About

The strategic guidelines of Europe 2020¹ put particular emphasis in strengthening horizontal cooperation and the sharing of experience and good practice among the Member States. It’s really crucial for education to fulfil its role in the knowledge triangle, research and innovation objectives and outcomes need to feed back into education, with teaching and learning underpinned by a strong research base, and with teaching and learning environments developed and improved through greater incorporation of creative thinking and innovative attitudes and approaches². Additionally there is a mainstream of eLearning in national policies for the modernisation of education and training, including in curricula, assessment of learning outcomes and the professional development of teachers and trainers³.

According to the OECD survey⁴, teachers have few incentives to improve their teaching, as while the most common types of professional development activity available to them are not the most effective. The majority of teachers would like more professional development (particularly on ICT skills, and student behaviour). It has to be mentioned that education and training play a fundamental role in achieving the ‘Europe 2020’ objectives.

All the above create a great deal of activity to ensure basic ICT skills as part of digital competence and learning to learn skills. Current developments in ICT and Web 2.0 technologies have offered the potential for new services, which has significantly transformed our day-to-day personal and professional activities; bare the potential to do the same for education and training. Known as ICT learning, using such technologies can be as simple as accessing a training timetable online, through very complex as developing virtual communities of practice for sharing and creating knowledge.