Summary of the EDUVINET Project

Societies that have become accustomed to a relatively high standard of living, will only be able to maintain this standard in an increasingly global economy if their productivity is higher than in other countries. In this context, the fast access to important information has gained more and more importance and with it also the initial and continuing training in the use of new information technologies. However, the introduction of these new information and communication technologies, particularly to young people, can not be successfully realised without special efforts in the education sector.

Precisely these efforts the EDUVINET project wants to start to undertake. The aim of the project is to promote the use of electronic networks (in particular the Internet/WWW) through pedagogic, technical and contents-related measures for teaching and learning purposes in European schools. A series of obstacles still seem to hinder the broad introduction of Internet-supported teaching in the Member States, e.g. missing contents for some school subjects, too little teacher training, missing support by the school administration authorities, no integration of the new teaching methods into the curricula, missing hardware and software, slow or too few connections to the Internet, etc...

The EDUVINET partner team from Ireland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece attempts to reduce these obstacles above all through the two following measures:

1. On transnational meetings, the partners develop exemplary contents and didactical-methodical guidelines for the use in Internet supported teaching. The following four topics serve as a starting point for the development of the exemplary teaching and learning materials:
   
   
   • European identity
   • Living conditions of EU citizen
   • Global challenge
   • European monetary union
   
   
   
2. On regional and local levels key actors of the education sector, above all school administrators and teachers, are trained in further education courses to use electronic networks (Internet/WWW) for teaching, learning and self-studying purposes.

Furthermore, students in test school classes from different Member States of the EU will participate in the project.

An important role for the dissemination of project results plays the Web-site of the project on the Internet (EDUVINET Service): http://www.merian.fr.bw.schule.de/eduvinet/ . All materials developed during the project can be found here. Furthermore, the Web-site was designed with the intention to be an orientation point for all others not directly participating in the project (school administration experts, teachers, students, parents or adults who want to train themselves) as to how to use the Internet for school teaching in a European context. For this purpose several hundred of links to education resources on the Internet had been collected and ordered in different sections. A Web-discussion forum integrated into the EDUVINET Web-site makes the exchange of ideas and the discussion between the authors of the project materials and their users possible. In this way, different point of views that exist in the Member States with regard to matters of common interest become more transparent and thus better understandable. The EDUVINET Service also features a full text keyword search, a mailing list, forms to submit own materials and links to be added to the Web-site.

With its activities the EDUVINET Project wants to contribute:

• to extend the educational contents available on the Internet
• to overcome geographical boundaries or disadvantages
• to prepare young people, teachers and adults for the requirements of the information society in a better way than it could have been achieved with conventional teaching methods
• to use scarce educational resources more efficiently in Europe

EDUVINET receives support under the SOCRATES-ODL and INNOVATION Programmes of the European Commission. Further project supporters are: Ministry of Culture and Sport of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, SWF TV-Station - Dept. of Education and Family Programmes, Computing Centre of the University of Freiburg, Regional School Administration Freiburg, City of Freiburg, Merian-School Freiburg.