Twinning, or 21st century skills in Kosovo

My first week in Prishtina in the Twinning Kosovo project is now completed.

I was to identify and assess current models and practices for sharing experiences on teaching, and to recommend how to develop them in the context of the new Kosovo Curriculum Framework.

On Monday evening I wasn't expecting a lot from this week, but right from Tuesday morning the days have exceeded all my expectations. Visiting and assessing four schools, attending a Kosovo Pedagogical Institute teacher training for a day, and having other meetings with experts and ministry officials have shed light to my questions.


My special interest is how 21st century skills and ICT in education is implemented. Not much, I have to say. Excluding international projects like the ones led by USAID (see here), the Internet is not used by the pupils and students.

Collaborative knowledge creation and ICT use for knowledge retrieval during lessons is not a practice yet. It seems not to be a case of lacking in skills but in attitude. That poses some problems to be dealt with when the new curriculum framework is to be actuated.

It is imperative for the Twinning Kosovo project to understand the society, ie. the Kosovo situation in order to benefit from the very different approach of KCF compared to the previous national curriculum, particularly regarding the 21st century skills and competences.

Main issue impeding changes towards implementing the underlying ideology behind the new curriculum framework is the prevalent thinking that didactic wise there is no need for change, and when examples of new methods (like problem based learning & the students’ information retrieval from the internet) are introduced, in many discussions with the educators it was explained that “not here, not in Kosovo.”

I was glad that I met a lot of people and was able to identify schools, practices and people who had already experimented new pedagogy, and who were eager to try new methods if they got assistance - which so suitably is one of the tasks of the Twinning Kosovo project.

We are to collaborate with 107 schools in Kosovo, of which 6 will be chosen as pilot schools. I have found out that the "Innovation Leader" model that Diana Laurillard has presented suits to the situation here and to our projects goals. (see slides 10-12 of my presentation ICT in education: setting criteria for the pilot schools).

So, it's Saturday and I'm sipping wine while waiting to fly back home. Such a good feeling and great expectations towards the next trip here. It'll take place in the middle of July. For that I have to plan a two-day training for trainers on core curriculum areas and student assessment.

There's a Google Album having some more photos.

Material for 'ICT in education' policy-making

My first Kosovo mission is only week away. Here are two presentations you might find useful.

ICT in education: transformation, not substitution from Esko Lius

ICT in education: examples on supporting the teachers from Esko Lius

Three recipes for ICT in Education

I'm heading to Pristina, Kosovo in some weeks. The line-up is very interesting, as I am to meet experts in the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, as well as with some other parties and attend school visits.

Our agenda is ICT capacity building in education on the national level. For that I'm updating my knowledge on useful resources and models in order to facilitate building up the necessary policies and actions.

Among other stuff I'm reading (and re-reading) some UNESCO technical papers and reports. Let's see how they will mix and mingle in my mind now when I have a go at them as a bunch. I'll share my notions and ideas when I'm more into them.

• ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (v.2) helps to develop comprehensive national teacher ICT competency policies
• ICT-in-Education Toolkit contains a set of tools and a systematic process to plan and evaluate development programs enhanced by ICT
• Guide to Measuring ICT in Education presents a set of ICT in education indicators, methodologies for collection and calculation, and even a proposal for a prototype questionnaire

Mobile learning – a bliss or a mess?

When an innovation turns into your regular cup of tea, wouldn't you want to know what you are actually committing to and how it affects your business?

Be it smartboards, flipped classroom, or gamification, learning styles or neurolinguistic programming, there is a variety of educational fads that we might put to use in the classroom – without having any clue whether they are a solution or just another mess in the learning process.

How is it with mobile learning?


We've drawn up a roadmap to facilitate the active application of mobile learning and particularly the BYOD model in our TVET powerhouse Omnia. (slideshow below, in Finnish).

In order to achieve major changes in the working and teaching culture, there is a need for the personnel to be instructed in taking advantage of educational technology and teaching practices that support learning in the digital world.

We've done a lot of piloting in mobile learning already, and the digital world learning culture is gaining foothold rapidly.

What do we know about the effects, and the benefit-cost ratio? How do we measure various direct and indirect consequences?

We've already taken various measures to gather information, like carried out surveys on campuses, given questionnaires to those who've borrowed iPads from the library etc. Our approach hasn't been very comprehensive or thorough, though.

Surely there are qualitative questions in our surveys meant to evaluate the advantages of mobile learning. And definitely we gather quantitative data as well. But now we want to move forward.

Trawling the net for research on the subject yielded only small fish. I started reading Salman Khan's The One World School House this morning, as I expected him to be the one who knows about analysizing educational data, but so far the first forty pages have been a disappointment. So, proper research papers might be a better option.


Have you found useful resources on evaluating and measuring the effects of mobile learning? Has your school come up with practices to share? Do me – and many of the blog readers, I guess – a favour and leave a comment!

BYOD case Omnia (in Finnish) from Esko Lius

Embedding Popplet, test

We're testing out Popplet.

BYOD and AYLD - a winning combination

Zambian delegation in InnoOmnia, Espoo, Finland.

Mobile technology and social media have brought some freedom from sitting at the desk, accessing information assembled elsewhere. They help us to take our personal networks with us, to learn and to show things in a variety of ways, to collaborate and co-create.

In educational contexts, the devices and networks are only a part of the solution.

With the help of new pedagogy and learning design that aims to take full advantage of the mobile, crowdsourcing-capable tools, it is possible to make radical changes in the learning process: from teacher talk to learner-centric process, from desks and classrooms to task-based environments in and out of the school premises, from rigid assignment formulations to flexible activities which in carry in themselves the signs of the competence that the students have learned.

mobiilioppija.wikispaces.com

Business and administration TVET students were to show their understanding of the school library service. They made a comic series out of it. Primary school kids made an eBook about The Mediterranean, enlivening it with photos from wikipedia and pics they had taken themselves on vacations. Special educational needs students in a high school have taken photos in a museum with their own phones, and continued to work on these later at school.

There are a million pedagogically sound ways of gaining from mobile learning. Another million of bringing own devices to learning.

Enter BYOD, or own devices

BYOD, or bring your own devices, means that the learner can have his or her own, familiar gadget at hand. It is up to the teacher to instruct the learning process so that it is not device- or platform-dependent.

An own device means familiar OS interface and organization, the apps that person has found best for him or herself, own materials ready at hand as connection to own cloud service accounts is a snap, and continuous presence in the virtual social networks he/she is connected.

Usually this means that instead of instructing to use certain applications or precise step-by-step procedures, teacher uses more generalized guidance, like: take pictures or shoot a short mobile video and upload that on the net, or outline your group's take on the issue with some collaborative online tool and be ready to describe the sharing of the work.

In our experience, the peer learning is a fast way to get all group members to know the application or platform chosen.

A 21st century competent teacher can not only handle a scenario like this, but also facilitate learning that takes advantage of new, personal mobile technology. He doesn't have to be a technical support but he has to facilitate the students to find missing information whenever they get stuck or are about to follow false track.

Surely BYOD method has its challenges, too, like the abundance of different devices and applications, and time spent on chatting anything but learning. It is a mixture of straight leadership and adjusting flexibility that the teacher has to possess.

Two takes on the organizational point of view

From an organizational point of view there are at least two issues on the table: professional development programmes and the cost of ICT.

Teacher training as a course-based activity is more or less fading or diminishing. Teachers are saturated with different software/platform/device trainings and are not very keen on going to dedicated courses on free time or arranging substitutes during lessons they are to skip due to their own course. More and more professional development must be woven into the daily work. Facilitating the actual work of a teacher, peer mentoring and assistance from students have proven valuable.

ICT costs have sky rocketed. BYOD might be one answer to the call to reduce those costs. If students feel it's better to use their own devices, the school doesn't have to provide so many devices, arrange so much technical support, and perhaps not to have so many it systems and services of their own. Less computers, less dedicated IT classrooms, and also less ordinary classrooms (with more versatile learning arrangements) means cost savings in these areas.

The role of ICT has expanded very rapidly, and it is not possible to meet the expectations of the information society without spending resources to educational technology.

BYOD can be seen as a way of keeping the expanding costs at the bay; new pedagogical thinking can be seen as a way of making the use of new technology effective – and not only for the course results, but for the life long learning path of the learner as well.

So, when introducing BYOD for learning, it might be useful to pay attention to AYLD too, or Adjust Your Learning Design.

BYOD - shaken, not stirred

Yesterday, coming home by bus from the Oppi Festival, I took my iPad and started taking notes. Soon it ballooned to a sketch of a blog entry.

Unfortunately the road was bumpy and the text got shaken and scrambled. Please help me to get it assemled again!