ThingLink Expands to Building Future Schools with Finnish Education Experts
(PRWEB) May 30, 2018 -- The Finnish education and media technology company ThingLink announces a new service targeted to educational institutions and governments internationally developing new ways of teaching and learning in the digital age. Based on a deep expertise of the Finnish education system and school culture, the new service focuses on holistic curriculum and school planning utilizing immersive learning technologies.
“The potential of new learning technologies lies in their ability to disrupt existing ways of working, but this also means that it is difficult for schools to adopt them without a connection to curriculum planning and professional development,” says ThingLink founder and CEO Ulla Engestrom. “A the moment, we are seeing great interest towards the Finnish education system, teacher training, and our technology from big countries like India. For our customers it is easier to buy technology and service in the same package.”
In 2018, ThingLink has invested in building a presence in the education and eLearning markets internationally. With 15 new distributors in the eLearning space and 3 million teachers and students using ThingLink’s interactive image and video technology in the classroom, the company is now introducing new products and services to schools worldwide. In software, this includes a new mobile editor and an affordable Premium Teacher account for immersive storytelling. On the service side, ThingLink now offers curriculum planning, competence development, teacher education, and consulting for technology integration in the classroom.
Finnish teacher training is organised in a unique way at eight universities throughout Finland. The network of teacher training schools, eNorssi, plays a central role in the training of prospective teachers in Finland. ThingLink’s new service unit operates in close collaboration with the eNorssi teacher training school network and provides the opportunity to visit them, as well. Other partners include the University of Eastern Finland and the Innokas school network at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. The range of services available through ThingLink’s partners include transversal competence and multidisciplinary learning module development, technology integration, adoption of new student assessment practices, technology curriculum planning, and school culture transformation.
“The Finnish education system has a great reputation, but every country and school has their own goals and challenges. We evaluate them together with our customers and create a fully tailored development plan adopting some of the best practices and models from Finnish schools and teacher training,” says Aleksi Komu, ThingLink’s new Director of Global Partnerships in Education. Komu recently joined ThingLink from the University of Eastern Finland in Savonlinna, where he worked as a technology program planner specializing in new mobile technologies, student-centered content creation and immersive learning environments. Komu and his colleague Sanna Metsälä recently won the international international GESS award for best integration of technology in the classroom. For the past two years, Komu and Metsälä have collaborated with other teachers and students in Savonlinna Teacher training school developing a new immersive school concept called Koulu 360 (School 360), and consulted several international schools in curriculum planning.
Ulla Engestrom, ThingLink, https://www.thinglink.com/, +1 3472763116, [email protected]
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