KlasCement is the official educational portal of the Flemish Community in Belgium.

MISSION

• Exchanging educational material and examples for class and school use;
• Promoting cooperation between teachers, principals, ICT-coordinators, students, …;
• Stimulating the pedagogical use of ICT.

TARGET GROUPS

• Primary and Secondary education and Teacher training.

STATISTICS
KlasCement has collected about 6000 learning objects provided by teachers. These are lesson documents, presentations, exercises, websites, software, photos, … All content is free available.
Daily we have about 5000 unique visitors who are downloading and uploading their work. KlasCement has become one of the biggest educational portals in Flanders and the Netherlands in two years time.

MORE DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THE PORTAL
Registering and logging on is the first thing to do. The teacher becomes a member to be able to add or use content. All contributions in KlasCement are free, but uploading and downloading is only possible after registration - so the success of each contribution can be checked by the team.

Each member gets:
• Free web space to share material and tips with others.
• Access to the forum to ask questions to colleagues or to help others.
• Access to the member list.
• An internal mailbox to communicate with other members or profession groups.
• Weekly e-mail newsletters based on the profile of each individual member.
• The possibilities to promote the member’s website or to communicate the member’s activities by using the database.
• Every user can search the database of KlasCement by choosing items or typing keywords. They can filter the contents by category, subject, profession, type of education or target group.
• Consulting and gaining experience is a sensible attitude. KlasCement offers a busy forum with bulletin boards organized by profession and target group.
• Every week members will receive a non-commercial e-zine containing an overview of the newest contributions within the interests chosen by the individual teacher.
• Teachers can also subscribe to get a commercial e-zine on a regular base, an e-mail informing the reader about KlasCement’s partners.

A teacher deserves a KlasCement Award if he/she
• creates and develops an impressive educational site,
• shares an original and useful educational document,
• develops an instructive software package.

Moreover the KlasCement Team regularly rewards members who have offered the best contributions.
KlasCement gathers thousands of digital exercises using the software Hot Potatoes. Guides and online courses are offered on the site.

Users can find a publication with files concerning the use of ICT in primary and secondary education. Good educational software and documents which are open
source are brought to the intention of the users. We’re also cooperating with Apple to show that a Mac has a lot of educational opportunities.

KlasCement stimulates Flemish schools to go European. The eTwinning project for schools that want to start a European ICT-project is coordinated by KlasCement.

The team
The whole team has an educational background. Until September 2007 we were four innovative and very motivated people and two developers and a system manager. From 1st September 2007 an the team has grown. We have extra funds from the government and some other partners, which means we were able to extend the team with six new colleagues (part-time): Liesbeth, Lies, Steven, Pascal, Vincent and Bea joined the existing team (Frank en Dirk with fill-time coordinator Hans. Toon and
Guus are the two developers and the system manager Luc who is responsible for being online 99 % of the time.