About the project
The main goal of the project is to coordinate and support the creation of sustainable multi-level Regional Innovation Hubs in local communities across Europe, each fostering the scaling of the digital innovation. iHub4Schools proposes an adaptive and flexible whole-school peer-learning mentoring model built on the innovation hubs.
The model consists of several core components and auxiliary approaches selected by the schools based on their needs. The model combines the school’s whole-school level improvement practices with the co-creation of the technology-enhanced pedagogical practices in collaboration with the teachers
Target group
The major goal of iHub4Schools is to bridge the research, practice and policies.
1) Teachers and schools – The partnership activities will provide the schools with guidelines and resources on how to support whole-school level adoption of digital innovation, implement evidence- informed practices in leadership level and instructional practices. Schools will obtain a way to institutionalize the support and adoption of digital innovation in education.
2) Teacher training institutions – The partnership activities support teacher training institutions to explore new methods of teacher professional development. The project’s activities will help in the establishment of more attractive, practice-oriented training programs. These programs will enable teachers to promote novel teaching practices, classroom level data collection and inquiry practices and the approaches. Also, they will benefit from the recommendations and guidelines on how to better support less advanced schools and teachers to adopt digital innovation in education in instructional practices and whole-school level improvement processes.
3) Scientific community – The partnership activities will provide new insights on how to scale and monitor the adoption of digital innovation in multi-stakeholder networks. Researchers are integrated to build a closer relationship with the community of digital innovation in education. This will make the scientific community understand the needs much better, which is expected to have an influence in their future research and can also be seen as a channel for researchers to disseminate their work and share research-based novel approaches in the field of digital innovation.
4) Educational Technology companies – Inclusion of educational technology companies into iHub4Schools activities (as part of the piloting process) will offer them the possibility to improve their engagement with local stakeholders, including public educational institutions, third-sector organizations (e.g. teacher networks) or other companies. Thus, they will further understand the needs of the local stakeholders, they will increase the awareness of their activities in the local community, and they will be better perceived by local stakeholders.
5) Policy bodies – Partnerships ensure genuine interaction between research and policy/practice by bringing together academic partners with strong policy/practice orientations with Europe-wide experience of engagement with the research community.
Knowledge exchange with stakeholders will be amplified through cooperation with other European projects including MenSi, SEIS project, Illumine. We aim to provide a framework, the best practices and the policy recommendations on how to scale up digital innovation through mentoring and peer learning.
Mentoring model
The aim of the School mentoring model is to foster the adoption of digital innovation at school level. The focus is on teachers’ understanding of digital technology and practices to implement technology in a pedagogically meaningful way. The model promotes teachers’ professional learning with peers and school management to create the culture and practices for evidence-informed implementation of digital innovation. The model is created in the iHub4Schools project (2021-2023).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Project Number: 101004676
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