UNESCO IITE Week took place in Saint Petersburg on 19-23 November. The event was held in the framework of the Festival “Wind of Changes”, organized annually by St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation (SUAI). The Festival was made possible by the support of the National Coordination Centre of the UNESCO Associated Schools Network Project in Russia, UNESCO Chairs of the Russian Federation, St. Petersburg Government (Committee for Science and Higher Education, Committee for External Relations, Committee for Education, Committee for the State Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments), Rosatom, Space Federation of Russia, and Svega-Computer Ltd.
This year the event became international: experts from China and Greece made presentations, and teams of pupils from Spain and China took part in the robotics competition.
UNESCO IITE Week was officially opened by the director of UNESCO IITE Tao Zhan, president of SUAI Anatoly Ovodenko, rector of SUAI Yulia Antokhina and CEO of Dobot company Margaret Han. All the speakers emphasized the importance of information technologies that radically change people’s lives; the contribution of online learning to the traditional education; the need to find new forms of human and machine interactions.
At UNESCO IITE Week, Russian and international experts from China and Greece made presentations and highlighted such important topics as ICT for Health Education, Technologies of 3D Visualization for Education in Classes, Online Communication Platform: Mapping New Digital Competencies of the 21st Century Schools, ICT potential in the World Heritage Study and Preservation. There was held a competition for teachers on advanced practices of online (synchronized) teaching and learning, and a competition for pupils on the use of ICT to preserve the World Heritage for future generations took place. The State Boarding School № 664 in Krasnogvardeysky District of St. Petersburg – UNESCO Associated School, and Qingdao school (China) conducted a joint open online-lesson in Chinese.
One of the key events of the Week was the robotics competition with participation of pupils from Russia, Spain and China. During the two-day training and final competitive stages, pupils of international teams got an opportunity to program and operate robots of the Chinese company Dobot. As a result of the competition, Spanish and Russian teams became the winners and shared the first place. The “Best Programmer” award was given to a pupil from Russia.
The video of the event is available at UNESCO IITE’s YouTube channel.
