eLearningworld News from Luxembourg and Finland
eLearningworld News from Luxembourg and Finland
Many Ministry of Education struggles to transform the educational system to better equip its pupils and students for the 21st Century society’s requirements. Two of the most interesting projects in this development are the BEE Creative program of Luxembourg and the pilot project for a future foreign language learning reform in Finland.
Makerspace
In November 2016 eLearningworld wrote about Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Children and Youth launch of the first educational makerspaces in the BEE CREATIVE program for High Schools. The project focus on to offer interested young people spaces to use their creativity and experimentation for their own digital projects, in order to develop their digital literacy and in a non-formal way train to solve problems. December 16 the first Makerfest to celebrate the first anniversary of the draft to BEE CREATIVE took place, where the Minister of Education, Children and Youth, Claude Meisch, accompanied by the ambassador of the European campaign “E-skills for Jobs”, Mady Delvaux-Stehres, participated. The Makerfest included thirty workshops for children 8 to 18 years and over a thousand entries were recorded from elementary schools and high schools etc. In the fields of programming, robotics and 3D printing etc.
Modern Language Learning Curriculum
The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is now launching a pilot project to start teaching foreign languages from the first grade in elementary school. This pilot project to begin with language studies much earlier than before is a part of the general program to renew the Finnish elementary school to the 21st Century requirements. The aim with regional projects is to develop the best possible and most engaging learning environments for young children to learn foreign languages. The pilot project also includes complementing further training for teachers and web-based pedagogical material to support the education that is funded by the government. The result and proposals to a curriculum for early language education is expected to be ready at the of end of 2018. This pilot project not only adapt foreign language learning to the 21st Century requirements, it also putting recent language teaching research into practice.
We will write more about innovative school education projects during this beautiful year of 2017 that just started.
Written by
LarsGoran Bostrom©