A portal by and for Dutch-speaking teachers

Acronym of the case:

KlasCement

Web address of the case:

http://www.klascement.net

Country of the case:

Belgium

Posting Date:

2 May 2007

Last Edited Date:

02 May 2007

Author:

Hans De Four (KlasCement - Educational portal)

web2.0 | School | community

Type of initiative

Case Abstract

A portal by and for Dutch-speaking teachers (mostly Flanders - Belgium). At this moment we have about 24000 members! They are exchanging documents, sites, learning objects, educational software, exercises, photos and videos, experiences, ... for free (with one of the creative commons licenses)! It's possible to announce events and to give comments and stars to every item. You don't have to share anything, but it's highly appreciated if you do so. Without people sharing, the database would be empty. But we have thousands of learning objects in our database. It's a social network of teachers and students.

Description of the case

Domain

eInclusion

Topic

ICT and community development

Sector

Education, Science and Research | Culture and Media

Start date - End date

January 1998 (Ongoing)

Date operational

May 1998

Target Users

Citizen | Other

Target Users Description

Teachers of Flanders - Belgium (and the netherlands because of the same language). In Flanders there are about 180000 teachers. About 20000 of them are already registered at the educational portal, which is a lot, as not every teacher is interested in what our portal offers. But every day more teachers get inveolved, motivated en interested in this database.
Students in teacher training are also member of this educational portal and exchanging digital lessons, talking about innovative ideas, helping each other in the community, ...
The site has about 5000 unique visitors a day. Our data trafic is 300GB a month.

Scope

National

Status

Not applicable/not available

Language(s)

Dutch

Policy Context and Legal Framework

Lissabon agreement: students and teachers should use ICT in the classroom, in their lessons.
National: A portal to exchange content and connect teachers.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Not applicable/not available

Project size

Implementation: €49-299,000

Implementation and Management Approach

We're only three so there's no important management approach.
Partnerships with universities, hoghschools, publishers, other educational initiatives, the web2.0-community, bloggers, ... are answered via other questions.

Multi-channel issues:
We're working together with:
- cultural sector: activities for schools and teachers can be announced at KlasCement
- media: TV-shows, radioshows about education or educational themes are reviewed at KlasCement or at the weblog
- educational publishers: books are digitally offered via KlasCement. We'll have a safe tool so visitors can pay online for educational papers, books, guidelines from publishers.
- other educational initiatives, fairs for teachers, ...

KlasCement organises ICT-teacher training so people can meet, exchange experiences, learn how to use the computer in the classroom. Twice a year we bring 600 teachers together to learn new possibilities of ICT in schools. We install 400 notebooks with the latest educational software an d internet applications just for one day!

We're involved in innovating projects from different universities and advising teachers in higher education about the effect of ICT.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

Since the website is database-driven (since 2005) this database contains learning objects for more than 10000 hours in the classroom:
more than 1000 lesson documents, presentations, courses, ...;
more than 1000 educational websites;
more than 500 softwaretitles, also open source and Apple-related;
and so on.

More than 24000 teachers and students are registered. We even notice parents registering to find resources. This means we'll also address parents (thus nearly everyone) in the future. Our website grows on a daily basis: more users, more and better content, new initiatives.

Thanks to the policy of the educational government, it's a sustainable initiative. Next year, the portal will be connected with educational portals in other European countries (Netherlands, UK, ...)

Innovation:
This webportal is one of the most innovative sites in Flanders and well appreciated by all visitors. We have a weblog since 2005, we're using ajax, wiki and forums for our volunteers who help us to moderate the content (we're only three to make and maintain this site).

RSS-feeds will tell everyone when there's something added.

At www.classy.be we offer every teacher free webspace and five! free weblogs (wordpress) + guidelines. Every teacher should have his own weblog :-)

Everything is tagged by our users for the educational search engine, ...

At www.leerfestival.be we're now starting with an 'educational Youtube'.
At www.etwinning.be we connect schools, teachers, headmasters, pupils in Europe through ICT.

A new site in a few months will adjust the content to the profile of the user, will connect people more than now using communities and mashups (Google Maps, Flickr, Last.FM, Twitter, Scribd, ...) and via live events, will give every user his own wiki, forum, weblog, ...

We'll also use harvesting and international standards to connect our search engine to other European educational engines (first of all in the Netherlands: Kennisnet).

It will be possible to login with the Belgian eID by the end of this year.

Track record of sharing

KlasCement is only about sharing good practice. In this way we already have influenced other partners do use KlasCement as their tool to share:
- publishers
- schools
- teachers

Lessons learnt

1. Web2.0 or 'The user is the content' is the future. We're already doing this since 1998 and each year we notice that people are easier to motivate to share their knowledge and work with other.
2. It doesn't have to be expensive (but you have to be enormously motivated!)
3. Networking is important! Work together with other initiatives, never do the same thing twice. Take the best from the rest (after negotiation) and keep up the good work!

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