Apple Awards Twelve European Schools

The Apple Distinguished Schools Programme aims to help pioneer schools develop and demonstrate examples of best practices in the application of computers as multimedia teaching and learning tools. The Apple Distinguished Schools provide examples of classroom connectivity, allowing teachers to communicate with the children, manage the student files and work on-line on classroom projects. The selected schools are located in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK (2), Germany, Turkey, Italy, Russia, Norway, Spain and Poland.

These schools have been selected for their clear technology plan, their openness to change, their willingness to share their experiences and their dynamic staff. Teachers from every ADS attend a "Towards Technology and Curriculum Integration" course in order to help them through the difficult process of creating their own classroom curriculum content with the multitude of multimedia tools at their disposal and most of all to reflect on their teaching methods.

One of the characteristics of the Apple programme is the startling diversity of the schools' technological strategies. In terms of the student to computer ratio, the primary uses of these computers and the achievements of the students, no two schools are alike. Although all the Apple Distinguished Schools have many common aims and ideas, particularly their commitment to the innovative application of technology in the classroom, the way this has been realised is markedly different in each case.