PEDAGOGISK PSYKOLOGISK SENTER

MUNICIPALITY OF KARMØY:

Karmøy is a municipality on the west coast of Norway just north of Stavanger. There are 37 000 inhabitants in the municipality, 6000 pupils in the age group 6-16 and about 600 teachers in its 29 schools. The smallest school has six pupils, the largest just over 450.

Educational and Psychological Advisory Centre (PPS) is a support department of the local authority of education.
The main working areas for the Educational Advisory Centre departement are to:

- Strengthen educational innovation in the schools
- Implement the new national curriclum plan “Culture for learning”
- Cater for in-service-training for teachers (local, regional and national)
- Stimulate local post-graduate courses
- Advise on methodology and within subject-related areas
- Convey and co-ordinate practical-pedagogical initiatives
- Advise everyone in the school community: pupils, teachers, school assistans and parents
- Implement evaluation in schools
- Organise and develop school management programme
- Operate and manage a regional resource centre including a library of updated educational books, textbooks, teaching aids, videos- dvds, audiotapes, cd-roms, ICT software etc.
- Provide various multi media equipment for schools
- Serve teacher and students in the use of video editing system

The Department of Education and Culture, Educational and Psychological Advisory Centre and many schools in Karmøy have been and are involved in several Socrates projects funded by EU. PPS has been and is involved in several projects within the Socrates programme, such as Minerva, Comenius 2 and 3 and Grundvig

The following trans-national projects are / have been coordinated by staff from PPS:
SLAM, GrandSLAM, SLAMIT, SITE, JUSTICE and REHAB

Educational Advisory Centre Karmøy are also involved in the Web for Schools programme (DGIII) and European Schools Project (ESP).

Schools in the Karmøy district have been engaged in ODL methods through EU based projects for several years. In collaboration with the Danish Pedagogical University, the Educational Advisory Centre ran a four-semester post-graduate degree course in 1997-99 for school librarians as an ODL-based course. 31 teachers in Karmøy completed this degree course.

Personnel at the Educational Advisory Centre have several years experience of regional, national and international conferences as key-note speakers on educational issues including Socrates related projects (SLAM, GrandSLAM, TRANSPRO and MANY COLOURS). The Norwegian national Socrates Agency, SIU, have also use teachers/advisors from Karmøy to promote the Socrates programme at local, regional and national level in Norway as well as writing articles in educational magazines.

In 2005, PPS was awarded for the first Comenius prize in Norway. The award was handed over by the Norwegian Minister of Education and Research.

The Educational Advisory Centre is responsible for a yearly three-day national conference on secon-dary education where more than 300 educators take part.

The project co-ordinator for SLAMIT will be Per Fagerland, a local authority Educational Adviser with previous experience in the use of ODL and trans-national projects.

Other partners in the work at Karmøy will include John Rullestad, Head of the Educational Advisory Centre, together with Margareth Tangen (Library Advisor), and Kjell Olav Leirvaag (Educational Advisor for ICT) in partnership with a large number of teachers and librarians from the authorities' schools.

John Rullestad has been used by the National Agency (SIU) in Norway and by Directors of Education in different authorities within Norway to promote the Socrates program. He also participated at the round table conference (the final evaluation) at the third Web for Schools-conference in Brussels.