Three of our teachers visited Sweden and Norway to study the developments of IKT “back home”. Here are the reports on their experiences:
from Olav Reppesgård . . .
Tablet and it’s learning tools
Tuesday and Wednesday this week the norwegian company Arena-IKT invited to a conference regarding tablets in education and what the publishers can offer for the tablets.
The conference took place in Sandefjord, Norway. Various companys and schools with different agendas were present, including a representative for Microsoft Education (Ivar Berg). He talked about how Microsoft see the use of “the cloud”, both possibilities and challenges of today.
The Norwegian school Gjennestad had several representatives talking, informing and inspiring the conference participants. Highlighted were the 
possibilities and the challenges they had experienced since they went 1:1 on iPads last August. Read more about their work here: http://ipadgjennestad.blogspot.com/
Erling Grønlund from RIKT, a company providing help with implementing tablets, SmartBoards etc in schools,talked about the importance of having a nice learning environment in a school. He meant that the learning environment is the key factor, not the ICT itself.
Brettboka was launched as a new app. This is an app trying to offer textbooks in pdf, as an alternative untill the publishers have developed a platform with the tablet technology integrated.
from Christina Newport and Mikael Sundholm . . .
Learnit 24 organized a network meeting at Väsby Nya Gymnasium, a newly built school in Sweden adapted to one-one teaching. Mikael and I joined interesting lectures and discussions which were focused on pedagogical use of IT in the classroom and implementation discussions.
Maria Ågren, Ulrika Zakrisson & Daniel Johansson (Väsby Nya Gymnasium) spoke about ”Pedagogical Work where IT supports learning”. We normally hear about projects based on the more theoretical subjects, but this project “I in 2035” included Sports amongst other subjects. The students introduced different training methods by making ICT-presentations including short films showing exercises. Moviemaker was used to plan music for Sports and lessons were filmed to help the teacher evaluate the students.
Kajsa Bernhardsson (Hammarbyskolan grundskola) ”OneNote for the younger years”. Younger students can be coached and assessed by the teacher on an individual basis and learn very quickly how to written and oral work on OneNote. The challenge is to teach the learners to share their learning with others. Questions were asked about how to protect learners who find it difficult to share on an open platform, but there are different ways you can password protect their work if necessary.
Mick Hellgren (Älvboda friskola, grundskola) spoke ”Answergarden och Polleverywhere” which are two programs which can be used in the classroom for instant feedback. Both programs are already being used at SSB.
Kara Barker & Roger Lister (Viktor Rydberg gymnasium) introduced ”Forensic Science” as an in-depth Natural Science course. After spending a week with the Detroit police department they came back to their school with lots of knowledge and ideas! Individual work and lab work was mixed during the observation of pig’s hearts deteriorating in different environments as two examples of working methods. Filming was used to follow up on the pig’s heart development! A great example of how to make learning “real” to the students and very inspiring to hear about. Using http://quizstar.4teachers.org/ to evaluate the student’s learning helps the teachers to keep track on whether all students are up to speed during the course. Kara Barker & Roger Lister were named most innovative teachers 2011 by Lärarnas Riksförbund
It wa
s a very inspiring day which ended in discussion groups about how to go forward in the implementation work with IT in the classroom. It is not a matter of if IT has a place in our schools but more how it helps us as teachers or students in our learning process.
SSBs tech team of teachers continue to study how to best utilize IKT in learning . . . school visits, best practice workshops, and individual coaching are some of the methods we are using to ready our school for a 1-to-1 learning environment starting 2012-2103.
Today was a day full of focused work. Our teachers worked with evaluating Period IV and planning Period V. After a series of informal meetings and individual planning sessions, we all came 
together to share our experiences from our Period IV tech projects.
Every class, every age are working with technology in an effective way.
, for example MUSIC or PRAO.
Becoming a school where every student has a laptop as a tool demands that teachers always consider which method is the most effective way to learning . . . our teachers value real and relevant learning – we shared good examples today.
