EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

Scoilnet

Scoilnet is a portal providing access to educational information and curriculum and training materials for teachers. It focuses on providing teachers and students with access to curriculum-relevant learning resources that support the integration of ICT in learning and teaching.

The “Resource Finder” in Scoilnet allows users to search for teaching and learning resources by curriculum, subject, strand and topic. The resource finder currently contains 11,000+ resources, all of which have been reviewed, described and categorised by Irish teachers. The majority of the resources are links to external educational web resources. Some user-generated content is also included.

In collaboration with Irish teachers, Scoilnet has developed a range of added value curriculum content, such as quizzes, theme pages, crosswords, interactive timelines, drag-n-drop interactives and image explorer interactives that serve the needs of the Irish curriculum.

Traffic to Scoilnet continues to rise year-on-year. In the month of January (2010), there were 1.1 million visitors to the site and 2.19 million page views.

Scoilnet has recently integrated results from other digital content repositories within its search facility. Following a keyword search, users can elect to view results for their search term from the EUN’s Learning Resource Exchange, Imagebank and Encyclopaedia Britannica (see below).

Commercial Digital Content for Schools

(1) Reference Content
In 2009, following an EU public procurement process, the NCTE licensed World Book Online and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Schools Edition for use in all Irish primary and post-primary schools. The encyclopaedias are accessible through the Scoilnet.ie portal and the Schools Broadband Network. The availability of these products has been warmly welcomed by teachers and students.
(2) Mapping Data
In 2007 the NCTE licensed all of Ordnance Survey Ireland’s mapping data for use in second-level schools. Particularly relevant to the Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate Geography syllabuses, this data also includes historical mapping data from 1830. The mapping data is licensed for use in all second-level schools via the Scoilnet Maps website (http://maps.scoilnet.ie) and the Schools Broadband Network. Scoilnet Maps uses a web-based map viewer developed by a UK company (WebBased) and this web-based viewer offers many additional features that support educational use of digital mapping and the sharing of user-generated content. Thematic data, such as census data and geological data, are also available as themed layers within Scoilnet Maps.

French.ie and German.ie

Two satellite sites of Scoilnet were developed in 2007 and 2009 respectively to support modern languages learning and teaching in second-level schools. These sites were collaborative projects with the French and Austrian embassies, the Goethe Institute, the French and German Teachers’ Associations, NUI Maynooth (university) and the Department of Education Inspectorate. Scoilnet’s “resource finder” provides a central focus in both sites with hundreds of relevant weblinks to educational materials appropriate for learning French and German. A range of additional learning resources (podcasts, worksheets, quizzes, dossiers and videos) are also featured on the two websites.

User-Generated Content – ImageBank

Imagebank is an online photo library that focuses on providing photos of Irish places and spaces for use in education. Created in 2007, it is NCTE’s first project promoting the use of Creative Commons licensing for educational content. There are 4,000 images currently in ImageBank and traffic to the site has improved since the integrated images search within the main Scoilnet site (2009).

Irish Times Digital Archive

One of Ireland’s oldest newspapers, the Irish Times archive was digitised and published online in 2007. Although usually only available to subscribers of the newspaper, the Irish Times have made this valuable resource available to all Irish schools via the ‘Ask About Ireland’ website and the Schools Broadband Network. The archive includes content from 1859-2007 and is particularly relevant to the subjects of English and History. It is a fully searchable archive.

IMMERSE

The IMMERSE partnership was formed in 2002 by Ireland’s national broadcaster (RTÉ) and NCTE to create content for primary Visual Arts and Science, and post-primary Science. In 2003-4 the initiative produced three websites and 75 videos directly related to the revised school curricula. In 2005, the partnership collaborated to source clips from the RTÉ TV and radio archives that supported Leaving Certificate History. In collaboration with History teachers, 38 clips were sourced and published on the Look At History website.

NDLR – National Digital Learning Repository

The NDLR is a pilot project between all Irish Universities, Institutes of Technology and their affiliated colleges. It is funded by the Higher Education Authority. The NDLR is an online resource bank to support collaboration and sharing of teaching and learning resources within the Irish third-level education sector.

Its aims include making digital learning resources from the Communities of Practice available within the NDLR for use in teaching and learning.