Day 4 The digital transformation of the city of Pori

Introduction

The day started at Cygnaeus primary school where we were received by the schoolmaster and we enjoyed a nice chat on how this international school develops the exact same Finnish national curriculum- 2014 as any other Finnish school, with the only difference being that subjects are taught in English. After the tour around the school, we had the chance to attend an English class, where we played with students a lovely Kahoot about flags.

How Pori and its schools underwent the digital transformation

  • The lecture by Teemu Heino, the digital transformation manager of the city of Pori enlightened us with the details of a complicated process that started in 2015 and which with the appearance of COVID showed how pioneering it had been.

  • The infrastructure they have in every classroom consists of a digital touch screen 86 inches with a sound system, a document camera and a Windows PC. Students from 3rd primary school onwards belong to the student 1 to 1 laptop program which means that they use a Chromebook provided by the government, which is later replaced in Secondary school with a more sophisticated one. Students from a younger age have also Chromebooks in the classrooms which are used ocasionally so that they are familiarised with the equipment and the Google Workspace.

  • It is important to highlight how they develop this Pori Virtual School, building steering groups formed by the head of ICT and education and representative teachers from each school, so everybody is engaged in the process of development.

  • Some interesting technical aspects are that all the schools share the same domain so this means that they have a common Google Workspace console edupori.fi

  • An aspect that also interested some participants and concretely is our organisation is how the city of Pori uses Google Analytics in order to improve constantly. We will learn more about it in future mobilities and online gatherings.


The system of Pori Virtual School


Google Classroom and Google Tools