Schoolnet – Content development, framework development and further training for teachers

The Sulinet Express Program is a governmental initiation, which was launched in 1996. The year 2003 was a milestone in the Program‘s life. Until 2003 the main goals were to provide the schools with Internet connection and computer labs, to help the teachers through a portal with structured extra teaching materials, to organize trainings for teachers and camps for students, teachers and system administrators and to announce calls for applications. In 2003 – besides the traditional activities – new challenges appeared within the frame of the Program.

We entered the Age of Digital Teaching Aids with a national software development project launched this year. It makes high quality digital teaching aids freely available for both students and teachers. We hope to establish an internationally unique Digital Knowledge Base that covers the whole of our secondary curriculum. Expandable and reusable multimedia and interactive tools in this pool incorporates all areas of learning.

According to the governmental initiation our staff started to work on massive content development, referred as Sulinet Digital Knowledge Base. The aim of this development is to create a digital curriculum that covers the national core curriculum of levels 7–12, secondary school, – in two years‘ time. Content development takes place by calls.

Schoolnet Digital Base of Knowledge, completed in September 2004, contains digitalized teaching materials for classes 7–12, examples, animation, demonstration films, supplementary data bases, background information, methodological assistance, lecture drafts, opportunity for individual editing and content forming and forum, chat, collaborative opportunities. We didn‘t aim to create digital books, but we wanted to change the ratio between the text and the illustrations through building in interactive and multi-media based tools into the curriculum.

Instructor can use SDT for utilization of prepared, team or individually developed output in class, for consultation or restructuring of a subject and for cooperative work in class or project task. SDT also supports students by individual, collaborative, cooperative learning, it offers a background for preparation (home essay, presentation) and content development individually or in cooperation. It is also very important to provide the teachers with information about the usage of the digital teaching materials. For that reason we organize trainings for teachers, which are based on the results of a recent research of ours that detected the needs. Schoolnet provided ICT training for 10 000 teachers in the spring of 2004 and ICT training for 30 000 teachers between 2004 and 2006.

During these in-service trainings teachers learn how to integrate ICT into subject teaching. Our colleagues work together with ICT experts on the development of different modules, which teachers can take. This progress is also supported by the state. The modular training allows flexibility and free choice. In Hungary the methods that are being used are mainly Prussian, frontal or instructional. Therefore there is a need for shift in paradigm, the Constructivist Pedagogy should be supported. This covers for example TIP-TAP instructions (ideas for teachers and students) within the digital learning materials and in- built tools of the VLE. We want to teach teachers as they are expected to teach.

Source: http://www.sulinet.hu