We arrived at Istitut Riberra Baixa which is a Secondary School in El Prat de Llobregat and were welcomed by Miquel de la Torre (Head Teacher), Angels Chover (Principal Teacher of Computing) and Iñaki Garay (Principal Teacher of English). We were told about the background of the school and the fact that it caters for three levels of education within the one establishment. It has standard secondary provision but it also has a considerable vocational element for over eighteens mainly delivering courses in Computing Science, Business and Logistics. It also has a special unit supporting pupils and families who are new to the country and don’t have Catalan or Spanish as their native language. We were taken on a guided tour of the school and saw some of the the Computing and Logistics classes.
The classes in the secondary school were noot purpose-built for specific subjects the way they would be in Scotland. Technical and Science classes were normal rooms which had some additional benching and machinery added. It was also noticeable that there was not the same attention to health and safety with equipment not meeting low voltage and security shut-off requirenments and there was no attempt to provide additional ventillation or dust removal.
In Computing, teachers had greater scope in the range of content they could teach (Java, PHP, Android etc) but there was no formal official qualification being offered. This would only happen at University level. They also didn’t have the security measures in place which we have in our schools and although they were happy to access Skype, Facebook, Twitter and youtube, they have had serious problems with viruses and hackers. On one occasion a hacker had wiped their entire online content platform.
The main input from the secondary school in supporting the Comenius Project is from Angels who is currently creating on-line content delivery to support the other materials already developed for the primary school. We should be given access to these materials when they go live. Next week, Angels will start training primary teachers on how to create content using authoring tools called JClick.
