We continue our “Meet Our Members” section with Vasilis Manassakis and Giorgos Panselinas from the Regional Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education of Crete.

Could you tell us a little bit about your organisation’s mission? (Vasilis M.)

Regional Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education in Crete, is a large educational organization in Greece which is responsible for schools and teachers in four Prefectures, Heraklion, Rethimnon Chania and Lasithi.

It is in charge of 1100 schools of both levels of education :

  • Primary Education : 866 schools
  • Secondary Education : 234 schools
  • 117 junior high schools,
  • 74 high schools,
  • 43 vocational schools.

Also a number of 12445 teachers of all disciplines work in these schools :

  • Primary Education : 6460 teachers
  • Secondary Education: 5985 teachers

The total number of students in the region of Crete is 98552 :

  • Primary Education : 54065 students
  • Secondary Education : 44487 students

The main task of Regional Directorate is to coordinate and implement the educational policies of the Ministry, guide pedagogically the teachers in the entire region of Crete and implement various education projects, like European projects, in schools.

How does CRISS fit with this mission? (Vasilis M.)

CRISS fits in a high extent our mission because as an educational authority by adopting new learning environments based on ICT,  we are able to help students to become more motivated and therefore more creative reducing the extent to which they connected with the old-fashioned pedagogical models while giving the teachers a tool to include innovative teaching techniques in their educational environment.

What is your role in the CRISS project? (Vasilis M.)

– Implementing the on-site pilot phase in Greece :

  • 15 schools,
  • 60 teachers,
  • 1000 students

– Participating in the widespread of the online pilot phase and the project objectives and outcomes.

– Collaborating in the definition of the methodology framework for digital competences acquisition and certification.

– Supporting activities and organise training workshops.

– Evaluating the pilots results and prepare best practices and recommendations for a public procurement innovation procedure to adopt CRISS.

– Press releases to local, regional and/or national press media, presentations at at national conferences, workshops and seminars and finally Promotion in our dissemination tools :

In your opinion, which of the digital competences listed by the EU do you find most important? Why? (Giorgos P.)

In my opinion the most important are:

DigiComp2.0

1.Information and data literacy: 1.2 Evaluating data, information and digital content . It is a very crucial digital competence in the 21st century when “fake news” have overwhelmed the WWW, when Tim Berners Lee himself calls for action with regard to fake news in WWW (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39246810).

  1. Digital content creation: 3.4 Programming

For students “it’s not enough to understand how to use an app or program; we need youngsters who can create their own programs” (European Commision, 2017)

How can we make students more engaged with ICT education? (Giorgos P.)

We must make sure students cope with authentic real world problems that can be solved using ICT. We must let them use their imagination and creativity to build and test ICT models that solve these problems. This is that makes the ICT learning activity interesting and fruitful for the students.

What is the most exciting aspect of taking part in CRISS for you and your organisation? (Giorgos P.)

It is exciting that we will test in our schools cross-curriclular project-based learning not only for students acquiring ICT competences but also creating a certification system that could be disseminated and applied in European level.