Samsung Smart School at my school

One of my favourite websites that I visit daily is European Schoolnet. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to find the link to one of my blog posts on their Future Classroom Lab Press Review page. The said blog post was about my visit to the FCL back in October 2012. I wrote about a course on iBook Author that I attended and in the post I also lamented about not being able to implement this tool in my school due to the lack of equipment. And I hoped for that "post to be read by a good soul who wants to donate iPads to my school or otherwise I doubt I'll teach with iPads in the near future."

And guess what!!! The good soul appeared in the form of CARNet  - the Croatian Academic and Research Network - who have just been awarded the Euroepan Prize for Innovation in Public Administration for the project Schools 2.0 -  in which I'm proudly taking part as an expert teacher.

Anyway, they invited Sonja and me to pilot the Samsung Smart School program with Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets at our school! Of course we accepted it wholeheartedly and now, six months later, with unreserved support from our principal, Ms Svea Bielen and also from the CARNet and Samsung staff, we're ready to embark on a new journey. To our delight and thanks to the City of Zagreb's donation, we have a new and lively Future Classroom where we'll be piloting the Smart School program.

About 15 teachers from my school are involved in the pilot project and will use technology for teaching in order to see if it really works and if it really does wonders. We'll be comparing and showing the differences on how our students have mastered a certain topic with and without technology. The official launch of the pilot is September 2013. However I was too eager to wait so I did my first lesson in my German class yesterday. My students were absolutely delighted and so was I. Together we were discovering the possibilities that Samsung Smart School offers. There's still a lot for me/us to learn, but I know now that this is just my cup of tea.  So stay tuned for first-hand updates.