1) How are we going to ensure that these laptops are used effectively to increase the learning process of our students? Which didactics are we going to apply and how can we learn from each other? Throughout this project we wanted to discover how other schools in Europe deal with this and how they approach this. We wanted to prevent these laptops from becoming a burden rather than an opportunity for our school. 2) How are we going to ensure that students and teachers use these laptops in a safe way? We noticed that students, but also teachers, do not always know how to work digitally in a good and safe way. They are confronted with fake news, hacking, social media, phishing, ... We wanted to help students and teachers become more skilled in this through this project. 3) How are we going to train teachers and students to optimally discover and use their digital skills. During the corona crisis, we had to quickly switch to online education. We noticed that for some teachers and for a large group of students this was not at all obvious. We wanted to achieve with this project that teachers and students can learn from each other.
In order to accelerate digitization in education, Flemish Minister of Education Ben Weyts launched the digisprong. Its purpose was to ensure that every student would have his or her own laptop and could use it at school. Schools were given a budget (510 euros per pupil) for this purpose. This was also the case for our school, Sint-Paulusschool campus Hemelvaart. We are a secondary school with a great diversity of pupils following directions at different levels. In consultation with the school council and the co-determination board of the Sint-Paulusschool, it was decided what type of laptop would be involved. Therefore, on September 1, 2022, every student from our school had a laptop. We had had to rapidly switch to online teaching and more digital didactics at our school during the previous corona crisis and had found that this did present some challenges. So now that every student had a laptop, the question was how to use it properly and how to use it to achieve maximum learning gains. All this was the impetus for us to start this project.