By the end of the year, a call for tenders will be announced for schools to participate in the second phase of the €140 million project
Croatian Academic and Research Network - CARNet presented the progress of implementation of the pilot project "e-Schools: Establishing a System for Developing Digitally Mature Schools." The presentation was attended by Minister of Science and Education, Ms Blaženka Divjak, Politika plus reported on June 10.
85 percent of the funds for the HRK 307 million pilot project has been withdrawn from the European Union's Structural Funds. It was presented earlier today by the project's manager and CARNet deputy CEO, Ms Andrijana Prskalo Maček.
Thanks to the pilot project, 151 schools in Croatia will be ready to apply a more modern teaching system in autumn, filled with new content and possibilities, Ms Prskalo Maček announced.
When students go back to school in autumn, their classrooms will be equipped with computers and teachers will be using computers and tablets they were provided with as part of the project. They will also receive digital educational content and numerous teaching scenarios for teaching natural sciences - biology, physics, chemistry - but also maths for grades 7 and 8 of primary school and grades 1 and 2 of secondary schools.
The schools participating in the pilot projects will be equipped with two types of classrooms - presentation and interactive. Presentation classrooms will be equipped with a PC, touch screen monitor, and speakers, while interactive classrooms will be equipped with presentation equipment, plus 30 additional tablets.
"So far, we have done training with about 20,000 teachers through more than 900 workshops and fifteen webinars and courses," Ms Prskalo Maček said, adding that their mobile teams provide continuous professional and advisory support to the schools involved in the pilot project.
She added that test modules are currently being prepared for digital educational content that will enable teachers and students to access and browse them through Edutorij, a repository of digital educational content, where publishers and teachers will be able to post their own digital teaching materials.
The remaining e-Services, such as systems for business informatization, classroom management, and learning analytics, as well as CARNet organisation, will be completed during the new school year.
Public procurement for e-Lektira (e-Book report) services is also underway, and the service will also be available through Edutorij, and will include complete works by Croatian and foreign writers from reading lists for primary and secondary schools.
Ms Prskalo Maček said that 170 of the project's 240 scenarios for teaching natural sciences and mathematics have been drafted so far. Their design and implementation will be accompanied by the e-Laboratory containing tool and application recommendations that teachers will be able to integrate into the learning and teaching process.
Opening five regional educational centres in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek and Varaždin was also announced. Each of these centres will be equipped with 30 laptops, 30 tablets, a computer for the teacher, a monitor, a video conferencing system and a classroom management system.
The e-Schools project is part of a wider e-schools programme, and it is important to differentiate these two.
The e-Schools programme is carried out through several projects aimed at introducing ICT into the school system in the 2015-2022 period. The e-Schools programme consists of the pilot project, which will be implemented in the 2015-2018 period and the major project, which will be implemented in the 2019-2022 period based on the results of the pilot project.
The full name of the entire programme is “e-Schools: a comprehensive informatization of school operation processes and teaching processes aimed at the creation of digitally mature schools for the 21st century”.
The specific objective of the e-Schools pilot project is to pilot organizational, technological and educational concepts of introducing ICT in the educational and operational processes in selected schools during two school years and to develop, based on the experience of the pilot project, a strategy for the implementation of a system of digitally mature schools in the entire primary and secondary education system in the Republic of Croatia, that is for the application in the major project (2019-2022). (www.e-skole.hr)
