Day 4

          On Thursday we visited the MTG secondary school in Erlangen, where Christine Altmann received us. It has about 850 students from 5th to 12th grade and 51 classrooms. It employs around 80 teachers, mostly women and half of them part-time employed, who are municipal officials. Classes have a maximum of 30 students, and 16% of the students come from immigrant backgrounds, although the majority are from well-off families.

          In terms of digital resources, MTG has four iPad suitcases managed externally, as well as three computer labs that must be reserved.  An external team manages the school's firewall, though students are known to find ways to bypass it.​ They follow a set of rules for the use of digital devices.

          We learned about the Netzgänger project, a prevention initiative on the responsible use of the internet and social networks aimed at secondary school students, with an approach where older students mentor the younger ones, on topics such as cyberbullying, data protection, social media and self-esteem, and virtual gaming worlds. We also saw the role of media managers, two students responsible for ensuring the proper use of digital media; their duties include overseeing correct session logouts, turning off projectors, promoting adherence to media usage rules, reporting technical issues to the IT team, and supervising the appropriate use of iPad sets.​

          Teachers use a variety of digital tools in their work. For internal management, communication with families, entering grades (not calculating them), reports, etc, they choose Infoportal, aiming to become a paperless school. For sharing content, they decided BayernCloud Schule, which is free, data-safe and they don't need to create an extra account; it contains a platform called Lernplattform, similar to Moodle (teachers can see content uploaded by colleagues on Lernplatform but cannot access it unless shared). and applications such as Tafel for the digital whiteboard, Aufgabe for collecting assignments and H5P for interactive content.

          We also had the opportunity to observe a 9th-grade mathematics class taught in English, during which student's worked with iPads.