Educational Technology
Digital Transformation Permanent Committee
The world faces many technological challenges in the 21st century. Knowledge and use of technologies increase daily and technological evolution speeds up enormously. The European School is ready to keep up with technology growth and contributes to the development of the staff and the students. It strives to ease the education process and develops citizens who are ready to face changes and acquire new skills and knowledge. To meet the above-mentioned goals, the European School formed the Digital Transformation Permanent Committee. It aims to support the school in facing changes and challenges of the technology era and is focused to create more student-oriented teaching-learning process.
Main objectives
- Instill a growth mindset in students
- Support students’ innovations and initiatives
- Develop a more technologically advanced teacher who can become a mentor and guide students in the right direction
- Students become more responsible for their own learning
- Use technologies to increase the effectiveness of learning
- Apply personalized instruction and use e-content consistently
- Encourage teachers to use technologies effectively in teaching every subject
- Create new digital learning resources and activities for each unit
- Increase parents’ engagement in the learning process.
The Digital Transformation Permanent Committee organizes various technology activities supporting students to develop 21st-century skills.
The structure of the Digital Transformation Permanent Committee
Chair: Sophia Bazadze
Vice-Chair: Nina Bitskinashvili – Vice Digital Transformation Advisor of the School Director, design teacher
Vice-Chair: Shorena Abesadze – Head of the Department of Innovative Technologies
Members:
Petre Babilua – Head of the Department of Mathematics
Sopo Patsatsia– Head of the Department of Sciences
Maia Revia – Head of the Department of Language and Literature
Ana Chakhnashvili- Vice-Dean of the American High School
Guranda Gogaladze – Robotics and design teacher
Aleksander Chuprin – IT manager
Mtvarisa Buskivadze – Head of Language Acquisition Department
Technology is everywhere. It is intertwined in our daily lives in such a way that using relevant technologies in the classroom opens up opportunities of the learning process making it more accessible, flexible and interesting. We strive to make classrooms a fun and engaging place where learning is a great pleasure for our students every day.
The European School believes that to meet the challenges of an evolving high-tech society, educators need to develop multiple forms of computer and information literacy to help improve education.
As part of this goal, European School uses various digital media to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom and in online environments: desktop computers (PC and Mac), laptop computers, E-mail, Social Networking (Skype/Facebook/Twitter), presentation programs, Google, Microsoft Education tools, Dropbox, Projectors, Smart Boards, etc. The School provides a fully wireless connection across the campus and ICT integrated classrooms to support learning with digitally connected devices.
Why Educational Technology?
Today, more than ever, the role of educational technology in teaching is of the greatest importance because educational technology allows the teacher to determine how to best integrate technology to meet the varied learning needs and methods of every studen in the classroom.
The ICT Department is working closely with faculty members to ensure the integration of educational applications to the curriculum. The program facilitates studies and disseminates the ways in which innovative technologies empower educators and learners. The department of ICT introduces effective technologies for online and multimedia, digital game-based and project-based learning.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): The European School started BYOD program approximately three years ago. According to the policy, the students must sign a responsibility form promising they will only use the mobile device for academic purpose.
BYOD program has several outcomes:
- Student participation increases because students enjoy using their personal devices. In the classroom they become more engaged while learning on their devices and the process becomes even more interactive when everyone has access to technologies;
- Learning becomes student-driven. Teaching in the digital age is becoming less oriented on directly transferring knowledge but rather showing students how to investigate through a vast amount of information to get the knowledge they need. BYOD has changed the teaching model. With the technologies they are using for BYOD, students have more authority over their own learning process. They can ask questions and do research instead of just listening to teachers delivering lectures.
- Student collaboration and communication increases. Collaboration is the key to engagement in today’s classrooms. Students use technologies to communicate with their peers and teachers. The BYOD program can provide students with far greater opportunities to interact virtually with teachers and work with other students on assignments, projects and content tasks.
Digital Citizenship
Technology is a part of our students’ daily lives. Using phones and other digital devices is their second-nature. But do we always prepare them for using technology in a responsible way? That’s where digital citizenship comes into play.
We need to teach students the rules of the digital world and prepare them to be safe and responsible digital citizens.
We integrate the nine elements of digital citizenship in the curriculum. Access, commerce, communication, literacy, etiquette, law, rights & responsibilities, health & wellness, as well as security issues are all integrated in the IT curriculum and in the curriculums of other disciplines via the ICT department.
