Digital T chnolo i ,T 1 h rsEngagement and Future la

omp t nroom: lT 1

tuProj

Neuza Pedro, João Filipe Matos, and Ana Pedro

Institute of Education- University of Lisbon, Portugal{nspedro,jfmatos,aipedro}@ie.ul.pt

1 iTEC Project

iTEC -Innovative Technologies for Engaging Classrooms- is a four-year pro] " 11which European Schoolnet is working with education rninistries, technoln Yproviders and research institutions to transform the way that technology is lIS 'li 11teaching and learning. With 26 project partners, including 14 Ministries of Edu 111uniTEC is the largest initiative yet on the design of learning and teaching for the fU1I1I1classroom. Within iTEC, educational tools and resources have been piloted in lV I2,000 classrooms across 19 European countries with the key objective of providin ,sustainable model for fundamentally redesigning teaching and learning.

Started in 2010, education researchers, teachers, education ministries, IT provid Irepresentatives and other specialists in the field of education worked togeth I' 111design the future classroom. The project aims to develop more meaningful visions uulscenarios for the future classroom by putting in place a user-centered design procand rigorous testing methodology. Ali learning activities and new webtools designe Ifor the future classroom are co-developed with teachers and are validated in lar L'

scale pilots (five overlapping 18-month piloting cycles) in order to determine wheth I

they can have the potential to be widely adopted by schools in Europe. The project Ideveloped and piloted three innovative educational tools:

• Eduvista, a toolkit for designing and sharing Future Classroom Scenario(http://eduvista.eun.org/);

• Edukata, a toolkit for Innovative Learning Activity Design (http://edukata.fi/). 1Iwas created upon a collaborative design process that allows educators to designfuture classroom activities;

• Eduteka: the technologies for Advanced Learning Activity Design (http.z/itec.eun.org/web/guest/eduteka). It has been developed and tested with thinvolvement of teachers and students involved in the classroom pilots. The toolalso demonstrates 'intelligent' advice on resources, with the capability to makepersonalized, informed recommendations, based on the teacher's local context.

2 Teacher Skills and Competences for Classrooms of the Future

iTEC does not just focus on diffuse futuristic visions; instead, it provides educatorswith the necessary learning resources and pedagogical tools to allow them to innovatewithin their teaching and learning practices. However, in order to design the future

C. Rensing et a!. (Eds.): EC-TEL 2014, LNCS 8719, pp. 582-583,2014.© Springer lntemational Publishing Switzerland 2014

'I UIIN1'00 111, 11 ti to kl 111I'y rhe I' 'hol iul 111Ir> 'du o I iul k 11 til I cffcctlvely nct in 111' .lassroorn oftom~rrow, 'ltH I 1'11I, ITI!' I iurning activities and wcbtools were designedc~nsldcrln UI1 I "I '(lmp stencc Frarnework for Teachers [2]. This framework isall.gned wlth (I) IOduy's kcy technological and educational trends and with (ii) theskills that are cxpectcd to be evidenced by learners in the near future which arefrequently referred to as 21st-century skills. This framework considers six differentdomains of teachers work: 1. Understanding ICT in education, 2. Curriculum andasse~s~ent,. 3, Pedagogy, 4. ICT (digital literacy skills), 5. Organisation andadrninistration, and 6, Teacher professional learning.

3 Evaluation of the Impact of iTEC Pilots in Schools

Fr~~ ~OIO to 2014, th~ project conducted five cycles of design and testing of learningacnvmes, The evaluatton of iTEC pilot activities draws information from severalsources including questionnaires and case study data collection which includes lessonobservations and interviews with the teachers, head teachers and students.

The report of the results founded so far particularly focus on students' learningou~comes and engagement, teachers' digital competence and pedagogical use of leT.In I.t,four out of five tea~hers stated that students had becorne more deeply engaged intheir .work, and that the ITEC pilots had positively impacted on students' altitudes tolearning. Over 80% of teachers also agreed that the pilot enabled the students toengage in ~ctive and independent Iearning, and that the Learning Activities providedstu~~nts .with new ways to express ideas. Teachers also felt that the pilot had apositrve irnpact on their own altitudes and practices relating to IÇT; 79% of the 826teac~ers sur~eyed .replied ~hat.th~ir knowledge of ICT was improved through takingpart rn the pilot, with 84% indicating that they intended to use ICT more frequently infut~r~ .. Above ali, 87% ~f participating teachers felt that using iTEC LearningAC~I~I~lesenabled the!ll to mcorporate new pedagogical practices into their classroomactivines [I].

T?e project results are .Iikely to be transferred thr~ughout the participating schoolan.d rt presents ~he potenttal to. ~e taken to seale in order to achieve European ICT-dnven econormc growth policies as the ones identified in the Horizon 2020programme.

References

I. Lewin, C.: Evaluating the impact of iTEC learning activities in schools. iTEC Magazine (1)(2013), http://fel.eun .org /e/doeument_library (retrieved)

2. UNESCO: ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (2011),http://unesdoc.uneseo.org/images/0021/002134/213475e.pdf(retrieved)