Thanks, Oona, this is indeed exciting. :-)

I have to say though, that this did not come out of nowhere. Rather, this is a result of many different smaller collaborations and pilot projects with specific schools, specific teachers, specific targeted groups (like gifted children) GLAMs, universities and later on with the Ministry of Education itself. These projects have been running separately by different wikipedians and wikimedians in Israel in the past 3 years, and even longer in higher education and universities.

For schools, we created different models of integration for different age-groups. It was crucial, since for example, though high-school students and gifted children in junior high may be mature enough to write full articles, this is not the case for elementary school and regular junior high students. We had to cteate a system where different ages engage with wikipedia in a different way that makes sense in terms of their abilities and capacity, and that the wiki skills they are taught, are used to teach them other learning skills from an pedagogical POV.
Junior-high students (7th-9th grades) might work in a groups, with the teacher, and only improve articles. And elementary shool children (1st-6th grades) might not be able to contribute anything, but just learn how wikipedia works and how to properly work with it as a tool.

So in order to scale, it became clearer and clearer that the teachers are as much our target as the students. We began giving wiki-workshops to teachers, who would then become wiki-agents in the classroom.

In the latest pilot that has been running in Israel, 2 wikipedians ran a pilot in Beer-Sheva, a big city in the south of Israel, with the ministry of education. They reached out to many different junior high classes, in various schools in the city, at the same time, working closely with the teachers and the ministry. Students improved articles and even wrote new ones about historical places and monuments in the city and the pilot came to show a successful model of working with junior high students.

Joining other smaller but successful collaborations with gifted children (sometimes in collaboration with GLAMs we've been working with), highschool students and even elementary scools,  the minister got convinced it could work and we are working on building a program that will help teachers implement it in class.

I'm sure like everything new that hasn't been done exactly like that before, there will be some "labor pains" and a learning curve. But given the opportunity to do that on the national level is huge for every country - Serbia, Israel, it doesn't matter; it's only a matter of time till it'll be something that is regularly done worldwide. That is what we want, really - to be part of the process and keep being there for the long run.

Cheers,
Shani.

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Shani Evenstein,
WM-IL.