Forum for digital education opens doors

Press release from 11/20/2020 10:00
/> Soest district (kso.2020.11.20.684.sc). The media center of the Soest district is opening the forum for digital education in the Börde vocational college in Soest together with its project partners, the South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences and the City of Soest, as well as with the cooperation of the education authority for the Soest district. This is a state-of-the-art classroom that will initially be used for training purposes in media education for primary school teachers. Later, the project is to be extended to all types of schools.

In the last few months, two former classrooms in the Börde-Berufskolleg have been completely refurbished and equipped with modern media technology and flexible furniture. This is how the Forum for Digital Education, or DiBiFo for short, was created, a room that will be used by the Soest District Media Center to initially offer workshops for primary school teachers on all aspects of digitization. The room already has a role model with regard to the future equipment of classrooms: The presentation technology includes an interactive board, a side-mounted short-distance projector, a permanently installed sound system and a document camera. The furniture dissolves the familiar, rigid frontal orientation of most classrooms by offering various seating niches for teamwork.

The first initiative to set up the Forum for Digital Education goes back to the project of the same name, which the project partners City of Soest, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences and Media Center launched in December 2019. The room was then furnished with funds from the Soest district as the school body of the Börde vocational college and the media center. The project itself is also supported with funding from the Ministry of Economics, Innovation, Digitization and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia through the measures for the digital model municipality of Soest. The education authority for the Soest district and the media consultant for elementary schools act as further cooperation partners.

“In the course of the corona pandemic, it has been shown that digital learning concepts and good media technology equipment are the basic requirements for successful distance teaching,” explains Sascha Cornesse, head of the media center. “For this reason, the project partners have agreed to focus more closely on the needs of location-independent, digital learning in the coming months.” Project website (http://www.dibifo-soest.com/) be made available to all primary schools in the district. In the forum itself, face-to-face workshops taking into account the hygiene regulations applicable under Corona, which are also open to all primary school teachers. In addition, digital learning offers are also planned in order to reach a larger number of teachers in a short time. The primary schools have already been informed of the measures by email.

–