This special event took place at a time of change in education and also at EUN with new leadership in place and the need to identify the priorities for the years ahead and new ways of working with our stakeholders. What was asked of participants was to look back on the successes and failures in ICT in schools in the last ten years, identify challenges for the next ten years and debate how to make the future happen.

Ten years after its launch, European Schoolnet is now “Europe’s largest pedagogical service provider” in the words of one presenter; but how to ensure that EUN provides added value to ministries of education to support new priorities, how to respond to new programmes from the European Commission and how industry and the public sector can create synergy to ensure schools take advantage of technological opportunities?

To answer these questions and draw a roadmap for the next ten years, the EUN Round Table was organised. Two surveys, for schools and policy-makers, were conducted before the event in order to obtain a snapshot of current views and visions of the future of schooling.

Opening the meeting in a video address, Jan Figel’, European Commissioner for Education, Culture and Multilingualism said “[…] the conference topics [imagining the future of schooling] are in line with our own concerns regarding the use of ICT in schools […] this is the right time to assess the impact of ICT, identify trend and challenges and promote positive innovation, together we can make sure that the technology fulfils its potential and help us modernise Europe’s education and training systems. ”

The event was split in three different Round Tables where participants had the opportunity to discuss issues in small groups following short presentations from panellists. The three roundtables dealt with: Education policy trends and challenges; Digital learning resources and Technology enablers. After the group discussions, the audience prepared questions to ask panellists and gave feedback to conference organisers using a chatroom and on paper.

Round Tables
Round table 1: Education policy trends and challenges
The first roundtable dealing with educational policy was chaired by Conor Galvin, Policy Researcher at the University College Dublin. Five other experts from ministries of education, industry and the European Commission made up the panel. Following short presentation from the panel, participants could ask questions to the panel of expert.

Lilla Voss, Chief Adviser in Danish Ministry of Education spoke about the initiatives such like ICT Pedagogical Driving license, a successful model that has been transferred to many other countries. In 2016, Denmark predicts that ICT will be embedded everywhere. Schools, however, still remain a key element in the society, sort of a focus on formal and informal activities. Majority of lessons will be one teachers/ one class/ one subject, but combined with group based /cross-curricular/ project oriented work and a group of teachers in collaboration. Also, special needs education will be dramatically changed.

The Estonian representative Enel Mägi, Chief Executive from Tiger Leap Foundation, underlined the issue of integrating the ongoing research into the policy-agenda emphasising the on-going in-service training of teachers and school heads.

The suppliers' side was represented by Nancy L. Knowlton from Smart Technologies Inc., Canada and Todd Korth from Sun Microsystems Inc. Ms. Knowlton urged direct conversations between the two, urging schools to tell their problems to industry so that they could better understand their processes and help them within.

Mr. Korth talked about the road towards the digital schools with 24/7 reliable availability of applications and services for schools, students and parents alike. The involvement of all stakeholders from the beginning on is a critical success factor to achieve that, and to identify clear goals and objectives. In an interview he also suggested possible new directions for EUN to bring it closer to the industry world such as “creating a ‘sandbox environment’ within EUN that would allow, building some ICT infrastructure central to European Schoolnet and connected to similar structures in ministries to start testing new ICT environment such as for instance building some mobile content which will be served to mobile devices.”

Lastly, Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz, Head of Unit A4, "Innovation and transversal policies" from the European Commission gave the Commission vision on ICT in European schools. She hailed high the number of interesting and innovative European projects within the school sector, however, the lack of innovative digital contents and services, that are not widely available as they need to be and the potential of ICT for transformation and change in education, are yet to be proven. She sees the coming period as a time for systematic actions and leadership focusing on a few strategic areas, such as where we know that ICT clearly adds value, where ICT is clearly needed and where ICT has a clear European asset.

Giving the key points of the first Round Table, Conor Galvin, the chair, described how ICT has moved off the stage in policy making, what is now needed is to find ways of  repositioning ICT at the centre of policy. One way is to focus on the digital divide; another is the research efforts showing impacting evidence. This was echoed in Jan Figel’s address to the assembly who said “… there is a room for research in order to effectively inform pedagogical practice and contribute to policy development.”

To the question of where is the future, the first round table chair answered in content rich media, convergence, public-private partnerships. In terms of technology, Todd Korth from SUN Microsystems indicated that the trend is to move towards the use of web-based services to cut on energy cost while we see the interest in thin client services more content delivered to mobile clients.

The school experience is not moving as rapidly as we hoped it would, schools still look like the school of today European Schoolnet can be a central player in disseminating best and effective use of ICT at school.

Round table 2: Digital Learning Resources
The second Round Table on Digital learning resources was chaired by Ferry de Rijcke from the Dutch Inspectorate of Education. The Round Table started with a presentation from Jim Ayre, of Multimedia Ventures Europe, who talked about learning from the past, and how the ideas of read/write web were already talked about years ago. However now we see materialise some of the visions of a social web. We hear more and more about social tagging, social search, social networking and user generated and shared content. What sort of "personalised" learning /content do we want in schools, and is this the right vision for schools? In order to find answers to these questions and to ask more, EUN will be testing these ideas in a newly launched project called MELT.

The first panellist was João Correia de Freitas from Ministry of Education, Portugal. He leaped 10 years back to talk about the Portuguese approach and talked about today's challenges. On the agenda in Portugal for the future is the promotion of educational digital content’s creation by school, as well as wide collaboration with open sources software and content.

Following was Vanessa Pittard, Director of Evidence and Evaluation in Becta, UK, who is now turning into thinking more about a content strategy development as an overall vision. She presented an Education Reform Model (by the UK’s Department for Education and Skills). Things like motivations and capacities need to be understood to translate them into a strategy that leads to a fulfilment of a vision. Flexible curriculum design and technological content standards are, for example, some of the important issues at stake.

In an interview during the event, Doug Brown from the UK department for Education and skills said that “there has been a considerable investment in the last ten years in terms of infrastructure. Now we have to ask questions about what should be happening in the classroom. There are more questions to ask now than we knew ten years ago”. These questions, he said, included how to extend learning beyond school day and how to deal with a technology rich world where young people are using technology for personal communication but could also use it as a tool for learning. “We need to ask questions in the next ten years of how to tap into this potential that we have not yet fully unlocked,” he said.

An industry representative, Mikko Laine from a Finnish publisher Sanoma WSOY, gave his perspective, which relies heavily on local support and management for schools. The advantage of good quality content can only be harnessed if ICT is embedded into everyday use of teachers and pupils. However, school organisation issues remain a challenge that could hinder schools from following on what many pupils already could do with new technologies.

Carlos Oliviera represented the European Commission DG Information Society. He emphasised that in the case of learning resources, more focus should be put on processes that could be enabled by the use of ICT. More emphasis should be put on content creation and use, better understanding of learner, learning context and social processes.

Giving the conclusions of the second round table, Ferry de Rijcke highlighted the tension between policy initiative and school level. Schools seem to ignore top down influence unless they enable and empower them, which is why EUN should involve teachers in all activities, including research. EUN should make visible the good impact of changes to show the benefits of ICT and address scepticism of innovation at schools. Finally the chair mentioned that EUN has relevant activities but more efforts are needed to connect and bring them together. This would make them more profitable to each other.

Round Table 3: Technology enablers
On Friday 8 December, the third and final round table ‘Round Table 3: Technology enablers’ was chaired by Prof. Erik Duval from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL).

Frans van Assche, Senior manager for interoperability in EUN introduced the round table by looking at different kinds of interactions that take place between teacher, learning resource and co-learners in the virtual world. Frans predicts that the slow evolvement of virtual worlds, web-experiments and e-teacher will continue into 2016. He foresees that the old and new will co-exist in the upcoming ten years.

The first panellist was Martina Roth from Intel EMEA Education, who talked about technological trends and consequences for education with the title "The World Ahead...starts here".

Annie Mullins from Vodafone Global Product and Content Services,  talked about the use of mobiles in supporting education. She asked what does the access to the Internet and other networks mean for children? From the adults perspective, it is usually connected to fears regarding the safety, as phones are not primarily designed for children and young children. Adults feel rather unsure about the introduction of social networking tools. However, interesting things are coming out such as the use of podcasting, for example. 

The two educational ministries were represented by Belgium Flemish Community and the Kennisnet from the Netherlands. Jan de Craemer, from Ministry of Education of the Flemish Community, talked about the visions on technology, how there are two main groups: the technological determinism and social constructivists. He sees the middle way between the two as important for education. 

Keimpe de Heer from Kennisnet Ict op School Foundation, the Netherlands, talked about how education should adapt with technological changes and the new world that the learners are living in. Mr. de Heer showed a little animation about how "Web 2.0" could be used to support learning.

Prof. Erik Duval as the chair of the Round Table 3, questioned provocatively ‘Does formal learning even have a future?’

Preliminary reflections on the three round tables were offered by the three chairs in a final plenary session, followed by responses from ministries of education, industry and a school of tomorrow that already exists.

Kevin Johnson (Cisco) argued that another driver for change is the need for more productivity in our economy.  ICT is a great enabler, not just for helping engage learners, but also for removing delays and burdens.  Employers need employees to know this, hence the onus on schooling systems as employers themselves, and also to ensure future employees (students) see it as such in their daily lives.  Children already expect this in their home lives and technology progress makes many things possible. Key to success is focus and expectations.  Focus on outcomes not inputs, on achieving compelling goals, not "solutions looking for problems". We should broaden our thinking, he said: enable practitioners, learners and the business of education.  To do this, connect and collaborate: people, resources and thinking.  Set high expectations, as all high-performing enterprises do: “Ensure ICT enablers just work, like water and electricity.  Help people collaborate: give them the tools to do their jobs well”. He described how industry can help, as suppliers, as employers and as connected enterprises with insights to learn from.

Doug Brown (Department for Education and Skills, UK) said that the real message is that it is about learning and about our future: “It is not about technology but about learning.” Those who want no change in the system tend to be those who succeeded through or despite it; ICT can do very little for a model of education which is about transfer of history, values and knowledge. The system needs to change for those with no power, for whom education has no relevance, and there is an economic argument for improving schooling. Even at one computer to five pupils, ICT does not impact on more than 15% of the mainstream curriculum; such a ratio gives a maximum of two hours a week per pupil for learning and so it is not surprising that impact is still low. Sharing experiences in embedding ICT across Europe should be a priority for EUN, particularly those related to leadership, games and home teaching.

Daniel Weiler of the Luxembourg ministry of education first wished EUN happy birthday on approaching its tenth year of existence and showed some slides from a conference ten years ago on ICT in schools, asking pertinently, “Where is the change? The questions are the same as in 1996.” Enduring factors are the school environment, the learning process and people. Students say school is important to their success but they say it is only partially meeting their needs. He concluded by outlining the technologies in use in 20 years’ time at different ages and said that in schools of the future learning is relevant, federating content, curricula and tools and learning is continuous, not depending on time and place.

Richard Galvin of the European School, Mol (Belgium) spoke with a background of a silent video made by young people highlighting ICT use in his school. In primary classes we saw the blend between traditional with hi-tech (very young pupils handwriting on a tablet PC), a classroom management system linking home and school, mixed age teaching (primary Y3-5 together), the changed teacher’s role (providing a learning context, a content assembler and sharer with other teachers, managing the learning for three groups at once). In secondary classes we saw a teacher creating and using resources in a way he could not before, a traditional model of schooling but using technology to squeeze as much as possible out of it, datalogging in science where technology makes the traditional experience in the lab better, using video-conferencing to provide home language teaching (a Portuguese teacher with students in different countries, a good language teacher using technology as she wants). Concluding Richard said, "This is the first phase of technology in schools. The next phase is driving forward more fundamental change. This is a challenge for EUN and us all.”

Concluding the conference Marc Durando, European Schoolnet’s newly appointed Executive Director, stressed the importance of strengthening the three strands of work of European Schoolnet: School networking; Policy and practice; and Interoperability/content exchange. More emphasis should be put on European added value, trans-national peer learning as well as experimentation, good practice and comparative work. The work of European Schoolnet, he said, should be "providing a platform for analysis, exchange and experimentation within a multi-level partnership with ministries of education, the IT industry and suppliers and the European Commission."

Odile de Chalendar, Chair of European Schoolnet closed the event by stressing that to be successful, education systems should get the mix right between the policy and the teacher in the school. She concluded by quoting former president of the European Commission and prominent French politician Jacques Delors: "Young people are already there but we need to provide the right environment for them to understand who they are and what they want to become".

Additionally the event featured an exhibition where participants could see demonstrations of innovative teaching and learning technologies such as interactive whiteboards and companies presenting their latest resources for schools. Exhibitors included Young Digital Planet, Promethean SAS, Maths for More, Vanerum International, and European Schoolnet.

Presentations, photos, interviews and conference reports have been posted on the Round Table Blog at http://roundtable.eun.org/blog. EUN gratefully acknowledges the support of the Danish ministry of education and Vanerum International in making the Round Table possible.

Donwload preliminary report: [pdf]
Round Table portal: http://roundtable.eun.org
Round Table Blog: http://roundtable.eun.org/blog