Rural School Network in the Cloud from Galicia, Spain, is one of almost 500 nominees to be examined by an international Grand Jury in the city of Tallinn / Estonia.

Rural School Network in the Cloud from Spain is nominated by an international jury of ICT experts to enter the next round of the 2013 World Summit Award (WSA) in e-Learning & Science. Rural School Network in the Cloud will compete against almost 500 outstanding e-Content products and applications from 168 countries in front of the WSA’s Grand Jury from Aug. 29 to Aug. 31 inEstonia’s capital city, Tallinn.

RuralSchool Network in the Cloud is an innovative educational initiative developed by Galicia Supercomputing Centre and IT Company Balidea Consulting & Programming, with active collaboration from Galician Government (Spain).

This project aims to develop a high quality and cost-efficient software, hardware and communications solution, based on cloud computing and Open Software, to improve education and collaboration in elementary and primary disperse rural school networks. This means optimizing the solution to run over weak Internet connections and heterogeneous devices (old & new PCs, interactive boards, tablets…), making it usable for 3-7 year old kids, teachers with little ICT training, etc.

It allows rural schools to manage communication among teachers, children and families, learning resources creation and sharing, as well as the complete management of cloud desktops look and content (cloud tools, learning resources) for their students and teachers. See http://youtu.be/0UAP34NFJSM

This initiative started in 2012, and counts on 23 small rural schools, grouped in 4 rural school networks, participating in it (59 elementary and primary school teachers and over 400 students from 3 to 8 y-olds).

It continues a path started by a research project by CESGA, named "Rural Schools & Cloud Computing" in 2010, funded by HP Labs, where a team of researchers, teachers and technicians designed and implemented an adapted "cloud", based on Open Source solutions and cloud infrastructure over rural communications network, to support learning and collaboration in a small disperse rural school network (6 schools, 13 teachers, 100 students). These small schools gather groups of kids from different ages (from 3 to 7 year olds) in the same classroom, so there is a strong need to coordinate activities among the schools, providing teachers with easy but powerful tools to break down the barriers of distance between schools.

The solution actively supports the creation of a "virtual community of practice" for teachers in small rural schools, who have a powerful platform where they can create, communicate, share their educational proposals and learn together, not only within their own small network of schools (CRA), as well as teachers from other rural schools.

In the first round of the international competition, an online jury will now valuate the ventures, creating a shortlist of 15-20 projects in each of the eight categories.

After this, in a three-day process in late August, the WSA Grand Jury, consisting of international renowned ICT experts and industry leaders, will meet in Tallinn/Estonia to evaluate the submissions from the remaining nominees and select the 40 best products. The jury members of the Grand Jury come from all continents and have backgrounds in the creative industries, telecommunication, advertising, journalism and research, as well as in teaching. The jury will be hosted by national partners such as the Estonian ICT Cluster.

Finally, the 40 world's best e-Content applications (5 products in each of the WSA categories) are selected to present their products in front of an international audience in Colombo/Sri Lanka from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25.

The categories of the World Summit Award (WSA):

e-Government & Open Date

e-Health & Environment

e-Learning & Science

e-Entertainment & Games

e-Culture & Tourism

e-Media & Journalism

e-Business & Commerce

e-Inclusion & Empowerment

Rural School Network in the Cloudis nominated in e-Learning & Science category.

WSA World Congress 2013 in Sri Lanka

After the selection in Estonia, the 40 WSA winners will get the chance to present their products at the WSA World Congress in Sri Lanka, Oct. 23 to Oct. 25. The event will offer a platform for high level experts, industry leaders and government representatives to discuss innovation in mobile content. At the event, an on sight jury will again evaluate the products to select eight overall winners: The WSA Global Champions 2013.

“With the winners from World Summit Award in e-Content, Colombo will host the best digital producers, interaction designers and content developers from all around the world. They will demonstrate the richness and diversity of the content industries. With Estonia, a country where the access to free internet is a fundamental right of the people, we are glad to have found the perfect location for the Grand Jury,” said Peter A. Bruck, chairman of the World Summit Award.