using computers for using ICT in schools in Germany. 78% of German classroom teachers had used computers in class in the 12 months prior to the survey, with little variation across school types and between urban and rural areas. For most teachers, this includes not only using a computer for presentation purposes but also the use computers by pupils in class. Surprisingly little variation can be found in this respect according to the subjects of teaching.



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Also, the higher the school level, the more use of computers – especially in terms of frequency and intensity – is made by teachers and pupils. Around a quarter of the teachers using computers in class in upper secondary and vocational schools use these in more than 25% of their lessons, whereas the figure only reaches 16% in primary schools. 22% of teachers in Germany still do not use computers in class. When asked for the most important barrier, three issues gain the highest ratings among this group of teachers: 49% state a lack of computers in their schools as an important barrier, 48% are not convinced of any benefits of using computers in class and 46% express the opinion that teachers lack the necessary skills to utilize computers in their teaching. This results in a situation where the statement “lack of equipment in school” is expressed by a substantial 11% of all German teachers (22% non-users multiplied with 49% of teachers agreeing to this item). The differences compared to the European average are striking. German teachers not using computers in class show figures on “lack of skills”, “no or unclear benefits in using ICT” and “lack of interest” which are two to three times higher compared to the European average. It appears that action is urgently required in the area of motivation for, and teacher training in, ICT use in German schools.



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The majority of German teachers are more or less satisfied with the technical access means at their schools: 81% state that their school is well equipped with computers and 79% express the opinion that their internet connection is fast enough. However, 56% wish there were better support and maintenance actions taken. In terms of content 38% state problems with respect to finding adequate learning materials 29% and argue that existing material are of poor quality. German teachers feel most competent in using e-mail and using a text processor programme but are less confident with downloading and installing software and with using presentation software packages. Primary school teachers (37%) seem to be less ICT competent than those in upper secondary (29%) and vocational schools (28%). Motivation. Over 80% of German teachers see significant learning benefits for pupils using computers in class and as many say that pupils are more motivated and attentive when computers and the internet are used in class.

5.5.2. Technology

(Almost) all German schools are equipped with computers and internet connection. 63% use the internet via a broadband connection. With this figure Germany ranks at number 21 of the 27 countries participating in the survey. There is a large variation between school types: while only 54% of primary schools have a broadband internet connection, the penetration is highest among upper secondary schools, with 82%.



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78% of German classroom teachers use computers in class, with little variation across school types and between urban and rural areas. Surprisingly little variation can be found in this respect according to the subjects of teaching. German teachers using computers do not restrict themselves to a particular source of information but use a multitude of different material from a variety of sources for teaching purposes which in most categories is above the European average. They are also very active (88%) in searching for material themselves in the internet. This shows a very proactive behaviour. The learning material that is used most by German teachers includes offline learning materials such as CDROMs and material that has been collected by the teacher on the internet. This applies to almost 90% of teachers for both types of material used. About 70% of teachers use prefabricated pedagogical material from existing online sources and material that is made available on the schools' network and databases. German teachers have positive attitudes about the different applications of ICT in teaching and achieve high figures (above the European average) on attitudes that ICT should be used for letting pupils do exercises and practice (87%), letting pupils retrieve information in a self directed manner (97%) and for collaborative and productive work by pupils (80%). Virtually all schools are at least equipped with some computers in Germany, so that the above statement suggests that there seems some scope for further ICT-infrastructure improvements in German schools such as an increase of the number of computers in total and per pupil where Germany ranks below the European average.

5.5.3. Economic



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9.5% of government spending goes to education in Germany, which is at a low level compared to other European countries. The industrial sector supported the provision of 20,000 schools with ICT facilities through the federal initiative “Schulen ans Netz” (Schools On Line) (developed together with Deutsche Telekom) which equipped and connected more than 8,000 schools with 5,000 more to come subject to the provision of complementary local and regional funding. Overall, Deutsche Telekom has provided both free Internet access and 20,000 computers. As part of this initiative, an association, comprising 120 firms, is assisting in the provision of computer-related infrastructure at preferential rates. The qualified staff members from these firms are also acting as free consultants to the schools. The “Schools Online” initiative was launched in 1996.

5.5.3. Cultural

German is the language of instruction in schools.


For Germany we lack data for some indicators for prospects for implementation of META-SCHOOL training, notably on the system and schools. However, ! A significant number of teachers are not convinced about ICT and do not use it ! Recommendation: the training should include case studies and examples of peers

using ICT effectively ! Access to equipment and broadband is not outstanding compared with other

countries, and some schools lack computers and broadband ! Recommendation: Ensure that schools have the access pre-conditions before

embarking on training ! Funding is generally adequate ! Teachers will naturally use German-language resources and networks although

many are competent in English.

5.6. Greece

5.6.1. System

In Greece the curriculum is nationally set and includes all the EU key competencies except for learning to learn. Digital competence is a cross-curricular subject, while



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entrepreneurship (“youth business dexterity”) aims at enhancing pupils’ familiarisation with issues related to finance and economics through on the purpose teaching material and projects. Other new subjects have been included in the new National Curriculum such as environmental education, health education, cultural affairs and art competitions. English is offered as a compulsory curriculum subject from the 3rd grade, while a second foreign language (French or German) is compulsory from the 5th grade. Until 1997 teachers were appointed in vacant positions by the Ministry on the basis of a precedence list on which candidate teachers were registered. Afterwards the seniority list has been abolished and examinations held by a national board have been instituted. Teachers are considered as civil servants. The Hellenic Pedagogical Institute under the authorisation of the Ministry of Education developed and published the new National curriculum and student textbooks, which encourage interdisciplinary learning approach and open methods of teaching and learning. ‘Flexible Zone’ (2 to 4 teaching hours) was introduced into the primary education school schedule, dedicated to pupils’ interdisciplinary project work aiming at collaborative teaching and learning. For the new subjects introduced in the National Curriculum, related teacher training has been organised, educational material developed and distributed to regional Education Offices and school libraries. Furthermore, foreign language learning is being improved. Governance and financing are provided at national level. The Ministry of Education has the overall responsibility for education, in particular for the provision of human and technical resources for the implementation of the National Curriculum. The National Curriculum is formulated by the Hellenic Pedagogical Institute under the authority of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry is also responsible for providing technical infrastructure and resources (computer labs) as well as software. In order to supply the increasing needs for educational and technical support of primary and secondary education, 58 regional support centres (KEPLINET) have been established. ICT has been integrated into all levels of education first of all through the subject of Informatics. But pupils should also become familiar with the use of the computer as a tool that can enhance their learning, help them explore, interpret and communicate information using appropriate software in the context of everyday school practice. According to the ICT National Curriculum, its aims are to provide pupils with opportunities to develop basic computer literacy as well as critical thinking skills and to enhance their motivation for creative action at a personal and social level.



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One of the main priorities of the Greek educational policy is the continuous improvement of ICT integration in education. In the framework of the Information Society Programme (http://en.infosoc.gr), infrastructure such as broadband, networks and computer equipment, is being further developed, digital content and services (educational software, educational portals, educational services, e-management) are being improved, and teacher training for the exploitation of ICT in educational practice enhanced. The Greek Schools' Network (GSN - www.sch.gr) is the educational intranet of the Ministry of Education (www.ypepth.gr), which connects schools, teachers, students, administrative staff and libraries across Greece. It aims to the creation of a new generation of educational communities using the possibilities offered by the use of ICT in education. The Greek Schools' Network is funded by the Framework Programme for the Information Society (www.infosoc.gr), in close cooperation with the Ministry of Education and 12 Research Centers and Highest Education Institutes, specialised in network and Internet technologies. The project has been funded at 75% by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). GSN provides ICT-related services to basic and middle education teachers and pupils such as email, mailing lists, caching, proxy, web access, web filtering, webpage generator, web hosting for schools’ and teachers’ sites, forums, a portal for teachers (www.sch.gr) and one for students (http://students.sch.gr), personal calendar, newsgroups, chat, helpdesk, network statistics, web file folders and virtual drives, electronic cards, monthly e-magazines (http://e-emphasis.sch.gr) and so on. The network has also incorporated cutting-edge services such as remote management of the school computer labs, activation of the IPv6 protocol, QoS service, digital signature, and application hosting services; furthermore, GSN provides events’ live streaming, educational open software, video on demand, e-learning platform, electronic class administration and synchronous tele-education. GSN users receive continuous support and training concerning the services offered.

5.6.2. School

All schools must follow the National Curriculum and make sure that targets set in the ICT National Curriculum in each level of education are attained. Schools have the autonomy to offer additional informatics sessions, provided they cover additional costs and have been authorised by the Ministry of Education.

5.6.2. Teaching



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ICT is part of teachers’ initial training, but as programmes are formulated by Higher Education Institutes there is no uniformity in the integration of ICT. Between 2000 and 2006 ICT in-service teacher training was provided through the Information Society Operational Programme. To date, 92,000 teachers (76% in total) have been familiarised with basic computer applications, while the rest of the teachers are currently attending such courses. An on the purpose certification procedure for teachers’ ICT skills assessment has been planned via national examinations. So far, 56,000 teachers have already got their certificate. A framework ensuring ICT continuous professional development states that:

! 15,000 primary/ secondary school teachers and 10,000 vocational school teachers will be trained in the educational use of ICT;

! IT teachers will be trained in the latest ICT developments, maintenance of computer labs as well as in Informatics education;

! 2,500 special education teachers will be trained in the use of special education software.

The first phase of the training aims at familiarising teachers with the use of the basic computer applications as well as at offering a first idea of the use of ICT in daily teaching activities, which is the main subject of the second phase. However, training is not compulsory for teachers. After completing the first phase, teachers can take an examination to get an ICT certification, which still is not compulsory. Also the teachers who have not attended the training can take it.

Only 36% of Greek classroom teachers had used computers in class in the 12 months prior to the survey, with some variation across school types and between urban and rural areas. With this very low figure, Greece finds itself at the tail end in Europe. The survey results show that once Greek teachers have started to use ICT in class they do not seem to



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differ from other European teachers in their ICT usage behaviour in schools However, a very high 64% of teachers in Greece still do not use computers in class. When asked for the most important barrier, three issues gain the highest ratings among this group of teachers: 50% state a lack of computers in their schools as an important barrier, 32% express the opinion that teachers lack the necessary skills to utilize computers in their teaching and 22% argue that their subject is not suitable for being taught via computers. This results in a situation where the statement “lack of equipment in school” is expressed by a very high 32% of all Greek teachers. However, the vast majority of teachers are convinced of the benefits of ICT use in class. Only 2% are not convinced of any benefits of using computers in class. Only in a few other countries are teachers even more in favour of ICT use in schools. “Lack of interest” in ICT use is an issue among teachers for only 5% of the Greek teachers. It appears that action is urgently required in the area of ICT equipment improvement in Greek schools. Although virtually all schools are equipped with at least some computers in Greece, the above results suggest substantial scope for further ICT equipment installations and ICT-infrastructure improvements (only 13% of schools have a broadband internet connection) in Greek schools such as an increase of the number of computers in total and per pupil. On the latter indicator, Greece with 7 computers per 100 pupils ranks dramatically below the European average of 12. Primary school teachers (65%) and lower secondary teachers (66%) seem to be less ICT competent than those in upper secondary (62%) and vocational schools (37%). This compares to a European average of 42% and shows another weakness in ICT equipment and use in Greek schools. Greece still has a long way to go to reach the usage levels of the other Western European countries and even several new member states.



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Interestingly, the majority of Greek teachers are more or less satisfied with the technical access means at their schools: 66% state that their school is well equipped with computers and 72% express the opinion that their internet connection is fast enough. The situation seems to be worse in primary schools, where 41% of the teachers are not satisfied with the ICT equipment they have. A substantial 83% of all teachers (the figure is even higher in primary schools) wish there were better support and maintenance actions taken. In terms of content more than 50% state problems with respect to finding adequate learning materials (51%) but only a third argue that existing materials are of poor quality (35%). Greek teachers feel most competent in using e-mail and using a text processor programme but are less confident with downloading and installing software and with using presentation software packages. Primary school teachers (65%) and lower secondary teachers (66%) seem to be less ICT competent than those in upper secondary (62%) and vocational schools (37%). This compares to a European average of 42% and shows another weakness in the ICT equipment and use in Greek schools. Motivation. Despite all the above insufficiencies 91% of Greek teachers see significant learning benefits for pupils using computers in class and as many say that pupils are more motivated and attentive when computers and the internet are used in class.

5.6.3. Technology

Basically all Greek schools are equipped with computers and the internet and their use is steadily improving. However, the level of equipment leaves substantial room for



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improvement. Only 13% use the internet via a broadband connection. With this figure Greece ranks at the very bottom of the 27 countries participating in the 2006 survey. In primary schools the computer per pupil ratio is 1:32.7 and 17% of schools have broadband. Computers are located in the computer corner in classrooms, in computer labs or in both.

In order to compensate the increasing needs for educational and technical support in primary and secondary education, 58 regional support centres (KEPLINET), have been established at regional level. New staff with technical expertise has been lately hired to provide technical support for computer labs and networks established in both primary and secondary schools, together with the Central KEPLINET office located at the Ministry of Education. There are no IT coordinators at the school level. Primary school teachers receive educational support by the appointed school advisor. The Informatics teacher who has the responsibility of the computer lab maintenance has 3 teaching hours less on his/her schedule. In case he/she cannot solve the problem, he/she reports it to an online helpdesk. The problem is then solved either remotely or by sending guidelines to the teacher. If the problem is not yet solved, a specialist from the regional KEPLINET office visits the school. Greek teachers using computers do not restrict themselves to a particular source of information but use a multitude of different material from a variety of sources for teaching purposes, which in most categories is around or slightly below the European average. The learning material that is used most by Greek teachers includes offline learning materials such as CDROMs. This applies to 83% of teachers. Other sources are used less. About 68% of teachers each use pedagogical material from established online sources and 55% material that is made available on the schools' network and databases.



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5.6.4. Cultural

The language of instruction in schools is Greek. Over the last few years, there has been a development of educational exchanges and the twinning of Greek Primary and Secondary schools with schools abroad; these include a large range of activities such as communication on the Internet and the exchange of projects which usually leads to the exchange of visits. Greek schools and teachers participate in the South Eastern Mediterranean sea Project (SEMEP), which is a Greek initiative, and combines interdisciplinary teaching and holistic learning.


The indicators for prospects for implementation of META-SCHOOL training in Greece suggest there could be challenges:

! There is government support for ICT in schools ! There is school reform giving them more autonomy but change is likely to be

uneven ! Teachers are generally not ICT-ready ! Recommendation: training should be more thorough than in other countries and

not make assumptions about access, competence and motivation. ! Access to equipment and broadband is less than adequate, particularly broadband. ! Recommendation: Ensure that schools have the access pre-conditions before

embarking on training ! Funding for ICT is relatively low ! Teachers will naturally use Greek-language resources and networks although

some are competent in English.

5.7. Sweden

5.7.1. System

The Government has the overall responsibility for education and sets the framework for education at all levels, but the municipalities are responsible for providing and operating schools at basic, secondary and adult education level.



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The curriculum is nationally set and includes communication in the mother tongue and in foreign languages, competences in maths, science and technology, digital competence, learning to learn, interpersonal, intercultural, social and civic competences, entrepreneurship and cultural expression. Governance and financing are provided at national level. The Swedish Parliament and Government set objectives, while the National Agency for Education assesses schools' achievements. ICT has no key role in any of the issues concerning pupils, teachers and schools. In general educational goals are set at national level, but there are no specific goals for ICT. However, online resources, standards, interoperability and general information are provided at national level via the portal "ICT for teachers". The municipalities are responsible for schools including material and ICT, while schools are in charge of daily maintenance. There are no specific directives for ICT in primary schools, because only pupils completing compulsory school must "have a mastery of Swedish and have knowledge about the media and their role; can use information technology as a tool in their search for knowledge and to develop their learning". Therefore primary schools are not compelled to implement and develop the use of digitals tools and working methods. There are no high policy priorities. Neither computer games, handheld devices, laptops, pedagogical content nor word processing are considered a priority. Administration and special needs pupils ICT services are of some interest. Between 1999-2002 the Government implemented a special ICT initiative for the schools sector (ITiS) that involved offering a skills development programme to teachers working in a team, and together with pupils. The programme included a state grant for infrastructural improvements, including Internet connections and e-mail access for all pupils and teachers. The programme "Practical IT and media skills" (PIM) 2006-2009, which is provided by the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement, is an online resource aiming at enhancing teachers' skills in ICT, available for everybody and free of charge. It consist of ten guides where experienced Swedish teachers describe step by step how ICT can be used in a wide range of topics such as mailing, meeting with parents, searching techniques and source criticism, creating slideshows, etc. As PIM is an online resource, teachers can train whenever it suits them, but if a municipality demands it, PIM-education can be used to give teachers the opportunity for examination in practical ICT



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skills. At the moment more than 100 municipalities are involved, but the high demand could be a barrier. The shared responsibility between national and municipal level is a success factor. "Check the source" website (2002-ongoing) provides shortcuts, practical tips and learning material concerning source criticism and internet safety for children. It aims at being an aid for teaching children how to search and evaluate web pages and other information sources. Lust@It (2003-2005) is a regional project. It is a follow-up to national projects and directed towards preschool teachers, teachers and after-school pedagogues in preschool, elementary school, special school and senior high school. One of the goals was to give pedagogues the possibility to develop their educational competence together with their colleagues during five months. Another goal was to acknowledge and practice the use of the computer as an educational tool. Participating groups were offered guidance and attended seminars and workshops. They were equipped with laptop, digital camera and video, digital projector and web camera. Specific subjects were addressed, such as podradio, interactive whiteboards, videos, graphic processing, Web 2.0, global classrooms, English and maths.

5.7.2. School

The head teacher, as the pedagogical leader and head of the teachers, is responsible for the school's attainment.

5.7.3. Teaching

Nowadays there is a steady fall in the number of applicants, who are also less qualified. Recruiting is getting difficult and the drop-out frequency is high. In service training is under the responsibility of municipalities and then decided by principals, who also appoint teachers, in individual schools. Since 2007 it has been organised also with state support. ICT is not part of pre-service teacher training, while for in service teachers is available the programme "Practical IT and media skills" (PIM), which is provided by the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement. 40% of schools use ICT successfully and 40% of teachers do as well. 10% of schools have little or no ICT.



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A very high 86% of the Swedish schools using computers for teaching use them in classrooms, with the highest percentage being achieved in primary schools (89%). The use of ICT has become an integral part of teaching most subjects with hardly any variation across school types. Only schools in the United Kingdom achieve a higher figure. An extraordinarily high 91% of Swedish classroom teachers had used computers in class in the 12 months prior to the survey, with little variation across school types and between urban and rural areas. Only Denmark and the United Kingdom show even better performances. Comparable to Finland, for instance, I CT use by teachers in class in Sweden is not the most frequent and intensive in Europe. A majority (54%) of teachers using computers use them in less than 10% of all lessons. Only 9% state that they use computers in more than half of their lessons.

The older teachers (indicator used here: years of teaching experience) are slightly more frequent users of ICT in class. Only 11% of teachers in Sweden do not use computers in class. When asked for the most important barrier, 43% state a lack of computers in their schools as the most important barrier. In total, “lack of equipment in school” is expressed by a very low only 5% of all Swedish teachers (11% non-users multiplied with 43% of teachers agreeing to this item). More teachers than on average in Europe see the advantages and benefits of using ICT in class. However, and what is striking, almost three quarters of the teachers argue that the teachers in school have insufficient ICT skills. This comes as a surprise since with this very high figure on “lack of ICT competence” Sweden finds itself at the tail end in Europe. One can probably only assume that Swedish teachers seem to be very critical of



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their colleagues and themselves in this respect and downplay their ICT skills and capabilities. Almost 50% argue that using computers in class does not have significant learning benefits for pupils, a statement made particularly by teachers in primary schools. The question remains as to what has driven the Swedish teachers to this statement, whether it is their belief or whether they are more critical than their colleagues in other countries.

With only 28% of the teachers having good ICT access, ICT skills and the motivation to use ICT in class, Sweden only ranks 22nd which places the country close to the bottom of European countries. This is a surprising result which contradicts actual facts concerning ICT equipment and internet access in schools and ICT skills etc. of Swedish teachers, which are obviously given at substantial levels. It seems not unlikely that the Swedish teachers heavily underestimate their potentials and are much more critical of themselves than teachers in other countries. ICT access in school is not an issue or problem in Sweden but “motivation” is. A very high 36% of teachers (almost three times higher than the EU25 average) seem to lack motivation to use ICT despite their good ICT access and competence in its use. Actions addressed to an improvement of teacher’s motivation for using ICT in class may prove useful and beneficial.

5.7.4. Technology

The computer per pupil ratio is 1:3.5 (2006) and 86 percent of schools have broadband. Teachers have access to online resources via a national portal.



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In small schools technical support is provided by an ICT-skilled teacher, who doesn't receive any extra salary. When it is financially affordable, schools appoint part-time technicians (who can also be teachers) or get support from a municipal provider. Pedagogical support is provided by dedicated teaching staff hired part-time to act as "development leaders". Teachers are supposed to work in team. Bigger municipalities also offer resource centres, while the National Agencies for Education and for School Improvement websites offer support and resources as well. All Swedish schools use computers for teaching and have internet access. Almost all of them use the internet via a broadband connection (89%). With this figure Sweden ranks at number 3 of the 27 countries participating in the survey. A large majority of Swedish teachers are satisfied with the technical access means at their schools

In terms of content a majority states problems with respect to finding adequate learning materials (62%) and argue that existing material are of poor quality (54%). In no other European country are such high figures reached. Swedish teachers using computers do not restrict themselves to a particular source of information but use a multitude of different material from a variety of sources for teaching purposes, which in most categories is above the European average. They are also very active (85%) in searching for material themselves in the internet. This shows a very proactive behaviour. Swedish teachers have positive attitudes about the different applications of ICT in teaching and achieve high figures (above the European average) on attitudes that ICT should be used for letting pupils do exercises and practice (90%), letting pupils retrieve



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information in a self-directed manner (81%) and for collaborative and productive work by pupils (79%). There are only minor differences across school types.

5.7.5. Cultural

The main language of instruction is Swedish but English is widely understood. There are state schools for the Samic population in the north of Sweden, where the basic curriculum are taught in both Swedish and Samic.


The indicators for prospects for implementation of META-SCHOOL training in Sweden are generally positive: ! There is little explicit government support for ICT in schools, but there have been

successful initiatives in the past whose effects are still visible ! Schools are empowered to make decisions about ICT ! Teachers are highly ICT-ready: competent, confident and motivated ! Recommendation: the training should ensure that it takes into account existing

competences and practices and not start from basics ! Access to equipment and broadband is good ! Funding is generally adequate Teachers will tend to use Swedish-language resources and networks although English is widespread and schools are open to English language resources.

6. Conclusion

This report has provided a review of the state of the art in metadata and repositories for school resources. The report has shown the value of metadata in educational contexts and indicated how it is used for teaching and learning resources. Educational repositories in 27 countries and pan-European collections have been described in detail.



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A feasibility analysis was conducted using a common framework and some conclusions drawn concerning the implementation of the project in participating countries in terms of equipment and other constraints. The next step is to design a training framework taking into account the context and conditions described in this paper.

Introduction to learning repositories in Europe and elsewhere

Education

Transcript of Introduction to learning repositories in Europe and elsewhere