A future-focus and a willingness to look beyond traditional forms of learning are central to ensuring that education can meet the needs of Europe’s knowledge societies.
Multilingualism and ICT literacy are cornerstones of the key competencies that future European citizens need to gain through education. Educators infrequently use social media, whereas for students, social media is an integral part of their daily environment, their life style. Students often use foreign languages as they operate in social media. Teachers do not necessarily recognise the extent to which this is taking place and formal education has not adapted to it.
The presentation will focus on this contradiction while introducing the CLIL Cascade Network and its platform, and argue how the CCN platform can help decrease this generation gap.
The presentation will first set the context by reviewing some general global trends that shape education and the results of some recent EU-surveys on the access and use of ICT in European schools. This will include a description of the changing role of teachers.
The primary focus will be on describing and demonstrating the functions of the CLIL Cascade Network Platform. These include networking, teaching and learning, and professional development. Finally, planned CCN future developments will be detailed and examples of future practices will be presented. These will include the promotion of new learning environments and new approaches, restructuring work in classrooms, work beyond the classroom walls, rethinking resources, and most importantly, building a pan-European CLIL community through CCN..
