Coordinator for Skillman Germany
The figure above shows the criteria of CoVEs Skillman.eu has elaborated to a self-assessment tool as a basis for the continuous further development of VET providers
General information
The educational opportunities offered by the “Berufliche Schule ITECH Elbinsel Wilhelmsburg” are diverse. ITECH offers dual vocational training in information technology, electrical and chemical engineering. Apart from vocational training, our school enables our students to prepare for future training, to gain the general higher entrance qualification (A-Level) or the subject-related entrance qualification on a full-time level. In 2021, we implemented an offer a study-integrated training program in cooperation with the “Berufliche Hochschule Hamburg (Bachelor Computer Science)”.
Apprentices will start at level 4 (EQF) and will graduate at level 6 after 4 years.
About 2,000 students are enrolled in our 3-year-programs of vocational training (software development / IT systems engineering / chemical engineering / electrical engineering).
These programs are a combination of school and training embedded in a real-life work environment (companies). Up to 200 students take part in the full-time programs in order to prepare for vocational training or further educational programs. There are about 80 teachers and 10 non-educational employees. In addition to having many students with a migration background, since 2015 there has been a comparatively larger proportion of trainees with a refugee background especially in the area of information technology professions.
Our challenges and resulting developments
The heterogeneity of our students requires individual solutions that optimally support all students and ensure educational equality. Over the last few years, we have therefore already intensively developed innovative concepts in all areas that overcome these challenges and implement them constructively in our everyday school life.
Our students need, depending on their individual background:
- Intensive personal support
- Language support that also takes into account the job-specific requirements
- Instructional offers that enable close integration with the rapidly changing requirements of professional reality (keyword „digitalization“)
Furthermore, we are in the process of building a support system for high-achieving students through scholarships and thereby allow them to take part in our exchange programs.
Over the past six years at ITECH we have changed our teaching culture towards individualized
and self-organized learning, a concept called „SkiL“ which stands for self-responsible competence-oriented individualised learning. About 50 colleagues had been involved in this successful project. We are used to working in agile teams and developing learning arrangements together. We regularly involve other schools and institutes in our work. This gives us experience of community work beyond the school boundaries. We offer learning arrangements with individual learning paths.
National Award and International Collaboration
Our approach of blended learning is far advanced and led to winning the German national school award.
Our international collaboration has been intensified since 2017. We implemented agile workshop formats with international composed groups in 2020 into our curricula. These three-week design entrepreneur workshops were organized among others with Taipeh (Design Students), Chicago (Business Administration), Cordoba, Prague, Paris and Sibiu (Romania). Challenges are taken from SDGs or from Citizen Associations giving us real world problems. Results of these workshops are shown on www.designentrepreneuershipworkshop.org.
Equipment
As a school with about 1,400 IT students enrolled we do have a strong IT background. We use the learning management system Moodle as well as the e-portfolio platform Mahara and integrate further digital tools such as BigBlueButton, Trello, MindMeister, Padlet and LinkedIn Learning, but also Socrative, Mentimeter, Kahoot! and the like, in order to collaboratively exchange positions, collect statistics and check what has been learned – also in competition and playfully. We regularly evaluate the possibilities of the platforms and tools and adapt them in the sense of a continuous improvement process. To ensure that all systems relevant to our teaching/learning offerings can be used reliably, flexible, securely and with high performance, we offer a very well-developed WLAN and LAN with self-contained subnetworks for different user groups and provide the digital learning and work platforms in such a way that they can be used from any learning and work location. We use redundancy and protection methods to ensure high availability (24/7) and data protection. In fall/winter 2019, we brought all these measures together in our digitization concept „digITECH“ and applied for the delina innovation award for digital education. We achieved second place in the „Education and Training“ category.
The Profile
Topics for collaboration
ITECH is open for a partnership in following areas:
- Development of Teacher Training for Agile Workshop Formats
- Design of Hackathons for Education for Sustainable Development
- Testbed for the Evaluation of the approach SkiL and the agile workshop formats
- Level5 Recognition
- International Mobility of Apprentices
- Study integrated VET with the Vocational University Hamburg
Current projects
- Coble – Individualized collaborative blended learning design
- EduTrans21 – Educational Transformation for the 21st century
edutrans21.eu - WIN4SME – Workplace innovation for SME
- Integration of SDGs into school curricula
Topics for future projects
- Development and Recognition of Micro-Credentials
- AI in Education
- VR and AR
- New approaches for teacher collaboration (Metaverse)
Possible Roles in Projects
- Development
- Piloting
- Testbed
For more information, please contact: