These online guidelines were created within the frame of the project "Geeks for Education - ‌Inclusive‌ ‌teaching‌ ‌and‌ ‌learning‌ ‌of‌ ‌STEM‌ ‌and‌ ‌digital‌ ‌skills‌ ‌by‌ ‌leveraging‌ ‌tech‌ ‌hubs‌ ‌and‌ ‌non-formal‌ ‌education‌" (G4E), which intends to support educators to become proficient trainers and to use digital technologies and STEM in general in collaborative, creative, attractive and effective ways, as well as equip them with methods and tools to transfer know-how to different learners in an inclusive and meaningful manner, so that these skills are functional to the different challenges of today’s and tomorrow’s disruptive change of our life in all respects.

Developed under European Commission's Erasmus+ Key Action 2, G4E includes as Intelectual Output (IO) an important Self Reflection dimension, aiming to foster a baseline systematization and to create common ground amongst the partners. This IO thus aims at collecting, analyzing, and assessing the transferability of existing good practices and initiatives by assessing the current experience with regard to relevance, quality and transferability into local contexts and partners’ practice and capabilities.

One of the first phases of the Self Reflection IO is this one, which sets the stage for partners to reflect and analyze on their surrounding educational context, namely looking into schools and their STEM and digital approach, by using the SELFIE tool.

Why SELFIE?

As it is best described in the SELFIE website, "SELFIE (Self-reflection on Effective Learning by Fostering the use of Innovative Educational technologies) is a free tool designed to help schools embed digital technologies into teaching, learning and assessment. (...) SELFIE anonymously gathers the views of students, teachers and school leaders on how technology is used in their school. (...) Based on this input, the tool generates a report – a snapshot (‘SELFIE’ :-)) of a school‘s strengths and weaknesses in their use of technology. SELFIE is available for any primary, secondary and vocational schools in Europe and beyond, and in over 30 languages".

SELFIE benefits:

• "SELFIE involves the whole school community – school leaders, teachers and students – in a 360-degree process covering many areas of school practice.

• Because every school is unique, the tool can be customised. Your school can select and add questions and statements to suit your needs.

• SELFIE allows all participants to answer questions that match their experience, as students, teachers or school leaders.

• SELFIE is free of charge. Answers are anonymised and data is secure.

• You can take the assessment from a computer, tablet or smartphone.

• On completing SELFIE, each school receives a tailor-made, interactive report which provides both in-depth data and quick insights into strengths and weaknesses."

Within G4E and this specific Intellectual Output, each country will involve at least 4 schools, which will apply SELFIE. Based on the schools' reports, a final SELFIE report per country will result from this phase, allowing - together with the collection of practices also foreseen in this "Reflective analysis & benchlearning of current practices" IO - to have a transnational grasp of what approaches are out there and ho are they like.

Here below you find, firstly, the main basic information for implenting SELFIE, and secondly a step by step description on how to put it into concrete within G4E. 

Parallel to the step related to creating the conditions for the schools' engagement, it is fundamental to get yourself familiarized with SELFIE.

In order to do, you should not only browse through these guidelines, but also create your own account (which you later may delete) and proceed as if you were a school.

For exploring SELFIE, creating your account and test a bit, you will need around 2h30/4h00.

Check out the link just below to have a gist of what implement SELFIE entails, in the role of the person from the school in charge of applying it.

One of the first steps to implement SELFIE within G4E, is to get the schools up to date in what concerns the project as a whole, this specific IO and the SELFIE tool.

After contacting the schools you intend to involve, a meeting should be set up on order to allow for this presentation to take place, leaving room for probable questions and doubts.

For this meeting you will need around 1h30/2h00.

Materials for presenting the project and this IO are available on the projects Google Drive. SELFIE can be presented through these guidelines, but also using the tool's website in your own language.

You can arrange one meeting per school, have just one meeting with all four schools, or have a meeting with two schools at a time. Considering G4E foresees to involve four schools per country, if there is more than one G4E partner in your country, you should decide together how to proceed with these meetings and if you will conduct them separatly or in collaboration.

Considering the schools' characteristics, you need to address your contact person / person in charge of applying SELFIE about the possible necessity of having an extended team in the school for this implementation. After presenting the tool and based on your gained knowledge about it, discuss together who might have a role on this and what roles may take shape.

For this discussion you will need between 45 minutes to 1h30.

When identifying the person or team, please consider the ICT competence profile. It is not mandatory to involve only proficient people, but it is good to have a basic adequate level.

After having the stage set up, the first thing to do is to create the school's SELFIE account. In some schools this can be a bureacratic challenge, so make sure your contact person is taking care of any needed internal procedure to do this before hand.

It is important that the account is not created by someone not involved in implementing SELFIE, once right after creating the account some aspects relevant to applying the tool will be filled in.

The suggestion is that you can accompany this process in order to make sure there is not any kind of blocking to implementing SELFIE for technical or even administrative reasons.

For creating the account you will need between 45 to 60 minutes.

After having the account created, the school needs to fill in its profile. The suggestion is again that you can accompany this process in order to make sure there is not any kind of sifficulty that may impact on SELFIE implementation.

The procedure involves filling in the requested information about the school (i.e., School official name, default language, participation in schools' networks, school location, school type, and other data). The school profile can be updated at any time.

For filling in the profile you will need between 45 to 60 minutes.

Considering the education level of each school involved (Primary education, Lower secondary education, Upper secondary general education, Upper secondary vocational education, Post-secondary non-tertiary education) and the school members that may make sense to engage (School Leaders, Teachers, Students), you should support the school to define who will respond to SELFIE. This is also important as a basis for the next steps.

For this decision making you will need between 45 minutes to 1h30.

You should define a minimum number of participants that is realistic and pragmatic considering all the relevant variables (school demographic universe, time you have to collect replies...). As a minimum sample it is advisable not to go under one class (around 20 students, depending on the country).

Using the set of questions presented below and going through them with the teacher (having checking them yourself before hand), you should take note of what are the questions you will definetelly use, which ones can be dropped and what questions may need to be added.

The questions are organosed with regard to six common practice areas:

• Area A: Leadership

• Area B: Infrastructure and equipment

• Area C: Continuing Professional Development

• Area D: Teaching and Learning

• Area E: Assessment practices

• Area F: Student Digital Competence

The tools has a strong customization feature, so the questions and phrasing can be adapted to fit the school and G4E's intents.

For this task you will need between 2h30 and 4h00.

SELFIE allows you to In Step 1, select the educational level(s) you want to analyse, indicate the overall number of users (School Leaders, Teachers and Students) that you will invite to participate, select optional statements (predefined questions that can be added to the core set of questions), create your own statements (up to 10 new questions/statements for each educational level), select the start and end dates for implementing SELFIE (the time frame within which participants will be able to reply to it), indicate the default language that you want SELFIE to be displayed in, select the education level for which you want to generate the links, or preview the questionnaires.

You may need to do this in two phases. A first one to go through the needed elements and start testing possible responses. And a second one to revisit what you previously defined and decide on a final customization.

This steps is concluded by generating the links for the taylor-made questionnaires. Because once you generate and activate the links changes to the set-up are no longer possible, the advise is to proceed to generating the links only after going through what will be need to disseminate SELFIE among your target groups. That way, if something you had not thought about before regarding a specific aspect comes up when defining the dissemination plan, you can still make adjustments.

For this step you will need around 3h00/5h00 in total.

The first task of the school in order to disseminate SELFIE, is to design a kind of dissemination plan. Will the school simply send an email to the target audience? Will the school organise dissemination sessions? In specific classes? Just for teachers in order for them to disseminate? What role will you (the G4E partner supporting the school) take?

After deciding on the plan, the next task should be to draft the dissemination materials. Will you use a digital presentation? Will you create a small flyer? What text will you use in the email?

Only after this decisions and drafts are concluded should you in fact generate and activate the links, because once you generate and activate the links changes to the set-up are no longer possible.

After this the school, with your support, needs to proceed with the dissemination among the participants. Do not take much time after the links are generated to put the dissemination into concrete, mostly because the links have a set time frame to be used, according to your own definition.

For this step you will need around 2h30/4h00 in total.

Along the period during which the participants are filling in questionnaires, you should monitor how th participation in going on. In the Dashboard you will be able to see in real time the participation rates of all the users' groups as an interactive bar chart, including information about the number of users who have been invited to take part in and the percentage completion rate as well as the recommended minimum number for each user group.

For students, answering the questionnaire should take no more than 20 minutes, for teachers and school leaders no more than 40. However, the questionnaire must be completed within two hours of starting, or the answers will be lost.

After submitting his/her answers each user may personalise and download a certificate of participation (the names entered to personalise the certificates are NOT stored as participation in SELFIE is always anonymous).

As a dissemination tool, don't forget you have the videos below (for teacher on the left and for students on the right) also available for your language.

The SELFIE platform will generate automatically your school report, which will be available the day after the deadline you defined. To see the school report, you will need to choose the education level which results you want to be displayed. 

If one of the user groups didn't participate, your report would have a watermark indication of incomplete participation, while if the completion rates are too low, no results will be shown. If the school has had a low level of participation, the results should be viewed with caution, as they may not be entirely representative of the school situation. The higher the response rates in SELFIE, the more accurate and useful the information provided through the report will be.

The SELFIE school report can be used as a basis for reflection and discussion within the whole school community. It offers an overview of each of the SELFIE areas, showing the average rates of each by user group; results per area showing the average rating for each statement within a given area; results per user, showing the average responses per user group for all statements.

School leaders, teachers and students should be brought together, to discuss the strengths and weaknesses identified in the SELFIE school report. The school may use this information to develop an action plan, which should define precisely what needs to be done in order to ensure that the objective is achieved. Only after this discussion session the process of implementing the SELFIE in the school is concluded.

For this step you will need around 2h30/4h00 in total.

Remember that for G4E a country report compiling all school reports results will be created. For this further instructions will be provided later on.

Considering the maximum duration each stage may have, we may have in total ... hours of work with the schools.

1. G4E and SELFIE Presentation: max 2h00

2. Team Definition: max 1h30

3. Creation of School Account: max 1h00

4. Filling in School Profile: max 1h00

5. SELFIE Participants Definition: max 1h30

6. SELFIE Questions Selection: max 4h00

7. SELFIE Customization: max 5h00

8. Dissemination Strategy: max 4h00

Here below there is an example of a calendar view of this time allocation for one school. Some of the time slots can be used for more than one school, but you should create your own plan considering the specific reality of your schools.