When Sugata Mitra won the TED Prize and worldwide fame for his speech on schools in the cloud in 2013, he wasn’t thinking about building skyscraper schools, nor were his words a metaphor for successful schools aiming high. The Newcastle University professor wanted to create a self-organized digital environment for students to exchange information and learn from one another, and his idea lit the world on fire.
In 1999, Mitra installed a computer in the wall of a building in rural India for local children to discover and do with as they please. What happened next was amazing: the children quickly learned to use it to do things without being taught or supervised by adults. The professor then started a number of digital labs in India where students would embark on intellectual adventures online.
Today, the phrase “school in the cloud” has a very specific meaning. Large and small technology companies offer cloud-based platforms to help schools manage learning content and administrative processes and students share their homework and give one another feedback. Google and Microsoft provide Bulgarian schools with the most popular cloud education platforms free of charge.
“More than 100 Bulgarian schools are bravely entering the cloud, and their number will double in the next few months,” says Stefan Kuzmanov, a software engineer from the Center for Creative Training (CCT), one of Google’s partners in Bulgaria and an important partner to the ABF-supported Schools of the Future.
In the fall of 2017, the city of Plovdiv started developing a digital work environment for all schools on its territory. In short, Plovdiv is now in the cloud. The city of Varna is following in its footsteps. CCT supports both cities actively.
“The cloud isn’t going away. The world isn’t talking about whether we need educational technologies anymore. That would be like asking whether we need electricity. The important question is how technology can make education more effective, more accessible to all children, and better,” says Natalia Miteva, education program director at ABF. This requires very careful planning of what technologies to use in the learning process. The goal isn’t to “digitize the status quo” but to move toward more interactive learning and teaching, where students have a leading role.
Educational technology specialists play a key role in schools. Professors from Columbia University in New York have trained 35 such specialists as part of ABF programs over the past two years. One of them is Iva Assenova, deputy director of educational technologies at Elisaveta Bagryana School 51 in Sofia. The school will be in the cloud from the fall. Its students will use smartphones to find information and share their projects.
