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fromJens Joachim
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A cooperation project between the Technical University of Darmstadt and the city is dedicated to the topic of “Education in a digital world”. An interim report of the project is now available.
The media center of the city of Darmstadt has been dealing with the question of how modern teaching can be designed in the age of laptops, tablet PCs, interactive smartboards and learning opportunities available online, not just since the beginning of the corona pandemic a year ago. In the past few years, Volker Seipp, the pedagogical director of the media center, who also works part-time as a teacher at a grammar school, had to manage the shortage with just three IT staff. Only in February, at the request of the SPD, had the city councils heatedly debated the digital equipment of the Darmstadt schools in a current hour.
Mayor Rafael Reisser (CDU), who is also Darmstadt’s head of school, points out that in the course of the media development plan drawn up by the city, 30 million euros are to be invested in equipping schools over the next three years. Furthermore, Reisser considers the digitization of education to be “an elementary question for the future” that goes far beyond distance learning in the current situation.
On the initiative of media center manager Seipp, a joint model project of the Digital City Darmstadt and the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU) has been dedicated to the topic of “Education in the digital world” since November 2019, in which three Darmstadt schools are participating.
The project
On the model school project Digitalstadt Darmstadt GmbH and the Technical University of Darmstadt are participating in the Herderschule – a language therapy school -, the Bernhard Adelung School – an integrated comprehensive school – and the Heinrich Emanuel Merck vocational school.
goal of the project “Education in the digital world”, which started in November 2019 and will run until the end of the year, is “to make a contribution to improving current school practice and to gain insights into development potentials for education in a digitally shaped world”. jjo
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A research team led by Professor Petra Grell and Professor Franco Rau, who is now at the University of Vechta, published an interim report on the project on Friday. In Grell’s words, it is primarily about “actively supporting schools in the digital transformation”. It is not the intention of the project to install as many digital tools as possible. The aim is to enable all actors in the school – that is, the school management as well as teachers and students – “to be able to act digitally with confidence” and to help shape development processes.
The digitization projects at the schools involved and the recommendations for action derived from them should then also be an example for other schools in the city.
On the one hand, the 50-page interim report describes the respective initial situations of the three project schools, which have different technical and structural requirements. In addition, nine exemplary projects such as learning with digital platforms and tablets or teaching with digital boards are presented in the report.
With a view to the special situation in the past few months, the authors write that “as if under a magnifying glass”, “central hurdles and difficulties” have also become visible. It has been shown very clearly that a functioning digital infrastructure “is a necessary prerequisite for enabling learning with digital media at a distance and in presence”. In Darmstadt there is still a lack of personnel capacities for IT support.
The interim report can be downloaded from the TUD and Digitalstadt Darmstadt websites.
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