Living Schools Lab

33 teachers and head teachers from 12 European countries took part in the first Living Schools Lab workshop in Brussels last week. The workshop (17-18 Jan 2013) was the first one organised by the project and aimed at the Advanced Schools (AS) teachers.

During the two-day workshop, the teachers find out about each others' best practices and discussed on what makes a good school, how to create an active community of teachers for the project and how to contribute to a good network.

One of the teachers told afterwards: "I've met very interesting people and have seen marvellous projects. It was really innovative and inspired me a lot." The LSL team looks forward for the next workshops!

The creation of the LSL school network has started! In the first stage, the project partners have selected a total of 24 so called Advanced Schools (AS). The Advanced Schools are defined as schools where technology is embedded in teaching and learning across the whole school.

This group of Advanced Schools (AS) from across Europe will help to build a network of schools where the schools and teachers can learn from each other and that helps practitioners in less advanced schools to develop strategies so that they too can embed innovative use of ICT across their school.

In the second phase, the network will be expanded with Advanced Practitioner Schools (AP) that will benefit from the examples given the Advanced Schools. Advanced Practitioner Schools are those where technology is embedded in ‘pockets’, with maybe only one or two practitioners making innovative use of ICT within the school, but the whole school approach is still underdeveloped.

The selection of the Advanced Practitioner Schools (AP) will take place in Jan-Feb 2013.

To read more about the LSL school network, click here.

The kick-off meeting of the new EC-funded Living Schools Lab project took place on 3 October at Brussels. All the project partners were represented in this initial meeting. See the list of the project partners here.

The participants discussed in groups on various topics regarding the project planning and implementation:

• School selection
• School audit
• Best practice examples
• School protocol
• Project partners role

In the picture the project manager Dorothy Cassells leads one of the  group discussions.