Open Discovery Space A socially powered educational portal supporting the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe Dr. Sofoklis Sotiriou - ODS Project Manager Dr. Davide Poletto - UNESCO Venice Office Project Officer

Open Discovery Space Aims Open Discovery Space aims to serve as an accelerator of the sharing, adoption, usage, and re- purposing of the already rich existing educational content base. It will demonstrate ways to involve school communities in innovative teaching and learning practices through the effective use of eLearning resources. It will promote community building between numerous schools of Europe and empower them to use, share and exploit unique resources from a wealth of educational repositories, within meaningful educational activities. It will demonstrate the potential of eLearning resources to meet the educational needs of these communities, supported by European Web portal: a community-oriented social platform where teachers, pupils and parents will be able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt eLearning resources on their topics of interest. Finally, it will assess the impact and document the whole process into a a roadmap that will include guidelines for the design and implementation of effective resource-based educational activities that could act as a reference to be adopted by stakeholders in school education.

The Open Discovery Space running version, offering access to a critical mass of 1M learning resources (

Socially-powered portal

Large Scale Pilots: 2000 schools (including 100 rural schools) Taking advantage from National Initiatives

Potential Impact

UNESCO Venice Office Contribution to ODS Mission Status: UNESCO Venice Office, regional bureau for science and culture mandate is to foster cooperation, contribute to capacity building and to provide specialized expertise in science and culture with special emphasis to SEE (South East Europe). UVO will be engaged in promoting ICT capacity building of ASPnet Schools of Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus through ODS. In particular it will: 1.Identify primary&secondary Schools from the UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network (ASPnet) in target countries and related focal points (July-September 2012); 2.Assess their ICT exploitation capacity in education (e-maturity - October-December 2012) and elaborate a first report on the matter (January- March 2013).

UNESCO Venice Office Contribution to ODS 3. Co-organise, in collaboration with ODS national coordinators, UNESCO NatCom, National Educational and National Scientific authorities and with the participation of selected UNESCO Schools from the target countries, regional visionary workshop(s) to be possibly embodied in a major scientific event, with the aim of: Disseminate and share narratives from the Region of successful use of ICT in education; Open a steered debate on the potentialities and obstacles related to ICT exploitation in the region and basic requirements to be met; Incubate new ideas for possible innovative ICT used based scenarios to be implemented in the Region; Present ODS resources and incentives to be put at the service of Schools and teachers willing to turn their ideas in concrete scenarios by using ICT based applications and resources for education, in particular to Science education; Involve committed schools into a regional/international UNESCO-ODS contest for the UNESCO –ODS award to the best case scenarios developed in the school settings.

THANK YOU Contacts Sofoklis Sotiriou - Ellinogermaniki Agogi Davide Poletto - UNESCO Venice Office