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GISSV Named "Smart School" for Tech Integration and Education Excellence

GISSV Named "Smart School" for Tech Integration and Education Excellence

We are pleased to announce that GISSV was awarded as a Smart School for the first time this year.

Annually, 15 schools in Germany win this prestigious award. This makes us one of over 100 digital pioneering schools in Germany and the first German International School Abroad to belong to the nationwide Smart School network. 

More and more schools in Germany are successfully embarking on the path to a digital future. The best among them are recognized as digital pioneering schools each year by the digital association Bitkom as part of the Smart School competition. The Smart School award recognizes schools that have convincing concepts for digitizing education and have already implemented digital education in practice. ‘Smart Schools’ combine digital infrastructures with digital content and pedagogical concepts that are implemented by appropriately qualified teachers. Schools that have developed and implemented a concept for these three pillars and supplemented it with projects linking digitization and sustainability were eligible for the award.

"Schools should empower children and young people to responsibly and actively shape the world of tomorrow. In an increasingly digital world, they must teach students the corresponding digital skills from an early age," says Bitkom President Achim Berg.

Andreas von Reppert, Secondary School teacher at GISSV and Head of the Biology Department, traveled to Berlin to receive the award for the school on March 23, 2023: The award ceremony took place as part of the Smart Education Night in Berlin. In addition to the laudator Stefanie Kreusel, Corporate Representative for Digital Education and Schools at Deutsche Telekom, representatives of the Smart School jury and previously awarded Smart School representatives will welcome the winners. This will be followed by the Smart School network meeting (Netzwerktreffen), where Smart Schools from the network can get to know each other. This includes presentations of best practices from the network as well as an exchange with Nina Stahr MdB, education policy spokesperson for the Bundestag faction Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and member of the Smart School jury 2023.

More about the competition:
The competition is supported by Deutsche Telekom. The first ‘Smart Schools’ were awarded in 2016 as part of the National IT Summit of the German government - today's Digital Summit - in Saarland. The competition has been held annually since 2017. The goal is to establish "Smart Schools" throughout Germany in the coming years, from which other schools can learn. Further information is available at www.smart-school.de.

> And read an article by the Weltverband Deutscher Auslandsschilen (WDA) here.

 

Photos by Bitkom e.V. and Andreas von Reppert