The cloud based services are growing rapidly in the global and European economy. With the rise of 5G technology not only storage but also all data processing and applicative services will move in the cloud environment. This change is anticipated to come in the next 10 years. The move towards cloud-based environment will tremendously impact our work environments, as well as in general the way we use ICT solutions on a daily basis.
“Kids in Clouds” is an interdisciplinary project that aims to introduce children with cloud-based services as early as the first grade of the primary school. Its main objective is to deliver well-rounded, useful and transferable educational programme in cloud-computing through development of educational modules for teachers and pupils, adaptation of contents and methods according to envisaged needs of the target groups, creation of didactic tools and production and recommendations on innovative education approaches. This is a project designed to meet challenges of the modern education system and challenging market needs, by providing an awareness-raising, holistic and flexible education in cloud-computing.
Our aims and objectives:
Why are so many businesses moving to the cloud? It is cost-efficient, secure, fast. Clouds enable us to work from anywhere. If we have learned anything during the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is that sectors of society which are better connected to internet can live through the lockdown much more successfully. Countries, where educational systems had a stronger and more robust cloud-infrastructure and cloud-services, they were able to keep the school year going in a much better way. Moving to cloud is also environmentally friendly. When you use the cloud, you only use the energy you need: if you use only one small application, you do not waste energy for powering an entire computer; therefore, you do not leave oversized carbon footprints.
We have established that switching from working in on-premise to cloud-based environment creates significant obstacles for users, as it requires them to relate to high-tech solutions in a different way. The aim of this project is to introduce cloud-based environment to children at the beginning of their school learning path. At that point, children do not differentiate on-premise from cloud-based content and services – for them, these are simply the tools to get things done. Sooner they encounter cloud-based services, easier it is for them to learn how to interact with them.
Partners will carry out a wide range of activities in order to implement a high-quality, well-rounded project with the objective to develop educational content in cloud-computing for schools, to be implemented and used by partner organizations and other EU schools. More concretely, this project aims to develop online repository of materials for cloud-computing for non-ICT teachers to be used in non-ICT classes. It will thus contribute to popularization of cloud-computing outside of the ICT field, something that is strongly needed if we are to achieve a stronger use of cloud-computing. Its benefits must be understood but wider sections of society, not only by ICT experts.
Our intellectual outputs:
The project results are the direct answer to the envisaged target groups’ needs, and they comprise a complete set of resources for popularization and teaching of cloud-computing in schools across EU. Specifically, they are:
– Gap analysis: report on the extent of usage of cloud-based services in schools at the moment. Built on that report, we will project further possibilities and mark the trajectory route on how to grow on the existing situation.
– Online repository of educational materials for teachers. This material will include general knowledge on what cloud-computing is, why and how we use and need it from the perspective of primary education, but more importantly, it will include didactic tools on how to teach children on this subject.
– Online repository of educational materials for children. This will be a series of small-scale school projects for different school age groups, which can be used in different classes (language and literature, music, arts, mathematics, science, etc.). It is imperative that these materials are highly usable to a wide section of teachers and children; we will demonstrate through this material, how teachers can achieve the required learning outcomes in their programmes by using cloud-computing.
– Piloting of the newly developed educational materials for teachers and for children. We will develop materials in one and pilot it in another country, so as to ensure that everything we produce is transnationally applicable and can satisfy the needs of very different national education systems.
– Guidelines and recommendations on how to implement cloud-based computing content as a horizontal element in curricula, including tailoring recommendations so as to fit the demands of the three different national education systems that are partnering in this project.
Project deliverables:
The project will ensure the production of the following deliverables:
- Deliverable 1. Gap analysis: the use of cloud-based services in schools today vs. the possibilities of the technology in general
- Deliverable 2. Digital educational materials for teachers
- Deliverable 3. Pilot 1 (educational materials for teachers) and recommendations on the implementation
- Deliverable 4. Digital learning materials for children
- Deliverable 5. Pilot 2 (educational materials for children) and guidelines on pedagogical strategy
Project Start Date:
- 02-11-2020
Project End Date:
- 01-11-2022
Project Total Duration:
- 24 months
Total Project Budget:
- 297.563,00 EUR