What should IT concepts for schools and local authorities look like? How can a curriculum for digital education be designed and which skills are important? What standards should apply in teacher training? What interfaces are there with extracurricular media education and how can these be better utilized? These questions were the focus of this year’s educational media conference “Digital Change – Paths to the Future”, which took place on September 15 at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Mainz. The conference is a joint project of the alliances Keine Bildung ohne Medien, Bündnis für Bildung e.V. and Initiative D21.
Media education in schools – what does it look like?
Greetings, including from KMK President Dr. Claudia Bogedan, who addressed a video message to the participants, were followed by a keynote speech from Prof. Dr. Schelhowe from the University of Bremen. Digital education must be integrated into all subjects and teachers need support from extracurricular institutions, said Schelhowe. Jun. Prof. Dr. Jasmin Bastian from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz called for interdisciplinary perspectives instead of isolated solutions for individual subjects.
Team building is important
How current approaches to learning with and about media can be brought into the mainstream remained a central question within the discussions until the end of the day. In the workshop on school development, Dr. Angela Thiele, head teacher of the Berlin elementary school at Koppenplatz, which teaches in so-called learning studios, advised teachers to have more courage to simply let the pupils do it. Proper leadership and team building within the teaching staff are also very important. Prof. Dr. Kammerl from the University of Hamburg, who identified networking and support as a key success factor for school development, also agreed. It doesn’t work with lone fighters alone, said Kammerl.
Obstacles still need to be overcome
Overall, the event showed that there is no shortage of good ideas and concepts. “We have more of an implementation problem,” said Martin Hüppe, Managing Director of Bündnis für Bildung e.V. (Alliance for Education). He would like to see a national investment program and the removal of obstacles such as the ban on cooperation in order to better shape the digital transformation in education. aconium is involved in the overall board of the
Initiative D21 for digital education. Together with other partners, it also analyzed the challenges and requirements for contemporary media education in schools in the 2014 study “Media education in German schools”.