Living Schools Lab

Regional Hubs are clusters to share good practices, and provide opportunities for closer mentoring and collaboration between schools. In the Living Schools Lab project (EC-FP7 2012-2014) regional hubs created a successful model for developing a mentoring and collaboration relationship between schools at a national and regional level. In the project, the hubs were facilitated by National Coordinators, who coordinated the meetings and were able to add a wider perspective and network of contacts to the benefit of the hubs.

See here the video of six steps on how to set up your own regional hub!

A two-day Italian Summer School of the Living Schools Lab project organised by Indire took place on 13-14 September 2014 at Majorana School in Brindisi. Several LSL teachers took part to the event to discuss and learn innovative teaching methodologies.

The Summer School included introductions, lessons and laboratorial activities organized and made by Majorana’s teachers. Daniela DiGiuseppe spoke about innovative teaching methodologies for using new learning environments, the Future Classroom. Rosa Palmizio discussed about collaborative learning in icloud. Maria Rosaria Serio showed how a teacher can use 1:1 scheme to help a dyslexic. Maurizio Verrienti spoke about interactive technologies and he showed 3D interactive learning objects used at Majorana School. Beatrice Vinjau spoke about the digital content importance for new methodologies showing their iBooks written by teachers. Workshop activities included 1:1 tablets, collaborative learning using tablets, how to create iBooks and interactive texts.

School principals heading innovative schools from across 14 different countries in Europe participated in a two-day workshop organised by European Schoolnet on 3-4 July to discuss the issue of mainstreaming technology across schools. The group represented schools involved in the iTEC and Living Schools Lab (LSL) projects. Both these projects are about mainstreaming innovative pedagogical practice facilitated by technology, across the whole school.

Watch here their ideas on how the best practices could be scaled up in schools across Europe. 

School principals heading innovative schools from across 14 different countries in Europe participated in a two-day workshop organised by European Schoolnet on 3-4 July to discuss the issue of mainstreaming technology across schools. The group represented schools involved in the iTEC and Living Schools Lab (LSL) projects. Both these projects are about mainstreaming innovative pedagogical practice facilitated by technology, across the whole school.

Over the two days, the group worked together to share practice from their own schools, discussed working with industry with the Future Classroom Lab partners, and explored a range of different outputs to help schools with mainstreaming.  

These included:

• the European Schoolnet Teacher Academy Future Classroom Scenarios course  - a free online professional development course. The registration for the second edition starting on 28 July is now open;
• the Future Classroom Toolkit - Enabling school leaders, education policy makers, teachers and ICT suppliers to create and implement Future Classroom Scenarios which provide a clear vision of innovative teaching and learning practices. The FC Toolkit will be available on the FCL website; and
• the Collaborative School Development course which is being developed by Diana Bannister MBE Development Director for Learning Technologies, University of Wolverhampton, following her observation visits to advanced schools across Europe. 

One of the workshop participants commented: "This is the first time I took part in a workshop that was addressed both for ındustry representatives and head masters from different countries. It provided a different view and we had the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences."

Living Schools Lab will organise more Learning Snacks after the summer break. A total of six new online webinars have been scheduled for September. The webinars are open to all those interested and signing up is easy through a web form. The snacks will be a great way to kick off a new school year with new ideas!  

• LSL schools' ICT audit 2014, 9 September 2014: Roger Blamire (Senior Manager, Policy and Practice at European Schoolnet) will present some of the key findings from surveys completed recently by principals and teachers in the Living Schools Lab project.
   
• Mindcrawler - EEG controls Lego robots, 15 September 2014: Hermann Morgenbesser, from Klosterneuburg International School (Austria) will show the basics of the interaction between brain and robots using an EEG interface. A Lego robot (NXT) will be remotely present and controlled by EEG using the Internet.
   
• LSL whole school recommendations, 19 and 30 September 2014: Diana Bannister, from the University of Wolverhampton (UK) will present some of the key findings from the research in the LSL project which have led to these recommendations, targeted to both school and system levels. The webinar on 30 September will have a particular focus for Head Teachers.
   
• Rethinking teaching and learning with 21st Century Skills, 22 September 2014: Maria Teresa Godinho, from the Eça de Queirós secondary school in Lisbon (Portugal) will introduce some of the key concepts of 21st century skills and show some of the work developed with her students. 
   
• Introducing the CPD course for school leaders, 23 September 2014: Diana Bannister, from the University of Wolverhampton (UK) will present the course developed within the Living Schools Lab project. The course on collaborative school development is targeted to school leaders, head teachers, ICT coordinators, lead teachers, etc. 
   
• LSL Validation service, 10 October 2014: In order to support research projects and ICT suppliers in overcoming the challenges of working with schools, Living Schools Lab has made research on validation processes and best practices. Jim Ayre (Senior Advisor, European Schoolnet) will run this webinar, which will be linked to the publication of the Validation Manual. 

The 10th interview of the Future Classroom Lab series has been published. In this great interview Anne Looney, the CEO of Ireland's National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, speaks to us about innovation in school, student engagement and national digital learning strategy.

The interview was filmed during the Living Schools Lab summer school in Dublin, May 2014. Anne Looney's presentation at the event is available here.

Diana Bannister, University of Wolverhampton, has gathered evidence of innovative practice in classrooms across Europe through observations visits, workshops, interviews and research. In this interview, she explains what the Living Schools Lab project is about and how it is supporting European schools in facing the main challenges and opportunities of embedding ICT into teaching and learning.

Running pan-European school pilots where teachers and pupils evaluate new technologies can be both extremely challenging and expensive. In order to support research projects and ICT suppliers in overcoming the challenges of working with schools, Living Schools Lab organised a workshop on “How to run school validations across Europe”. The workshop offered an overview of European Schoolnet's procedures and methodologies of organising pilots in a range of projects, some covering more than 2500 schools across Europe. Key questions on how to coordinate and motivate teachers were explored as well as a range of methodological approaches addressed. At the end of the workshop the participants had the opportunity to develop a validation framework for two different scenarios, providing them with a hands-on feel of how to organize a school validation across schools in Europe.

For more information about the workshop take a look at the workshop presentations and documents here.

During the LSL Summer School the teachers were challenged to provide advice to other schools and teachers on different topics on ICT for learning. The presentations from this exercise "Can you investigate?" are now here available.