Miracles do happen

These days when the West Jet Christmas video is going viral, I've been thinking about the message it conveys - Miracles do happen if we all work as one. Yes, I know, it's a fairy tale, but still, I want to believe and I do believe that miracles really happen - if we join forces we can make things happen, do the unthinkable, make dreams come true!

Take my school for example. It's old, it desperately needs a complete makeover, which will most likely not happen, not even in the distant future, with all these cuts in the field of education (unfortunately, my government doesn't understand that investing in education brings prosperity to a country).

This time last year our computer lab looked like this:

Today it looks totally different:

Inspired by the Future Classroom Lab in Brussels, it is now a flexible learning space that motivates students, sparks creativity and instills the love of learning and teaching.

I've written about it so many times before here and here and recently I was invited to lead a webinar for the Living Schools Lab, a project coordinated by theEuropean Schoolnet, and to talk about how we managed to create such a creative space. The recording is here and the presentation is below:

A Little Bit of Magic in the Croatian Future Classroom from Arjana Blazic

The video about how Samsung School Solution is used at my school:

Samsung Smart School at my school

One of my favourite websites that I visit daily is European Schoolnet. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to find the link to one of my blog posts on their Future Classroom Lab Press Review page. The said blog post was about my visit to the FCL back in October 2012. I wrote about a course on iBook Author that I attended and in the post I also lamented about not being able to implement this tool in my school due to the lack of equipment. And I hoped for that "post to be read by a good soul who wants to donate iPads to my school or otherwise I doubt I'll teach with iPads in the near future."

And guess what!!! The good soul appeared in the form of CARNet  - the Croatian Academic and Research Network - who have just been awarded the Euroepan Prize for Innovation in Public Administration for the project Schools 2.0 -  in which I'm proudly taking part as an expert teacher.

Anyway, they invited Sonja and me to pilot the Samsung Smart School program with Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets at our school! Of course we accepted it wholeheartedly and now, six months later, with unreserved support from our principal, Ms Svea Bielen and also from the CARNet and Samsung staff, we're ready to embark on a new journey. To our delight and thanks to the City of Zagreb's donation, we have a new and lively Future Classroom where we'll be piloting the Smart School program.

About 15 teachers from my school are involved in the pilot project and will use technology for teaching in order to see if it really works and if it really does wonders. We'll be comparing and showing the differences on how our students have mastered a certain topic with and without technology. The official launch of the pilot is September 2013. However I was too eager to wait so I did my first lesson in my German class yesterday. My students were absolutely delighted and so was I. Together we were discovering the possibilities that Samsung Smart School offers. There's still a lot for me/us to learn, but I know now that this is just my cup of tea.  So stay tuned for first-hand updates.