As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes on the 19th of November, 2020, the textbook in Croatian intended for sixth grade-aged children “Six” (Sestica) published by Profil Klett received the award as the best textbook in Europe at the large international competition BELMA – Best European Learning Materials Award, co-organised by the Frankfurt Book Fair.
As Dalibor Greganic, Director of Profil Klett, explains, a three-member jury of international experts in the field of education awarded this textbook this prestigious award for its innovative concept, modern approach and outstanding quality of materials that promote reading in the digital age and develop critical thinking, analysis and creativity.
“At a time when public opinion is increasingly influenced by false information and the trivialisation of content, and in a world of rapid change and uncertainty caused by a pandemic, knowledge has never been more valuable,” says Greganic.
Curricular reform was, at least before the coronavirus pandemic struck, one of the top social topics in Croatia, and textbooks and publishers’ business relied directly on it. The adopted curricular reform in any case determined and directed the development of new educational materials.
Profil Klett also pointed out that they have offered Croatian teachers new textbook sets, each creative and innovatively designed, with new methodologies and concepts.
“The tender of the Ministry of Science and Education for new textbooks ends next year and we’re already very satisfied with the results achieved. We at Profil Klett see ourselves as an ally to teachers in the fight for knowledge, and in addition to excellent textbook sets, we’ve shown this by creating and developing IZZI – an educational platform for creating digital textbooks, which has proven extremely valuable for online teaching.
We’re very pleased because this year we managed to place our digital educational platform with companies in Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Germany, as well as the Croatian Naklada Ljevak. In addition, the project we’re especially proud of is the partnership with the Government of Montenegro in the process of the digitalisation of their education system, ie textbooks for kids in the first grade of primary school,” says Greganic.
Profil Klett points out that the last few years have been intensively dedicated to the design of innovative educational content and investment in the development of new technologies in education, and given that due to the circumstances, meaning that only digital communication was possible at one point, this period showed just how important the digital world really is.
”We’ve just turned the coronavirus situation in our favour because it has been shown that only by developing digital educational content and creating our own IZZI platform for digital textbooks (IZZI – interactive, interesting, fun, inclusive) can we overcome this crisis and provide real, concrete support to schools and teachers in these demanding and unpredictable circumstances.
Thus, our digital educational content proved to be extremely useful this spring at the time of launching online classes, when we offered them free of charge to all teachers, even those who don’t use Profil Klett’s textbooks. In this way, we’ve greatly facilitated their teaching in the demanding conditions of a lockdown,” emphasised the director of this publishing house.
In the last decade, we’ve faced major and far-reaching changes, from social to technological, economic and political ones, which of course affect and require changes in the education system and its overall modernisation, too.
Profil Klett explains that we really need to modernise the entire educational system in Croatia, considering that in ten years there will be occupations and professions that we can neither predict nor imagine today.
Due to the situation with the ongoing public health crisis, many events have been limited or cancelled, and one is the traditional Interliber, which is enormously important for every publisher. However, Profil Klett states that considering how much they themselves are developing all the possibilities of online teaching through the improvement of the IZZI platform, they have completely adapted to the online Interliber.
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