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Poskole 2007 International ICT Conference

April 25th to 27th 2007
Lazne Sedmihorky, Czech Republic

Report

Poskole is now the leading ICT conference for teachers, teacher trainers, and academics in Eastern Europe. Organised this year by Dr. Mirka Cernochova, (below, far right) from the Charles University, in Prague and by Professor Ivan Kalas, from the Comenius University, Bratislava, it celebrated its 15th anniversary this April with the widest and highest quality of academic papers and workshops ever presented. Below are some of the Poskole 2007 team, with international visitors from the UK, including Hanse Põldoji from Estonia (in black.) See: http://poskole.org/2007

The Poskole Team (Susan and Lawrence Williams in the centre)
The Poskole Team (Susan and Lawrence Williams fourth and third from the right)

MirandaNet was represented at the conference by Susan and Lawrence Williams, (centre) who jointly gave the Keynote presentation on the international day, Friday 27th April. The subject, which was very warmly received, was the new UK-China collaboration between the two MirandaNet schools, Raynes Park High and Holy Cross, both London comprehensives, working with Chinese schools and colleges in Beijing.

Susan began the proceedings with an account of the latest UK government initiative for schools: Enterprise. She explained how schools were being challenged to create new curriculum resources and lesson plans, in order to deliver new skills which would support their understanding of business and enterprise concepts. Susan then explained how she was able to deliver this through her English lessons at Raynes Park. As part of her presentation, she showed the web pages on MirandaNet which document some teacher training aspects of this project. (See the section on Teacher Training.)

She also showed an example of PowerPoint work about Enterprise, by one of her own Year 8 students, (below left) which had been sent, with English voice-over, to Beijing School Number 27.

In return, Beijing School Number 27 sent similar PowerPoint presentations (right) about their own school to London, for comparison. Instantaneous conference translation into Czech was ably carried out, as usual, by David Ulbrich, (far right), now an old friend.

Susan and Raynes Park High School
Susan and Raynes Park High School

Susan and School No 27
Susan and School No 27

The next step for these two collaborating schools will be to widen the project to include bi-lingual work on some further aspect of Business Studies and Enterprise.

This Keynote introduction was followed by Lawrence’s own presentation, which outlined the new UK-China collaboration between the two London schools and the Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences (BAES). On screen is the stunning “logo” for the Learning-Together web site in Beijing. Apart from the BAES web site, these lovely lions, (from Trafalgar Square and the Emperor’s Summer Palace), now grace many web pages on MirandaNet, on the Holy Cross School site, and on the Specialist Schools and Academies’ Trust web sites.

Lawrence and Susan and the Lions
Lawrence and Susan and the Lions

(See the section on Why and how)

BAES is developing a stunning new website to support this collaboration. (See: www.learning-together.net where you will find the students’ learning outcomes of the projects.)

Lawrence (a Poskole committee member) then explained the new on-line UK-China community that he is creating, as outlined below.

To summarise, broadly:

These sites are hyperlinked to provide an on-line community of teachers and teacher trainers, giving easy access to the UK-London Learning Together Project from many different starting points, both in the UK and in China.

Finally, the “Science Through Arts” Project, (STAR) whose web site was decommissioned by NASA in January 2007, following draconian Federal budget cuts, has been reborn in Taiwan province.

Lawrence and Taiwan
Lawrence and Taiwan

Taichung First Senior High School has energetically adopted STAR by creating a new on-line resource, in collaboration with Holy Cross. See: web.tcfsh.tc.edu.tw/england This new initiative resulted from the visit to Holy Cross by a ministerial-level delegation, hosted by the British Council, in December 2006. The revised Holy Cross/ NASA/ Taichung/ STAR project also formed part of Lawrence’s presentation.

On the screen above is the MirandaNet report on Taichung FSHS’s excellent work, with a live link from MirandaNet to the new Taiwan STAR web site. This is a rapidly developing collaboration between MirandaNet, Holy Cross and a very fine Taiwanese secondary school. A range of new Holy Cross/Taichung FSHS projects is currently under development, and will no doubt be shared with Poskole delegates in the future.

All in all, Poskole 2007 was a very successful conference.

Conference data, supplied by Dr Mirka Cernochova, Pedagogical Faculty, the Charles University in Prague

The POSKOLE Conference has accreditation by the Ministry of Education, as a part of training courses for teachers’ professional development. It is not only the National Conference: it is more than a conference, with a wide range of practical Workshops. It offers the opportunity for teachers to learn from others, to contribute, to share their ideas and knowledge with others. Each active participant obtains a certificate for their participation in a workshop, for lecturing, for leading a workshop, or for the presentation of an academic paper.

The POSKOLE 2007 Conference has been newly organised to share ideas and experiences, and to support an active approach for participants. We decided to organise POSKOLE as morning paper presentations, and afternoon workshops, in 4 computer rooms.

Participants:

93 participants from Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, United Kingdom, Estonia and Australia

Papers:

The papers were prepared by their authors and were of a high quality. We divided them in the Proceedings into these sections:

  1. Research in Information Education
  2. Informatics, robotics
  3. Projects in schools
  4. SW applications
  5. WWW sources
  6. ICT in school subjects
  7. E-learning in education
  8. Teacher education

Workshops:

All the workshops were prepared by teachers from Primary or Secondary schools and by the university teachers. The workshops were dedicated to:

  1. ICT in curriculum of Czech schools, ICT in teacher profession,
  2. skill development in using SW applications (video production, CABRI 3D,
    Cinema 4D, Macromedia Flash, etc.)
  3. e-learning platforms and learning objects repository (Moodle, CALIBRATE,
  4. pedagogical mastery (how to design good tests)
  5. methodology of programming (Imagine, Design Patterns First,
  6. remote laboratory in school practice
  7. ICT in language education (Czech, English) - one was managed by James Thomas from Australia - Using the British National Corpus when correcting students’ English
  8. pedagogical and methodological mastery (concept maps)
  9. applications of computers in experiments in Physics, Chemistry (ISES, Coach),
  10. Web 2.0 in education

The teachers prepared 33 workshops - it was very difficult to put all in the programme: we finally chose 28. All of them were very interesting.

Beijing - London Learning Together

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