Kasavuoren koulu in Kauniainen hosted on April 16th an event titled What are good schools made of where participants had a chance to learn about experiences and research done on computer usage for education Finland. The pupils of Dream school illustrated to the visitors their view on how ICT should be used in schools. They also toured the visitors around the school to see the everyday life in schools. The finnish speaking school district in Kauniainen also presented their results on their pilot projects.
Also Opinsys attended the day to have a chance to learn. The finnish speaking schools in Kauniainen are using a computer system run by Opinsys. The system is based on Ubuntu and it consists of ltsp based thin/fat clients in class rooms, shared netbooks for pupils and personal laptops for teachers. In total there are almost 600 computers. The schools also use various web based applications that are integrated with the school’s user database and other systems. For example Moodle, wiki, video server and Google Apps are used and they all authenticate against a single server with one username and password. With the tools pupils can do realtime collaboration and the services are also available from home using the net.
The main topic of the day was the change in usage of ICT to support learning and the change that is waiting when today’s pupils enter the workforce. Old thinking about learning needs to change and as an example of that, schools are already creating videos as part of everyday learning processes. New technologies enable new possibilities, but it cannot be used to replace the teacher. New social media tools require new media reading skills, but also other skills are needed – e.g. proficiency in using social media platform does not mean that one could use a word processor efficiently.
As a summary I could say that there’s a lot that needs to be done, but a lot is already being done. It really pays off to hear what the pupils have to say about improving schools for better learning – thanks to the pupils in Kasavuori!
More information about Dream school:
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg4n66zb_169g3rq3hc7
Dream school in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8109371155
Pictures from the school:
Principal of Kasavuoren koulu Riitta Rekiranta
Minister of communications Suvi Lindén
Education counsellor Kaisa Vähähyyppä
Do diginatives really know ICT?
Research done in Turku university of applied sciences found that students master social media
BUT:
Word processing: 50% could edit margins and 11% how to indent text, etc..
46% of students could save text correctly in right place with right name
19% could add a row to a spreadsheet, 2% managed to create a bar chart, and in other functionality results were between 3-7%
There is serious lack of skills on how to use the tools!
The school uses info screens (digital signage) to broadcast information like lunch menus, course information and free-time activities.
Fat clients in computer class
Pupils use netbooks in classes
Thin clients
Recycled computers have had their noisy harddrives removed and settings changed for network booting like other thin clients.
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