Using common technological equipment in different rural schools

Hosted by , contributed by Kyriaki_Vakkou on 15 September 2023

Dimension:

Availability of ICT tools and applications

Stakeholders involved:

Local authorities

Main challenge:

Agrupamento de Escolas Frei Heitor Pinto is a school cluster composed of 16 schools spread throughout a large area in the municipality of Covilhã, Portugal. Ten of these schools are participating in the LfE project. Although belonging to the same cluster, some of these LfE schools are located more than 60 km apart and have difficult accessibility. Nine of the 10 LfE schools are small schools, from grade 1 to 4 (primary schools in Portugal) with a small number of students, multi-grade classrooms, with only 1 or 2 educators on site. The tenth school is from grade 5 to 9 and receives students from the other 9 schools when they pass to grade 5. The isolation of the schools reflects the isolation of the towns they live in. The low socio-economic and cultural status of the families leads to having children from the primary schools, that don’t even travel to the other towns in the region and know little about the world. Overall, the technological and digital equipment of the schools is very basic and does not reach for every student. Most teachers from these schools are above 50 years old and haven’t had many opportunities to develop their digital skills since they didn’t have many chances to use them in the school. The local authorities started a program this schoolyear that consists of having ICT teachers visiting the isolated primary schools once per week and working with students. This has begun to have an impact on teachers and students, but the insufficient equipment has been a problem.

Action and initiatives:

With the participation in the LfE project, schools bought relevant ICT equipment. However, due to the limited budget, it wasn’t possible to equip individual school. To address this, they created one set of mobile equipment that could circulate among the primary schools based on an established schedule. Another set was used to create a Technological Laboratory called the Creative Star Room in the larger school. It has been extremely important for the ICT teachers that travel to the primary schools to have some laptops to take with them so that no student is left out - usually there are always a few students that either have problems with their computer or forgot their computer at home. The portable video projector has also been very helpful for the schools that didn’t have one, enabling various activities and lessons. Since it has a battery, it can be used everywhere in the school and therefore allows different activities with it. The Creative Star Room is intended to be used not only by all students in the school where it is but also to support the work developed in all the other 9 primary schools participating in this project. The “universal” use of the Lab enables inter- school collaboration. Schools started to organize shared lessons where one of the schools promotes the lessons and the other schools participate online. This will greatly amplify the students’ experience, interaction with other educators and collaborative work with students from other schools. Many of these schools have a small number of students and these interactions are very welcome by the students and are a great enrichment of their learning experience. The fact that the schools are better equipped allied to the support given by the ICT teachers to the primary schools has propitiated a short training course for the primary teachers. This is only the beginning of a training plan that covers the use of the newly acquired equipment and the implementation of STEAM activities in the classroom.

Main change/improvement/impact:

The innovative pedagogical aspects in the dynamization of the activities are related to the promotion of hybrid teaching methodologies using digital tools, combined with existing analogue ones, for the implementation of active learning scenarios. The aim is to generate creative, collaborative, and inclusive learning for each student, allowing the recovery, reinforcement and consolidation of essential learning. Inter-cycle sharing, debates on digital security, work in the area of block programming, support for benchmarking tests, are some of the activities that are possible due to the acquisition of equipment and subsequent teacher training. Educators are now starting to become more self-confident in the use of the ICT solutions, tools, equipment and resources as they can perceive the benefit for their teaching practice and the positive impact triggered in their students. Students are becoming more accustomed to this newly adopted methodology and asking their teachers for more similar activities.

More information: