European Schools Network
29 October 2007-10-29

Context

EUN was started by the Swedes in a meeting of the council of ministers, when there were still only 12 members of the EU.

Over time it became far too successful for just one country's patronage and became a separate corporate entity. Now 28 countries are members of the EUN. It bids for work in specific countries and projects contracted by the European Union.

Our group is able to meet with EUN because of agreements in place between Education.au, COSN and EUN.

European Schoolnet (EUN) overview:
Alexa Joyce (Development Manager)

Alexa is responsible for a number of projects, and for liaison between member organisations.

The 28 ministries of education have interest in EUN supporting and promoting-
• Schools implementation and integration of ICT
• Improvement of overall education standards using ICT

Stakeholders
• Ministries of education,
• IT industry and suppliers
• European commission
• Schools
• Experts

Audience:
• Teachers and pupils: most services aimed at them.
• School leaders
• Policy makers
• Researches & developers

Three strands of activity
• School networking and services
o eTwinning: 30,000 schools cooperating on collaborative projects using a special website and collaborative environment set up by EUN and fostered and supported by each national educational body. European Commission gives annual grants of about E$1.5M for this program.
o Xplora: Science portal. Gateway to a number of EU science projects.
o eLearning Awards: A prize awarded annually for best practice in eLearning, done in partnership with industry. http://elearningawards.eun.org 13 industry partners now on board.
o Development Youth Prize

• Knowledge building and exchange on ICT policies and practice
o Insight Portal: This is a EUN Observatory regarding ICT in education. 3 strands-, Policy, Interoperability and Innovation in Schools. Loads of information is gathered from across al EU countries, translated and placed into the Insight repository. Able to retrieve fact files about ICT in each country or across countries : http://insight.eun.org

o "In Safe" This is for the safer internet project, bringing together the different countries. Some countries block routinely - e.g. Netherlands block for primary schools. In some countries, they feel that the best blocks are in the head. Emerging issue with mobile phone access.

• Interoperability and content exchange:

EUN has developed a federated resource repository and exchange, attempting to link all countries various repositories together. This will be known as the Learning Resource Exchange. Doing lots of work on metadata standards and other standards for interoperability- eg IMS, LOM, SCORM, Shibboleth
Also looking at less formal approaches for tagging such as allowing Folksonomies- (if metadata is a structured set of data, a folksonomy is a home-baked set of tags: Flickr, Youtube, Facebook use folksonomies).




eTwinning School partnerships in Europe
Christina Crawley, (Web editor EUN)

This is the biggest project in the EUN. eTwinning is an initiative of the EC to give an opportunity to as many EU children as possible to communicate with each other using ICT.
Basically brokers and supports 'sister' school relationships online.

eTwinning is for teachers, students and principals. Started off as a one-school-to-one school project, but now has some quite large groups.
What are the aims?
• Promote school collaboration across borders using ICT
• Bring European dimension into school curricula
• Involve whole schools
• Improve skills for teachers
• Prepare pupils for European future

Who is it for?
• Teachers and school staff at K-12
• At least two schools from two different countries.
• Schools can connect with schools outside EU, but 2 schools from inside can invite schools from outside EU to become unofficial partners of the online space. Have been trying to lobby EC to allow outside-EU schools involve.
Who does what?
• National Support Services (29) supported by EUN.
o National promotion of eTwinning
o Monitory of projects
o Assistance to schools and partnerships
o National events, competitions, training
o Collaborate with other National support services, Central support (EUN) and EC
• Central Support Service: European Schoolnet
o General information on www.etwinning.net
o Pedagogical advice, kits and guidelines to eTwinning
o Partner funding tools and virtual environments for partnerships
o European events and prizes.
o Collaborate with national support services and EC

3 Levels to the eTwinning Portal, all available in 22 languages.
• Level 1, the public portal at website
o Practice examples
o Ideas and kits
o News from Europe
o Pedagogical guidelines
o Practical guidelines
o Newsletters
o Registered schools and partnerships
o Recognition and quality
o Support
o Can access the eTwinning map to see all who are involved.
o There is a section that shows you the Level 3 sites that have decided to be published.
• Level 2, once registered, you can find a partner to discuss partnership: chat, forum, email, a twin-finder;
o Desktop tools
• Partner finding tools. (100s posted each day).
• Editing profile
• TwinFinder
• Chats
• eTwinning learning resources.
o Face-to-face meetings can be arranged: this is a way of sorting out the projects
• Level 3: Twinspace - private to the schools in the partnership; Available to any members of the participating school.
o Calendar
o Email
o Forum
o Mailbox
o Chat
o webconferencing
o Bulletin Board
o MyTeam:
o Can upload photos, videos, documents.
o Progress card:

Main values of eTwinning.
• Now in the 4th school year.
• Collaboration the mail value, among students/teachers within the school and between schools
• New ways of communicating using ICT. School gets closer to real life
• European dimension: EU's intention of promoting "European culture"

Statistics 12/09/2005
• No of registered schools: 6000
• No of partnerships: 800+
• No of teachers involved: 7000+

Applications:
Development of the application was done in-house using Coldfusion. Have a few third party applications like FlashMeeting for the web conferencing.



Learning Resource Exchange
John-Noel Colin, (CTO for EUN)

The LRE is a service designed to unlock the educational content hidden in digital repositories across Europe and share it among all partners of the LRE and their users. The service is offered to actors providing digital content: Ministries of Education, regional educational authorities, commercial publishers, broadcasters, cultural institutions and other non-profit organisations who are offering extensive but heterogeneous catalogues and repositories of online content to schools.

It's a full open-source project. Idea is to build a federation of all actors providing digital content.

From a technical standpoint, the LRE consists of an infrastructure based on a 'brokerage system' to which independent systems (e.g., learning resource repositories, educational portals, learning (content) management systems) connect to share learning resources in a federated way.
This architecture has been adopted because it offers maximum flexibility: it is decentralised enough to allow content providers to manage their collections autonomously, and is secure enough to ensure the trust needed when dealing with content for school pupils.

The brokerage system is run out of EUN. All partners are asked to implement a piece of software which allows connection. SQI for searching, ORI for indexing. Brokerage system is agnostic to systems.

Supports 3 types of service:
• Content search and retrieval from repositories
• Metadata harvesting
• Access protocol, providing appropriate access under license

Federated Searching

During a federated search, an educational system sends a query from its user to the brokerage system.
The brokerage system then propagates the query to all the repositories of the federation.
The repositories that support the language of the query and the requested result format (i.e., metadata format) process the query and return the results to the brokerage system that then forwards the results to the system that originally sent the query.
Most of the content available through a URL.

Metadata Harvesting

The LRE proposes metadata harvesting as an alternative to SQI for exposing the metadata of a repository. The harvesting of metadata itself relies on HTTP requests as defined by the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting version 2.0 (OAI-PMH). The latter is complemented by an OAI client module that allows repositories:
1. To be registered by the brokerage system so that they can be found by harvesters and
2. To ensure that only authorized harvesters get access to their metadata.

The Access protocol
This is still under development. There is difficulty in finding a good solution to Intellectual property concerns of the owners of digital content. Providers want to protect their content, but don't know how to do it. Standards have been tried such as ODRL out of Macquarie Uni in Sydney, but Microsoft crunched it.
Resource size:

Two current sub-projects - 'calibrate' and 'melt' - will add over 60,000 resources to the LRE.

A new project - INSPIRE - will zoom in on science and technology resources, because these are more internationalized.

Quality assurance is only done at the local repository level. Problem has been to agree on what is quality. Rather than "best practice" the content is considered by all as "practice".

There is a profile developed for each individual so that the federated search knows what the user is interested in.

Resources are developed by teachers, departments of education, institutions, commercial content. The repositories are usually owned by national bodies reporting to a department of education.

Application
Name of the open source application used as part of the project is LIMBS (available from www.sourceForge.net ).






European Schoolnet: Knowledge building and Exchange on ICT policies and Practice
Paul Gerhard: (Information and Communication Officer)


Insight Portal is an initiative of the Policy Innovation Committee (PIC). Insight.eun.org has most of the reports of this group. (http://insight.eun.org)

Insight portal: EUN Observatory for New Technologies and Education has various strands-
• Policy
o Country reports: each member produces reports on large-scale developments in the country. E.g., internet safety, teacher motivation, etc. Has a search interface. You can configure the tool to produce automated pdfs. Very popular tool with ministries of education
o Insight reports: Global reports on areas of interest- cf Use of Interactive Whiteboards.
o Policy briefs
• Interoperability: the policy and practical view
o LRE project
• School Innovation
o School galleries. Good best practice examples.
o School portraits
o ePortfolios
• Thematic dossiers
o Leadership
o Assessment and eAssessment

Additional services:
• Newsletter: Quarterly updates and eLearning news.
• myInsight: community building tool, and access to full country reports.
• RSS feeds from myInsight.
• Library of resources

Major publications
• ICT Impact Study (Dec 2006 - Copy distributed)
o Pan-European study
o Framework of the ICT cluster of the EC
o 17 impact studies across Europe
• ICT in Schools: Trends, Innovations and Issues in 2006-20067 (Jul 2007)
o 90% of teachers now use ICT in preparation of lessons.
o State and progress of ICT infrastructure and use
o Results of the impact of ICT in schools
o Examples of national policies and innovations
o Issues for schools
o Country reports


InSafe:
Sofia Aslanidou (Internet Safety Project Officer)

Has been working on the Insafe and InsafePlus (European internate safety awareness network)

This is a network of nodes (national contact points) for internet safety awareness. Established in 2004, 24 nodes, coordinated by EUN.

Multi-stakeholder approach. Generally, nodes are consortia including various types of organization such as:
• Telecommunications Companies
• Industry
• Education
• Media
• Govt agencies
• Consumer protection bodies
• NGOs

InSafe has relationships with organizations outside EU - e.g. NetAlert Australia

www.saferinternet.org
In Australia, it is now run by ACMA (Australian Communications Media Authority).

Network Cooperation:
• Steering committee - decision making organ, reps from each node; meets 4 times per year
• Training meetings - three per year, delivering training to the nodes
• Common portal at www.saferinternet.org
• Shared resources - best practice; each national group has different needs. Hence need for sharing.
• Newsletter: articles submitted by the nodes. Describe things of actual interest in countries, or by industry stakeholders
• Shared annual event: "Safer Internet Day"; Celebrated in each of the countries. It has a global presence also. 12 Feb 2008
o In 2007, 43 countries participated
o Hundreds of events, high media visibility
• Website has a library of resources, useful websites, toolkits for parents, tips on mobile phone use, etc…