About ITFM
During the ITMF project period every second municipality and every third primary and lower secondary school in Denmark have participated in educational development projects. External cooperation with researchers, training institutions, publishing houses or ICT and media experts was one of the conditions for schools as the central actor to receive grants for their projects. At the same time teachers and educators have participated in pedagogical supplementary training (Skole IT). 355 primary and secondary schools have been connected to the Internet via Sektornet paid for by the state. Moreover, Radio Denmark Education has developed a total of 35 themes, clip collections and interactive features with underlying content elements such as teachers´ guides and students´ tasks.  

Changes in Practice
The underlying rationale for ITMF was to strengthen the pedagogical use of ICT and to make ICT an active incentive for daily use in schools. The evaluation specifically looked at the changes in school practice. Important factors for the change of practice were identified as follows:

1. Pedagogy and didactics
2. Management
3. Cooperation and networks
4. Competence development
5. Personal commitment

Particularly pedagogy, didactics and management turned out to be absolutely essential to a change of practice regarding the use of ICT and media and school development in the long term. The evaluation shows under which conditions each of these points can turn out to be “real incentives”. As an example, schools that had clear common goals and common values integrated ICT and media in education sooner and easier than other schools. The assessment also showed that the creation of an innovative environment in the school by the school management with the discussion of common values is an important prerequisite for development projects.

Ambitious goals
The nine project goals were ambitious and focused on supporting learning processes with ICT. Among the aims was 1) to support reading, writing and language skills of the students, 2) strengthen students´ general ICT and media skills as well as 3) to strengthen the content of subjects, including themes, concepts and methods.  Further to this, the project should 4) support interdisciplinary work, 5) the creation of new learning methods, 6) a more inclusive school and 7) the exchange of good practice.

The outcomes of the evaluation show that these first seven goals were mostly achieved by the project. However, there the impact of ICT as a tool for the learning of central skills (reading writing arithmetic and languages) was perceived as low by a majority of teachers. “Only 31% of teachers believe that the aim of the ICT usage is to support the pupil’s writing skills, in spite of the fact that word processing is used in education by 72% of the teachers” the evaluation states.

Project aim 7) strengthening the dialogue with interested parties and 8) students´ influence on education has not been reached successfully by a lot of individual projects.

Qualitative jump
The quantitative use of ICT has hardly changed during the duration of the project, 
more so has its qualitative use. The different technologies are more widespread and the teachers have gained more pedagogical knowledge about ICT. The qualitative jump can also be seen in improved access to good ICT based educational material and concepts for the integration of ICT.

Interestingly enough more knowledge about pedagogical use of ICT is not sufficient in itself as the evaluation reveals. It shows that in some cases the reasons for selecting a technology is affected rather by the teachers´ user skills than by professional consideration (pedagogical or didactic). If teachers are not confident users of the medium itself, they tend rather not to use it in their teaching situation. Therefore, updated technical skills make an “e confident teacher” and help in the successful and didactical meaningful use of ICT.

Impact of Pedagogical ICT licence
The study also reveals aspects of the impact of the Pedagogical ICT Licence (Skole IT), a model high at stake at national and European level. Many schools have not followed up on the utilisation of the teachers´ new skills after having acquired the pedagogical ICT licence. On the other hand, impact of the pedagogical ICT licence has been the greatest where the access to technical and pedagogical ICT instruction is immediate and where there are clear goals for ICT. 

Increased priority and use of ICT
After participation in pedagogical ICT supplementary training (Skole IT) every other teacher estimates that he/she has increased the use of ICT in education to some extend. ITMF has put ICT and media in a higher perspective of the agenda of primary and lower secondary school than before. However, there is limited impact on the teachers´ participation in IT strategic decisions.  Increased use has had too little effect on the use of ICT for presentation and communication.

Problem areas
Establishing the framework for carrying out projects has been identified as not sufficient for ITFM projects. Schools have had little experience in the systematic planning, implementation and follow up of development projects. Many projects also lacked continuous involvement of the whole school or whole municipality in the dissemination of the results.

Research in connection with ITFM projects has brought with it increased research in the field, yet research related impact was not at its best due to the involvement of the researchers in the various tasks such as planning and implementing the project and less time for project evaluation. 

Focus areas for the future
The follow up of investments seem to become crucial at this stage of ICT integration in schools all over Europe to create sustainable conditions and to prevent from useless losses of acquired skills. The success of ICT based project will depend on how schools in general are experienced in this type of activity and project related working skills will become crucial in the future to fully exploit the potential new technologies can offer. Moreover, there is still some way to go to include all teachers in the process, certainly not only in Denmark. Many projects, as it was assessed, have been carried out by enthusiasts.

Despite an increased use of ICT more focus is needed on communication and collaboration activities for students. The so called “web 2.0” now offers various possibilities of active participation and collaboration by making use of social networking tools such as web logs or wikis. This, in the long term, will contribute more to the strengthening of writing skills than the use of word processing programmes.

There is still much to do in empowering people, students as well as teachers, to make their voices heard concerning strategic ICT decisions at school. Increased autonomy for teachers and students make this possible in a lot of European countries, but in reality impact on whole school development remains a difficult goal to be achieved as the Danish case shows.

Concrete tools for schools
Valuable by-products have been produced as a result of the evaluation.  Ramboll management has developed three evaluation narratives which can be used by schools on the Internet: ”Good advise on project management”, “How to develop our school” and a self assessment evaluation tool. There are also two other reports available on ITMF results (in Danish only). One report presents the 100 research projects carried out during ITMF. In another booklet the 750 web based ”ITMF stories” are illustrated, where teachers of the local ITMF projects tell their best practice story often with videos, flash animation and pupils’ products.

Evaluation of ITMF, Report in English (pdf)
http://enis.emu.dk/spredning/itmf/finalreport_itmf.pdf (English, 1,4 MB)

For a couple of ITMF projects basic information is provided in English.
http://www.itmf.dk/info/english/138.htm

ITMF project website (including evaluation tools for schools)
www.itmf.dk

ITMF research projects (in Danish)
http://enis.emu.dk/spredning/itmf/forskning.pdf (437 KB)

ITM stories (in Danish)
http://enis.emu.dk/spredning/itmf/fortaellinger.pdf (7,5 MB)