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Educational Advisory Centre,
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| Contact: John Rullestad john.rullestad@karmoyped.no | |
Karmøy is a municipality on the west coast of Norway just north of Stavanger.
There are 37 000 inhabitants in the municipality, 6000 pupils in the age group
6-16 and about 600 teachers in its 29 schools. Some schools are rural whilst
others serve larger population in the small urban areas. The smallest school at
primary level has just nine pupils, others have so few pupils that year groups
are merged to form larger classes. The largest school, a combined primary and
secondary school, has 450 pupils
Pedagogisk Senter Karmøy (Educational Advisory Service), Norway, is a department
within the Director of Education and Culture’s office in Karmøy. Pedagogisk
Senter has responsibility for all in-service training for 700 teachers employed
in pre-school, primary, secondary and adult education and 90 support staff as
well as being responsible for educational innovation in its schools and has a
resource centre with all educational materials that are used in Norwegian
schools
At the Educational Advisory Service (Pedagogisk Senter) there is a staff of 11
people: Head of the Services, nine educational advisors and one secretary.
The main working areas for the Educational Advisory Service are to:
• Strengthen educational innovation in the schools
• Cater for in-service-training for teachers
• Stimulate local post-graduate courses
• Advise on methodology and within subject-related areas
• Convey and co-ordinate practical-pedagogical initiatives
• Advise everyone in the school community: pupils, teachers and parents
• Implement evaluation in schools
• Organise and develop school management programmes
The Norwegian curriculum plan L-97 has as its basic ideas that it should give the pupils in greater extent learning by doing.
The pupils shall examine, research, search, collaborate, compare,
discover…
The verbs in the curriculum plan leaves no doubt of what kind of school we wish
to create:
A school with active, creative pupils who work scientifically.
In Karmøy we have decided to relate these basic ideas through the expression:
A pupil-active school
To fulfil the vision about a pupil-active school, we have decided to work within the following areas for the period 2003-2006:
• School libraries
• ICT
• ICT in Special Education
• Raising of competence in schools, both in subjects and didactically
• Networking newly-qualified teachers
• Classroom development /Anti-bullying
• Internationalisation
• Evaluation
• The Cultural Dimension in Schools
The Department of Education and Culture, The Educational Advisory Office and many schools in Karmøy have been involved in more than 30 different EU-funded projects since 1996. Some of these are:
SLAM - School Libraries as MultiMedia Centres
www.slampro.net
GRAND SLAM - General Research And New Development in School Libraries As
Multimedia learning centres
www.gslam.pro
JUSTICE - Joint Unifying Stratgeies on the Teaching of InterCultural
Education
www.karmoyped.no/justice
COMPASS - Competencies for Achieving Successful Schools
www.compass-project.net/
MANY COLOURS -
www.karmoyped.no/manycolours
TRANSPRO - Transnational educational projects using the project method and
ICT in in-service-training for teachers
http://it.pedf.cuni.cz/transpro
and http://it.pedf.cuni.cz/inverness
REHAB - how to rehabilitate/habilitate adults with special needs to have a
meaningful life in their own community
www.karmoyped.no/rehab
Schools in the Karmøy district have been engaged in ODL methods through EU based projects for several years. In collaboration with the Danish Pedagogical University, the Educational Advisory Service ran a four-semester post-graduate degree course for school librarians as an ODL-based course. 31 teachers in Karmøy completed this degree course.
The Norwegian national Socrates Agency, SIU, has also used teachers/advisors from Karmøy to promote the Socrates programme at local, regional and national level in Norway as well as writing articles in educational magazines.
The Educational Advisory Service has for the last three years been responsible for a yearly three-day national conference on secondary education where more than 500 educators, national politicians, and school managers take part.
Contact: john.rullestad@karmoyped.no