Thanks to SELFIE, the European Commission’s tool for schools to self-evaluate their digital competency, thousands of educational institutions in Europe (and beyond) are getting a clearer vision of their school’s digital capacity. Now SELFIE PTK is here to help those schools gain a practical sense of their SELFIE results and put that understanding into concrete action to enhance digital capacity. This key output of the SHERPA project is a tangible contribution to the development of a SELFIE ecosystem for improving digital education in Europe, as set out in the EC’s Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027.
SELFIE PTK is a free, comprehensive toolkit that helps individual schools draw on the wealth of information contained in their SELFIE self-evaluation report and use it as a starting point to devise their own digital action plan. The toolkit includes step-by-step guidelines schools can follow for reviewing their SELFIE Report, fixing digital education priorities, and setting appropriate goals. Crucially, SELFIE PTK provides schools with the tools and resources they need to develop a customized SELFIE-based action plan, and offers them support both for implementing it and for evaluating outcomes.
Ultimately, the SELFIE-based Action Plan that a school devises and enacts using SELFIE PTK can involve the whole learning community. However, the toolkit itself is primarily destined for use by a specific taskforce, the SELFIE PTK School Coordinating Team. This group normally comprises the school’s SELFIE coordinator, the school head, and other key figures like subject-area coordinators, ICT coordinator, and digital education teacher, as well as those responsible for school evaluation, staff training and development.
Working closely together, the Coordinating Team uses SELFIE PTK to review and interpret the school’s SELFIE Report, set digital education priorities and goals, devise the SELFIE-based Action Plan, and oversee its execution. The Team is also responsible for getting the school’s leadership on board and involving teaching staff by sharing the Plan’s objectives and securing participation in the activities it proposes. The Team monitors how those actions are put into practice, reviews the results they generate, and shares the results with the whole school.
To find out more, visit the SELFIE PTK website, which is currently available in English, Greek, Finnish and Italian (with a Portuguese version on the way). This site provides easy online access to the toolkit’s many features: clear guides, authoring templates, tips, examples, and other helpful resources. And because School Coordinating Teams work in different ways, SELFIE PTK can also be downloaded as a single package for offline use in digital or printed formats.
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To help them through the whole process, Coordinating Teams can also access the #SELFIEPTKMOOC, a free, self-paced online course that presents the toolkit, illustrates its features, and explains how it can be put it into practice.
DEVELOPMENT & EVOLUTION OF SELFIE PTK
SELFIE PTK was developed by two SHERPA partners, the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (CPI) and the Italian Research Council’s Institute for Education Technology (CNR-ITD). Following an initial background study of similar initiatives, CNR-ITD devised a conceptual model for the initial draft version of the toolkit. The model and draft toolkit were investigated and then validated by a group of European education experts in a special online interactive Validation Workshop held online in October 2020. The workshop confirmed the soundness, applicability and extensibility of the draft toolkit and conceptual model, providing valuable input for development of SELFIE PTK Version 2 in various languages. These localized versions have since been successfully piloted in four SHERPA partner countries (Cyprus, Finland, Greece and Italy) from late 2021 through to 2022. Analysis of resulting pilot data has subsequently resulted in optimization and consolidation of the present release of SELFIE PTK, ensuring it:
- has the flexibility, functionality and extensibility needed for use in different educational contexts;
- is suited to different SELFIE-related approaches;
- can provide added value for developing schools’ digital competence even in contexts where SELFIE is not the chief initiative officially adopted for that purpose.
This is all explained on the SELFIE PTK website and in the accompanying support materials, which provide detailed descriptions of the SELFIE PTK approach, how it evolved, and how it works. SELFIE PTK is currently available in English, Greek, Finnish and Italian. Good progress is presently being made on a Portuguese version as well, demonstrating SELFIE PTK’s potential for reach and impact well beyond the pilot contexts of the SHERPA project.