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Dr. Eugenijus Kurilovas
EU-funded projects: preparation, coordination and participation
7th
Framework Programme & 6th
Framework Programme ................................................ 2 1. iTEC (Innovative Technologies for an Engaging Classroom) ................................. 2 2. LSL (Living Schools Lab) ....................................................................................... 4
3. META-NORD (Baltic and Nordic Branch of the European Open Linguistic
Infrastructure) .......................................................................................................... 5 4. CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) .................................................. 7 5. iCLASS (Intelligent distributive cognitive-based open learning systems for
schools) .................................................................................................................... 9
International Research Projects ....................................................................................... 10
6. ICILS 2013 (International Computer and Information Literacy Study) ................ 10 7. STEPS (The Study of the impact of technology in primary schools) .................... 12
Safer Internet 2009-2013 Programme .............................................................................. 13
8. SIC LT II (Lithuanian Awareness, Hotline and Helpline Actions for Safer
Internet), Integrated Network................................................................................. 13 eContentplus Programme ................................................................................................. 14
9. ASPECT (Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content) ....... 14 10. EdReNe (Educational Repositories Network).................................................... 15
11. iCOPER (Interoperable Content for Performance in a Competence-
driven Society) ...................................................................................................... 16 eLearning / Lifelong Learning programmes ..................................................................... 17
12. CCL (Creative Classrooms Lab) ........................................................................ 17
13. eQNet (Quality Network for a European Learning Resource Exchange) .......... 20 14. INSPIRE (Innovative Science Pedagogy in Research and Education) .............. 22 15. [email protected] (Learning community for Web 2.0 teaching) ..................................... 23
16. P2V (Peer to Peer Networking for Valorisation) ............................................... 24 17. eTwinning: 8 projects since 2005....................................................................... 26
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7th Framework Programme & 6
th Framework Programme
1. iTEC (Innovative Technologies for an Engaging Classroom)
7FP, 2010–2014. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry
of Education and Science) http://itec.eun.org/
Objectives:
To develop and refine a range of teaching and learning scenarios that include new
approaches to assessment, (developed by project partners and teachers themselves) for the
future classroom in order to engage teachers and pupils together with other stakeholders
contributing to pupils’ learning and growth.
To develop decision support criteria (technological, pedagogical and policy-related) that
facilitates the selection of scenarios that can be mainstreamed and taken to scale.
To develop specific teaching and learning activities, also involving new approaches to
assessment, based on the scenarios and test these in a pre-pilot phase with a focus group of
teachers, with a view to determining which of these have the potential to be mainstreamed
in a number of countries.
To carry out large-scale pilots in up to 1,000 classrooms in at least 12 countries exploring
both the integration of technologies and how these impact on teaching and learning
practices and the engagement of a wider group of stakeholders outside the school.
To research the skills and competences needed by teachers in the classroom of the future
and to equip teachers and ICT coordinators, both within and beyond the project, with the
pedagogical knowledge and skills needed to implement project scenarios.
To evaluate the extent to which the iTEC scenarios have been successful in supporting
collaboration, individualisation, creativity and expressiveness and identify those with
maximum potential to have a transformative effect on the design of the future classroom.
Also to identify the underlying change processes necessary to bring about this
transformation.
To widely disseminate project results and ensure they can be taken to scale by
implementing a mainstreaming strategy that includes the formation of a new high-level
body at European level to ensure that iTEC scenarios and work in the large-scale pilots
contribute to the educational reform process.
Including 5 technology focused R&D objectives to support the large scale pilots:
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To select resources (i.e., technologies: tools, learning platforms, services, and plug-ins;
content; and people) necessary to carry out the selected learning and teaching scenarios
and then to group these resources into meaningful categories (i.e., depending on the way
they contribute to the different scenarios) and provide a conceptual framework for
describing each of these categories.
To describe these selected resources according to the corresponding frameworks and to
register them in one or more registries and then to apply a set of specifications and
standards (e.g., IMS LTI, OpenID) to the selected resources in order to make them
interoperable and easy to combine (mash-up).
To develop a shell (possibly more than one) that will support the combination of resources
in order to provide classrooms with the technical setting necessary to support the teaching
and learning activities corresponding to the selected scenarios.
To explore conceptual modelling paradigms (e.g., learning design, semantic-web
ontologies) to formally describe learning and teaching scenarios.
To build a prototype assistant for advising users how to find, select and combine resources
that support the project scenarios.
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2. LSL (Living Schools Lab)
7FP, 2012–2014. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry
of Education and Science) http://lsl.eun.org/
Starting in October 2012, Living Schools Lab is a two-year project funded by the European
Commission and coordinated by European Schoolnet. It includes 12 Ministries of Education
and aims to create:
A sustainable, growing network of primary and secondary schools, based around regional
clusters that showcase and share best practice and ways to successfully embed the use of
technology in teaching and learning (T&L) across the whole school.
A strong community of practice, with supporting continuous professional development
opportunities for teachers.
Opportunities for schools to get involved in action-based research, creating links with
outside partners including industry and other pan-European projects.
The project will also develop validation methodologies and a new turnkey validation
service whereby schools in the network will be available to test and evaluate results of
European Commission funded projects along with technologies, services and content
provided by other stakeholders.
Objectives:
To establish a pan-European network of ‘living schools’ demonstrating and showcasing a
diverse range of innovative pedagogical practice involving ICT.
To identify successful strategies for change to take to scale – from single class to being
embedded across the whole school.
To establish a sustainable LSL network of schools offering a baseline validation
methodology and service for future projects and research.
To promote a dynamic system of ‘living schools’ encouraging change and organic growth
with new schools joining the network of LSL schools.
To create a strong community of teachers, with access to continuous professional
development to help them with changing pedagogical practice.
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3. META-NORD (Baltic and Nordic Branch of the European Open Linguistic
Infrastructure)
7FP, 2011–2013. Author of feasibility study http://www.meta-nord.eu/
Objectives
To provide a description of the national (resp. language community) landscape in terms of
language use; language-savvy products and services, language technologies and resources;
main actors (research, industry, government and society); public policies and programmes;
prevailing standards and practices; current level of development, main drivers and
roadblocks; and create this in a simple, clear, standardized format.
To contribute to a pan-European digital resource exchange facility by identifying,
collecting resources in the Baltic and Nordic countries and by documenting, processing,
linking and upgrading them to agreed standards and guidelines.
To collaborate with other partner projects, in particular concurrent pilot projects and the
META-NET network of excellence. Cooperation with other relevant multi-national forums
or activities, e.g., FlaReNet, CLARIN, will ensure consistent approaches, practices and
standards aimed at ensuring a wider accessibility of and easier access and reuse of quality
language resources.
To help build and operate broad, non-commercial, community-driven, inter-connected
repositories, exchanges, and facilities that will be used by target user communities.
To mobilize national and regional actors, public bodies and funding agencies by raising
awareness, organizing meetings and other focused events.
Specific targets
To provide expertise to other pilots in fields where META-NORD partners have
outstanding expertise: treebanks / syntax databases, terminology resources, wordnets and
finite-state techniques.
To develop and document methodologies for building language resources for the so-called
under-resourced languages (i.e. languages with limited language resources) as efficiently
as possible, with focus on semi-automatic/machine assisted resource generation.
To facilitate availability of BLARK resources for META-NORD languages.
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To facilitate knowledge transfer between CLARIN and META-NORD, especially on
standards and intellectual property rights issues.
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4. CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools)
6FP, 2005–2008. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry
of Education and Science)
http://calibrate.eun.org/ww/en/pub/calibrate_project/home_page.htm
Aims
To support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools by allowing
teachers to access resources in a federation of learning repositories supported by six
Ministries of Education (Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia).
CALIBRATE was also strategically important as it helped provide the framework for
European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service.
Teachers participating in the project were able to search for learning resources in this
network of linked repositories via a CALIBRATE portal.
A new LeMill community platform for teachers, collaborative learning environment that
allowed teachers and pupils to develop community-driven learning content repositories and
also to carry out collaborative learning activities.
Information, support and advice was also provided, culminating in the development of a
manual for teachers that would include international examples of good practice on how
schools taking part in the project had used the portal for collaborative learning.
Research objectives
To carry out multi-level research activities (related to ‘brokerage system’ architectures,
collaborative learning environments and semantic interoperability of curricula descriptions
of learning resources) that would strengthen the ICT research effort in an Enlarged Europe.
To develop and implement a European LRE, based on this research and involving a
federation of learning resource repositories supported by six Ministries of Education.
To evaluate the use of the LRE, LeMill and new approaches to semantic interoperability
with up to 100 schools in seven countries, and to report on the extent to which project
results were capable of supporting advanced pedagogical models including more
collaborative forms of learning.
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To disseminate the results of the project, including via open source modalities and to offer
ongoing LRE services to all interested Ministries of Education participating in the
European Schoolnet initiative and to large numbers of teachers and learners across Europe.
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5. iCLASS (Intelligent distributive cognitive-based open learning systems for schools)
6FP, 2008. Project manager in Lithuania (validation, Centre of IT in Education,
Ministry of Education and Science)
Objectives
iClass aimed to develop an intelligent cognitive-based open learning system and
environment, adapted to individual learners’ needs and ensuring their take-up in the
education sector at a European level. The project was funded under the FP6, the European
Community Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and
Demonstration. It was in the Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage
action line, and is one of the two integrated projects in the area of education.
The project took into account not only advanced technology but also educational,
psychological and cognitive aspects to ensure full integration of current research and best
practices. iClass provided an attractive and stimulating e-learning environment, for
students, teachers, school administrators, educational authorities, parents, and other
important partners such as educational content developers, publishers and providers of
educational services.
On a pedagogical level iClass contributed in realising a paradigm shift, making ICT more
than simply a tool allowing a more generalised and widespread access to learning
resources. It is to be the key element of a new pedagogical approach capable of adapting
teaching and learning processes to the profile of individual learners.
iClass also improved the quality and efficiency of learning, was an important intangible
asset and also provided Europe with the future framework and infrastructure for exploiting
and delivering national curricula and educational resources in an advanced learning
environment.
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International Research Projects
6. ICILS (International Computer and Information Literacy Study)
2011–2014. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science) http://www.iea.nl/?id=303
The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2013 will
examine the outcomes of student computer and information literacy (CIL) across countries.
CIL refers to an individual's ability to use computers to investigate, create, and
communicate in order to participate effectively at home, at school, in the workplace, and in
the community.
ICILS asks how well students are prepared for life in the information age, and aims to
answer several key questions about student CIL and its contexts:
a. How does student computer and information literacy vary within and between
countries?
b. What factors influence students' computer and information literacy?
c. What can education systems and schools do to improve students' computer and
information literacy?
The assessment of CIL will be authentic and computer-based. It will include three types of
tasks: (i) multiple-choice or constructed response items based on realistic stimulus
material; (ii) software simulations of generic applications so that students are required to
complete an action in response to an instruction; and (iii) authentic tasks that require
students to modify and create information products using 'live' computer software
applications.
The student questionnaire will gather information about computer use in and outside of
school, attitudes to technology, self-reported computer proficiency, and background
characteristics. Teacher and school questionnaires will ask about computer use, computing
resources, and relevant policies and practices in the school context. A number of items will
link to SITES 2006. A national context survey will collect systemic data on educational
policies and practices for developing computer and information literacy, expertise of
teachers, and digital technology resources in schools.
Target population
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The population to be surveyed will include all students of the eighth grade, provided that
the mean age at the time of testing is at least 13.5 years.
Participating education systems
The education systems planning participation in ICILS include: Australia, Canada, Chile,
Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, Israel, Korea, Lithuania,
Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Slovenia,
Switzerland, Thailand, and Turkey.
Schedule
ICILS was inaugurated in June 2010 at the first meeting of the national research
coordinators in Amsterdam. Framework and instrument development work was carried out
in 2010 and continued in 2011, along with the pilot of the survey instruments. The field
test was conducted in the first half of 2012, and the main data collection will occur at the
beginning and end of 2013 for northern and southern hemisphere countries, respectively.
The international report and database will be released in 2014.
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7. STEPS (The Study of the impact of technology in primary schools)
2008–2009. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science) http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/minisites/steps.htm
The Study of the impact of technology in primary schools (STEPS) provides the most
detailed picture yet of national ICT strategies and their impact in primary schools in the 27
countries of the European Union, as well as in Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway.
Funded by the European Commission, this landmark study of ICT in Europe’s 209,000
primary schools was undertaken by European Schoolnet (EUN) and empirica GmbH, with
the support of national correspondents, researchers, policy-makers, teachers and pupils in
30 countries. The study includes an analysis of interviews with 18,000 primary school
teachers and head teachers, a review of relevant research in Europe (amounting to 60
research studies published in 22 countries), a survey of policy makers in 30 Ministries of
Education on national ICT policies, 25 case studies of good practice and 30 country briefs.
The study presents baseline data on 30 national primary education systems and their ICT
strategies, and investigates the impact of ICT in three key areas of the education system:
learners and learning, teachers and teaching and the school as a whole.
The evidence shows that ICT related strategies at national, regional and local level have
resulted in:
Increased access to and use of ICT in primary schools;
ICT-supported learning and ICT-enabled wider educational goals;
Higher levels of teacher and learner motivation, leading to competence development and
an engagement with lifelong learning;
First steps towards systemic change and modernisation of planning.
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Safer Internet 2009-2013 Programme
8. SIC LT II (Lithuanian Awareness, Hotline and Helpline Actions for Safer Internet),
Integrated Network
2012–2014. Project manager (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of Education and
Science) http://www.draugiskasinternetas.lt/lt
With this proposal consortium composed of four Lithuanian organizations – the Centre of
Information Technologies of Education (CITE) under the Ministry of Education and
Science, the Communication Regulatory Authority of the Republic of Lithuania (RRT),
Child line (CL) organization and LIA association – have prolonged the activities of the
currently running project “Safer Internet LT” and will seek for the new objectives.
CITE implements a wide range of awareness raising events and to create relevant tools like
improvement and maintenance of the project portal www.draugiskasinternetas.lt, Safer
Internet Day celebrations, organization of traditional annual conferences and dedicated
seminars for target user groups, establishment, maintenance and development of activities
of the Youth Panel, improvement of the online education program dedicated for parents
and adults about children‘s safety on the Internet, etc.
LIA aims to help CITE to increase awareness of wide society and educate parents and
teachers by providing them both face-to-face and distance courses and offering online safer
internet knowledge estimation and motivational tools. LIA plans to develop computer-
based learning tool to use in the younger classes.
The hotline established in RRT and being a member of INHOPE seeks to improve its
operations and to cooperate closely with the other hotlines in order to fight effectively
against illegal content on the internet and to remove it swiftly. The hotline will contribute
also to the European URL database administered by INHOPE.
CL provides psychological and emotional support for youth and children in order to meet
objectives raised by EC for the helpline. The helpline will answer online questions and
telephone calls from children and parents related to their use of online technologies, in
particular in relation to harmful contact (grooming), harmful conduct (cyberbullying),
harmful content, and uncomfortable / scary experiences of using online technologies.
Future project implementation should lead to significant increase of Lithuanian society
awareness on safer use of Information Technologies and visibility of the hotline and
helpline.
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eContentplus Programme
9. ASPECT (Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content)
2008–2011. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science) http://aspect-project.org/
ASPECT productively compared how a range of standards and specifications can be applied to
a diverse range of learning resources from both commercial and public sector providers. In
particular the project successfully:
Evaluated how the implementation of standards and specifications can enhance
interoperability of educational resources and the systems that are used to develop,
discover, transfer, and use that content.
Efficiently carried out practical implementations of a range of content standards and
specifications considered to be of strategic importance for the school sector by Ministries
of Education and commercial developers.
Demonstrated how to improve support for multilingualism in metadata.
Established the Learning Resource Exchange as an example of best practices for
combining existing specifications into a complete solution that addresses the needs of the
school community in Europe in terms of discovery, exchange, and reuse of learning
resources.
Provided dissemination events that promoted consensus building and raised awareness
related to standards for educational content and reached a larger and broader audience than
originally envisioned at the start of the project.
Offered recommendations on how combined standards and specifications can be taken to
scaled and adopted.
Helped shape the direction of standardization activities and outcomes by directly
contributing to the development of nine new specifications.
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10. EdReNe (Educational Repositories Network)
From 2007. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science) http://edrene.org/
The objective of this Thematic Network is to bring together web-based repositories of
learning resources with content owners and other stakeholders within education in order to
share, develop and document strategies, experiences, practices, solutions, advice,
procedures etc. on the organisation, structuring and functionality of repositories.
The overall goal is to improve the provision of and access to learning resources.
The network links to / collaborates with other cross-national and / or local repositories /
collections / catalogues, and publishers’ associations.
EdReNe develops practical guidelines and recommendations, but most importantly,
constitutes a collegial network of European repository nodes and stakeholders.
Connecting many providers of learning resources with the education community.
New repositories may have a less costly and much less complicated path in life.
Issues to be addressed include:
Policies and strategies
Quality criteria and assurance
Rights protection and management
Standards and interoperability
Development and harmonisation / mapping of application profiles
Types of learning resources
Involving commercial publishers and associated agreements
Encouraging teachers’ knowledge sharing
Linking to reviews and evaluations
Connecting to curriculum
Ethics, screening and clearing, and
Web-services bridging to other portals and local learning platforms.
EdReNe has categorized the long list of issues into 4 themes:
Repository policies and strategies
Engagement of producers and users
Standards and interoperability
Rights issues
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11. iCOPER (Interoperable Content for Performance in a Competence-driven Society)
2008–2011. External expert http://www.icoper.org/
The iCOPER networking capacity is grounded in key and leading experts in digital
educational development and technology enhanced learning. Driven by a consortium of 23
key players in Europe iCOPER provided access to a critical mass of more than 12,500
hours of integrated educational content. Based on this beneficial infrastructure the project
systematically analysed the specifications and standards available and in use, to draw
conclusions on their validity in iCOPER Suitability Reports for Better Practice (ISURE).
iCOPER’s underlying educational framework guided a consensus building approach to
developing Best Practices, addressing issues such as:
Exchange of competency models and learning outcomes
Collaboration around learning designs
Integration of content via federated search and harvesting
Reuse of instructional models and content in learning delivery environments
Interoperability of item banks for assessment and evaluation.
iCOPER provided mechanisms to ensure European-wide user involvement, cooperation,
and adoption of standards within a large community to support all phases of
standardization.
Overall, the confusion around the applicability (fit-for-purpose) of standards and
specifications in technology enhanced learning results in a lack of adoption, which
consequently has a profound negative impact on making digital content in Europe more
accessible, usable, and exploitable.
The work in iCOPER was driven by an educational framework that is competency-driven
and consists of 4 process stages where best practices and use of specifications and
standards are analysed, and the result is integrated in the iCOPER Reference Model (IRM).
The four iCOPER process stages were:
Needs analysis
Content Preparation
Learning Interaction
Assessment
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eLearning / Lifelong Learning programmes
12. CCL (Creative Classrooms Lab)
2013–2015. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science) http://creative.eun.org/
What is the Creative Classrooms Lab project about?
The 1:1 computing paradigm is rapidly changing, particularly given the speed with which
tablets from different vendors are entering the consumer market and beginning to impact
on the classroom. Over the next 2-3 years policy makers will face some difficult choices:
How to invest most efficiently in national 1:1 computing programmes? What advice to
give to schools that are integrating tablets?
To address these challenges, the Creative Classrooms Lab project will carry out a series of
policy experimentations to collect evidence on the implementation, impact and up-scaling
of 1:1 pedagogical approaches using tablets. This evidence will enable policy makers to
take more informed decisions. Lessons drawn from the policy experimentations will also:
1. Provide guidelines, examples of good practice and a training course for schools
wishing to include tablets as part of their ICT strategy.
2. Support capacity building within Ministries of Education and regional
educational authorities and encourage them to introduce changes in their
education systems.
3. Enable policy makers to foster large-scale uptake of the innovative practice that
is observed during the project.
Who is involved?
The project is coordinated by European Schoolnet, a unique network of 30 Ministries of
Education in Europe and funded by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning
Programme. Nine Ministries of Education or organisations nominated to act on their behalf
are project partners: Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Belgium (Wallonia), Czech Republic,
Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The observation and
documentation of innovative practice in participating schools is led by the University of
Wolverhampton from the UK.
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In addition, a number of leading ICT vendors have expressed an interest in being involved
in the project as Associate Partners.
What will the project do? The Creative Classrooms Lab project will:
Act as an ideas lab bringing together policy makers, innovative teachers and technology
suppliers to jointly develop innovative pedagogical scenarios on how tablets can support
new learning and teaching methods.
Carry out action research pilots based on these scenarios in 45 classrooms that are already
equipped with tablets from different vendors.
Focus on how practice is changed as a result of tablets being used for collaboration,
personalisation and active learning.
Explore how tablets can be successfully integrated with classroom technologies already in
mainstream use.
Provide capacity building workshops to support ministries to introduce changes in their
education systems in order to foster large-scale implementation of innovative practice
involving 1:1 computing approaches.
Pedagogical scenario development
For the scenario development, the project builds on the expertise of the iTEC project. This
flagship project on the design of the future classroom, which is also coordinated by
European Schoolnet, is providing a Future Classroom Scenarios Toolkit that is being used
by participating Ministries of Education in the CCL project.
From the Creative Classrooms Lab pedagogical scenarios, teachers can derive concrete
learning activities for their classes that incorporate the use of tablets. The aim is that these
scenarios engage teachers, learners and stakeholders both inside and outside the school.
What will be the outcome of the project?
For policy makers: The Creative Classrooms Lab project will:
1. Support capacity building within the Ministries of Education at both national
and regional level in order to mainstream and foster large-scale implementation
of the identified innovative practices.
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2. Enable policy makers to make more informed policy decisions related to the
procurement and implementation of tablets as part of their 1:1 computing
strategies.
For teachers: Lessons drawn from the tablet pilots will be used to provide:
1. A Creative Classrooms Lab Course for teachers.
2. Guidelines for successful classroom integration of tablets.
3. Examples of good practice.
For ICT vendors: The project action research pilots will allow ICT vendors to:
1. Better understand the priorities of policy makers and the challenges faced by
schools wishing to deploy tablets.
2. Assess the potential impact of tablets in a fast moving market and how these fit
into a 1:1 computing paradigm.
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13. eQNet (Quality Network for a European Learning Resource Exchange)
2009–2012. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science); leader of work package “Developing ‘Travel Well’ Quality
Criteria” http://www.eqnet.eun.org/web/guest/about
The ease with which one can reuse digital learning resources is a key part of their
attraction for many teachers, This in-built flexibility of digital content applies not only to
resources developed for a specific curriculum or designed for use by teachers in one
country. In a number of recent projects, European Schoolnet has found that some teachers
are also interested in using a digital learning resource in a context other than the one for
which it was originally created. This has led to European Schoolnet and its supporting
Ministries of Education developing the concept of learning resources that have the
potential to ‘travel well’ and that can be used in a pan-European context.
The eQNet Multilateral Network is a project involving nine Ministries of Education (incl.
Lithuania) that have their own national repositories or collections of digital learning
resources and are also sharing some of their resources via the European Schoolnet
Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service for schools. As a pan-European service with
over 200,000 learning resources and assets from 30 content providers, the LRE particularly
seeks to include materials with the potential to ‘travel well’ across borders that can be used
in a cultural and linguistic context different from the one in which they were created.
In eQNet, the key aim is to establish a network of policy makers and practitioners
(teachers) to develop ‘travel well’ quality criteria and then apply these to both existing
LRE content and content that will be selected in future from national repositories and other
collections. The end goal is to help Ministries of Education identify and share ‘travel well’
resources and thus to make it easier for interested teachers (particularly in countries where
there is still a limited supply of digital content in the national language) to access these
sorts of resources. At the end of the project, the aim is to have created a public collection
of more than 3,500 tagged and rated ‘travel well’ resources that will be made available to
all stakeholders via the LRE. The LRE will also include ‘showcases’ of some of the best of
these resources.
eQNet has also been specifically designed as “a forum for joint reflection and cooperation”
within which both educational policy-makers and practitioners can strengthen their
cooperation related to the exchange and re-use of educational content that has the potential
for cross-border use. The fostering and animating of these two networks in the project is
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particularly relevant at a time when Web 2.0 tools and user-generated content are
becoming a key component of national content strategies. New mechanisms are now
needed so that quality frameworks both at national and European level can be
systematically tested and applied to existing content collections, to federations of learning
resource repositories such as the LRE, and also to the growing volume of resources created
by teachers themselves.
In the first half of the project, a key objective was to have teachers and partners working
together to better understand and discuss the issues underlying the ‘travel well’ concept.
An online teachers’ Community of Practice was planned to play an important role here and
will continue to do so later on in the project as partners seek to define ‘travel well’ criteria
and involve a wider group of stakeholders in a discussion on the uptake and potential
impact of these resources on pedagogical models in different countries.
A final objective of the eQNet project is the outreach to policy-makers in the LRE
Subcommittee as well as to LRE Associate Partners and a wider group of stakeholders
who will have regular opportunities to comment and be involved in the project’s activities
and outcomes.
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14. INSPIRE (Innovative Science Pedagogy in Research and Education)
2008–2009. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science); leader of work package
http://inspire.eun.org/index.php/Main_Page
INSPIRE aimed to develop and experiment new teaching methods in the field of maths,
science and technology (MST).
The purpose was to challenge the lack of interest among students to start scientific studies
and to extend the supply of scientific specialists and to develop a scientific culture in
European countries.
INSPIRE observed the impact of new teaching methods on pupils and on their motivation;
analysed the pre-requisites to be defined for enabling teachers to integrate these new
techniques in their pedagogy; and identified the critical success factors to be mastered at
the level of the teacher and the school for the generalization of such practices.
INSPIRE has set up a limited validation observatory where 60 schools in Europe used,
tested, and analysed new didactical tools in the field of MST. On the Inspire website the
pilot schools were able to choose from 60 learning objects to be applied in their science
lessons. During the project, schools regularly provided reports of students’ and teachers’
feedback on the new teaching methods.
The project relied on previous R&D activities and implemented the following activities:
Implemented three school pilots involving a total of 60 schools in Germany, Austria,
Italy, Spain and Lithuania.
Defined the protocol of experimentation and organise the training of the pilot schools
via training of trainers’ session.
Launched and monitor the experimentation activity for a period of 10 months with the
pilot schools.
Analysed the impact and feedback of this experimentation.
Drawn the lessons and propose recommendations, action plan and concrete support
(e.g., a handbook for teachers) for generalizing such an approach.
Ensured the dissemination of this project via a dedicated science education portal based
on the existing Xplora portal.
Ensured the exploitation of this project via the organisation of an international summer
school and the development of an online community of practice for educators regarding
the use of digital learning resources in MST.
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15. [email protected] (Learning community for Web 2.0 teaching)
2009–2012. Member of Lithuanian team (Vilnius University)
What is [email protected]? [email protected] is a web community for teachers interested in integrating
Web 2.0 in classes at school. [email protected] wants to support Web 2.0 projects at schools and
motivate teachers to use modern internet technologies in classes.
Why [email protected]? Basic knowledge, motivation and inspiration of the teacher are key factors
when starting innovative educational approaches in classes. Other web communities on
Web 2.0 teaching are often dominated by experienced members. [email protected] is a learning
community that focuses on beginners connecting them to advanced learners and experts.
[email protected] is a starting point in the world of teaching with Web 2.0.
What can you find here? [email protected] offers a learning environment for knowledge sharing
and communication between beginners and advanced learners. In the “Practices” section
you find examples of Web 2.0 projects in other schools in Europe. The “‘Basics” and
“Experts / Advanced” sections offer general information and web resources about Web 2.0
in education with respect to different difficulty levels. The integration of tutored online
courses is planned for 2011. [email protected] is not a comprehensive website for all topics on
Web 2.0 teaching. But, you will find many links to external resources and other
communities. [email protected] wants of offer inspiration, wants to make you ready to take part in
other topic-related learning communities and to start your own Web 2.0 project at your
school.
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16. P2V (Peer to Peer Networking for Valorisation)
2007–2008. Project manager in Lithuania (Centre of IT in Education, Ministry of
Education and Science)
http://peerlearning.eun.org/ww/en/pub/peerlearning/homepage/about_p2v.htm
P2V aimed to help teachers, inspectors and policy makers discover methods, pedagogies
and inspection schemes in other countries using peer learning.
Partners in the project worked on three topics that are significant in widening the uptake of
e-learning in schools:
Digital resources: accessing, sharing across borders, common standards
Digital literacy: competent, effective and responsible use of technology by all
New learning environments: online learning, future schooling models
The P2V project took place in three strands: Policy Peer Reviews, Inspectorate Peer
Reviews and School Peer Reviews and included:
Three policy peer reviews: in Ministries of Education in Lithuania, Spain (Catalonia) and
France organised peer learning visits to exchange experience and views on the use of ICT
in three contrasting education systems. From the visits emerged some key points related to
successful ICT adoption in education systems.
Sixteen school peer reviews: Schools participated in peer learning activities. In P2V it was
decided to create triads of schools peer reviewing each other. The approach was for all
schools, while picking up ideas from all three topics of the project, to look more
specifically at the topic of new learning environment and apply the P2P methodology to
peer review innovative activities in these areas. For visits, two people (head and ICT or a
particular subject area) in each school visit two other schools and host one visit. Inspectors
join the visits. As part of the project, an online tool to perform peer learning was started
and is under development (see TIES: Toolkit for Investigating eMaturity in Schools).
Six inspection peer reviews: Under the leadership of the Dutch inspectorate, Inspector of
Education from France, Catalonia, Scotland, Sweden and Lithuania engaged in peer
learning activities with support from the Standing International Conference of Inspectorate
(SICI). The aim of the strand was to valorise the ICT assessment framework developed by
inspectorates in the P2P project, testing and using it in different countries and look into the
possibilities of adapting it for use as an audit tool for self-evaluation and as a roadmap for
institutional change towards school e-maturity.
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Among the main outcomes of the project are detailed accounts of how peer learning was
conducted among policy makers, inspectors and schools in the project following a detailed
methodology.
A key document describing the peer learning activities, methodologies, successes and
problems encountered during the P2V project is the final version of the Common
Analytical Framework, “A roadmap for change” (Dec 2008).
P2V was a continuation of previous peer learning projects, ERNIST and P2P.
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17. eTwinning: 9 projects: 2004 – 2013
Project manager in Lithuania (Head of National Support Service, Centre of IT in
Education, Ministry of Education and Science)
http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm
eTwinning is the Community for schools in Europe. Teachers from all participating
countries can register and use the eTwinning online tools (the Portal and the Desktop) to
find each other, meet virtually, exchange ideas and practice examples, team up in
Groups, learn together in Learning Events and engage in online-based projects.
What is an eTwinning Project? Schools from at least two schools from at least two
different European countries create a project and use Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) to carry out their work. As schools communicate and collaborate
via the Internet, there are no grants or administrative conditions connected to the
scheme and face-to-face meetings are not required.
In an eTwinning project, you can work on any topic you and your partner wish to work
on. Projects should have a good balance of ICT use and classroom activities, and should
preferably fit into the national curricula of the schools participating in the project.
One of the objectives of eTwinning is to improve teachers’ abilities in ICT and to make
it part of daily life in the classroom. eTwinning caters to all levels of ICT knowledge.
Who can participate? An eTwinning project can be carried out by two or more teachers,
teams of teachers or subject departments, librarians, head teachers and pupils from
schools across Europe. Collaboration can be within the same subject or cross-curricular
through the use of ICT. Pre-school, primary, secondary and upper secondary schools
can all participate (age range of pupils, 3-19).
