Following the 2017 Educaid.be conference “Digital, Education and Development. How to be smart about it?”, Educaid.be’s working group on ICT in/for education organised a lunch seminar on Thursday 7 December 2017, where two inspiring Belgian experiences of the use of ICT in the educational context were presented:
-
ICT-praktijkdag is a practice-oriented ICT training day with concrete tips for and by school leaders, ICT coordinators, teachers and educational partners from the education sector in Flanders and the Netherlands. Two or three of these practice days are organized per school year, each time in a different higher education institute. Depending on the available infrastructure, there are 400 to 1000 participants per day. The initiative started 17 years ago, and is entirely self-financed – with the help of a good deal of volunteer support. In February 2018, the 33rd ICT Praktijkdag will take place in Leuven.
-
Fyxxilab– “A Future for our Youth with XXIst century skills” – is an initiative of EduCentrum vzw where 5 to 18-year-olds can work in an interactive way, during and outside of school hours, with a wide range of educational STE(A)M technology. They work creatively and (re)searchingly on different themes with the appropriate tools: robotics, 3D (games, design and printing), programming, sciences, gaming, … Each year some 5000 youth are reached. Fyxxi also organises inspiring refreshers courses for teachers and rents tool boxes with STEM-tools to get started themselves in class.
Hans De Four and Isabel Allaert, coordinators of respectively ICT-praktijkdag and EduCentrum vzw, presented both initiatives, follwoed by a Q&A and reflection on how these experiences could be duplicated in an international context.