International Classrooms On Line
Education is the means for disseminating knowledge and developing skills. It is also vital for bringing about desired changes in behaviours, values and lifestyles. In this respect education is important to build public support for the continuing and fundamental changes required if humanity is to leave the familiar path leading towards growing difficulties and possible catastrophe, and starting the uphill climb towards sustainability. Education, in short, is humanity’s best hope and most effective means in the quest to achieve sustainable development. It is a force of the future to elicit change and communicate ideas and achievements in a cosmopolitan framework.
ICOL
ICOL is a not-for-profit UK organisation that networks schools, communities and individuals with digital classroom resources for curriculum development and lifelong-learning. Its purpose is to help turn the United Nation's 2030 Agenda, aimed at living sustainably, into local action plans for the benefit of future generations.
AIM
ICOL's aim is to introduce the UN's current 2030 Agenda into learning environments with a portfolio of free, customisable digital resources that can be added to by organisations and individuals. The resources use cultural ecology as a cross-subject knoowledge framework to make action plans for living sustainably.
FUNDING
ICOL has grown with grants from the European Community, UK Government Agencies and Commercial Organisations. It is now managed by a family trust as a portfolio of Google docs to kick-start the creation and use of on line classrooms as learning centres to help meet the UN's objectives to benefit future generations
HISTORY
ICOL has developed from the 1992 response of teachers in Wales to Agenda 21. which was the UN's global action plan for living sustainably lnto the 21st century. Their project was entitled SCAN, the Schools and Communities Agenda 21 Netwwork, cordinated by the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.