At the Joan Miró Elementary School, two sixth graders show Senator for Education Astrid-Sabine Busse and State Secretary Aziz Bozkurt (2nd from left) how they work with digital media in class.
One year after the start of the digitization strategy, the administration draws a positive balance: 500 schools are already using the Berlin learning space
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Berlin. Shortly before the summer holidays, there is good news from the education administration: Digitization in schools is progressing. According to Education Senator Astrid-Sabine Busse (SPD), the Berlin school portal has developed well. “We’re on the right track,” she said when she visited the Joan Miró elementary school in Charlottenburg, where she and State Secretary for Education Aziz Bozkurt (SPD) wanted to see for themselves how digital media are used in the classroom.
Class 6c sits together in small groups. Some kids are practicing geometry with the Bettermarks online learning system, others are recording a history podcast, and two boys are programming a robot. “Even if the focus in the early days is of course on arithmetic, reading and writing, even the first graders learn how to get started with the programming language with us,” explains Wolf-Dieter Wagner, head of the Joan Miró Elementary School.
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An approach that pleases Education Senator Busse. “Not everything digital advances people,” she said, especially in schools digitization cannot replace everything, “but with the right pedagogical content, it can be an important addition.” The senator admitted that the corona pandemic was clearly noticeable.
12,000 registrations per day in the school portal
The key to the pedagogical implementation of school digitization is the Berlin school portal. After a one-off registration, schools have access to learning platforms, educational media and services, for example. “It’s like an electronic desk for the teachers,” says Anja Tempelhoff, Head of the Schools in the Digital World department in Education Administration. The school portal, which also includes a conference tool and a parent portal for better communication, records around 12,000 registrations per day. According to the Senate Department for Education, there are plans to expand the portal even further.
In its first stage of development, the school portal with more than 70 apps offers public schools in Berlin free access to the two platforms recommended by the education administration. On the one hand there is the “Lernraum Berlin” and on the other hand the platform “its learning”. More than 500 public schools are currently using the learning room, and 146 schools are currently using the “its learning” platform.
The launch of the platform was anything but smooth
The fact that the Berlin learning space still exists is mainly due to Andreas Steinhauser from Infra.run Service GmbH. Because the launch of the platform was anything but smooth. When students and teachers wanted to use the study room during lockdown, the server collapsed completely. “At that point, no one could do anything about it at the time,” explains Steinhauser, “the software was simply not intended for such parallel use.” But since then he and his team have put a lot of work into the “Berlin learning space” and worked on the software .
The learning room has been redesigned so that each school has its own instance, and the first school is already working on its own platform. “It works wonderfully,” says Steinhauser. He is therefore relaxed about even a new lockdown. “At least technically there shouldn’t be any problems,” says the IT expert. He is convinced that the Berlin learning environment will prevail in schools in the long term. “Even if some schools have already looked for their own digital solutions, they will certainly come back to the learning room over time,” predicts Steinhauser, “the offers are good and there are no problems with data protection.”
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