European Schools Project

The Slovenian report

I have run some ESP projects that involved ICT in Slovenia and internationally. Let me mention just a few of them. There is my project My favourite toy that has been a meeting place for different schools allover the world, also Japan. It's a small, but effective project for younger students, where they can start their first collaboration with other young students all over the world. The topic is Toys, names, songs. (http://www2.arnes.si/~osngso3s/mytoys/my_toys.htm).

 Then there is also traditional Art gallery that has become also a Spring day project with every year topic and symbolic awards. (http://www2.arnes.si/~osngso7/index.htm)

Than I have to mention our portal for The image of the other project which I promote in my country and also use it with my students regularly. Last but not least we run a Comenius 1 project for schools Art through child's eyes and a PC mouse (http://www.ecolenet.nl/artproject/) an ECOLE initiative with 7 European countries involved with cross curricula art for primary school. There are of course also many short projects that happen once in a while at our schools.

ESP Association?

I think that it's high time now to start ESP association after so many productive years of our work and with such useful experience. It will bring our collaboration a new perspective in future.

Collaborative eduprojects

In Slovenia we try to present all possible projects (iEARN, ESP; KIDLINK...) through our special organisation MIRK that has its own annual international conference based on ICT and project work in educational process. Schools do participate in projects of different kind. Schools are involved in successful Comenius three year projects, ESP projects (The image, Christmas traditions, Art gallery, My favourite toy…), iEARN projects (Learning circles, ENO…) KIDLINK (Draw me your story, Proverbs, Who am I…) and other projects covering different topics and school subjects. We still lack more quality projects where we could build collaboration and cooperation, cultural exchange and language learning. Language is a problem in many cases.

National ICT strategy in education

International dimension has been integrated in our national curricula and schools also imbedded it into the schools educational plans. But we can’t say that it is practiced generally everywhere. I believe it will be the case in future.

Our country introduced a special program called computer literacy in the past and it helped a lot to promote the use of ICT in education and to train teachers to use it in educational process. Now we have to put it into life in our everyday work, which is not very easy as ICT takes time and teachers have to be trained. I believe that distance education and teacher training through the use of ICT will improve the situation in future.

In my opinion the willingness for computer-mediated collaborative learning comes in waves and differs according the situation in education. Recently we use different e-environments with internet tools for projects of different kind (open source, or environments developed by our university), but we can say that this is not spread enough. We still have to work on this topic.

I can say that many changes have been done at our schools on all levels. Students have opportunities to be in touch with their mates all over the world, teachers try to promote their ideas and exchange them with teachers abroad. This is a quality process that could be seen in most of our schools due to both better equipment and computer skills.

Viljenka Savli