Our school has a long tradition. It was established 145 years ago in a small and old town called Solkan, which is situated in the south-north of Slovenia, close to Italian border. Our town celebrates its 1000 anniversary this year and we are all proud of its history. The beautiful river Soca, nice mountainous, vineyards and mild climate attracts a lot of tourists and sportsmen. Here you can see a school district map.

The school district is quite big and our students come from not only Solkan, but also from most of the villages on the nearest Banjska and Trnovska plateaus. About 660 students attend 32 classes and 120 children are in the kindergarten which is a part of our school too. 95 people are employed at our school and take care of students. In 1976 a new wing of the school was built and from then on we have better working conditions and we are also given more possibilities for different cultural, sports and other events. This year our school celebrated a 1000-anniversary of our town with the official opening of the additional part of the building devoting partly to canteen, a spacey dressing room, a classroom and staff room.

Many students (100) from other school districts attend our school, because here they are given different opportunities to develop skills for communication, use of ICT, learn by trying and seeing in nature, do sport activities, prepare for important competitions. Our school is also a teacher-training centre for the use of ICT in education.

Our students are quite successful at school and on different competitions. We are proud to have such gifted students who compete with children from other schools in Slovenia and have achieved numerous best awards in English, maths, geography, logic, art, sports, music and many other fields. We make a great effort to develop different students abilities, so more than 30 after school activities are successfully organised and attended at our school to fulfil special needs of our students.

Our main aim is to use modern contemporary technologies in educational process and give students the opportunity to communicate with the world. We feel obliged to offer the new generation of students the ability to be computer literate. For without this skill, they will not succeed as readily in the future. So we can say that our teachers and students are computer literate due to the fact that the school is well equipped with high quality teaching and other facilities.

For years our school has been actively involved in different projects that help pupils and teachers research materials and communicate in traditional way or via internet with other schools from Slovenia and beyond it. The aim is to learn and exchange experiences and ideas with students and teachers from different schools and countries. So we are a member of the European Network of Innovative Schools (ENIS) and myEurope. We have already been engaged in many good international collaboration projects for years. Our students have already participated in different iEARN, KIDLINK and ESP projects and also some of the USA projects. By exchanging e-mails and presenting their work on our site, they have learned a lot about values of other nations and countries. But mostly their aim is to present our small and new country to other students and learn how to surpass many spiritual, natural and political frontiers. This way they develop their skills in using languages, creating artworks, and ICT. We have to stress that as we don't have any sponsors and nobody gives us expensive tools and internet learning environments to promote and use for educational purposes we find our way out by searching the net and finding useful educational tools, which takes time but the results are even more ours. This way our projects can't compete fully with other projects, but we find them worth doing. Our achievements are purely amateur but we are happy that each day teachers and students learn something new and useful.

Years ago we launched our first international project concerning art - ESP project - Art Gallery, last year we invited schools all over the world to participate with articles in our electronic magazine Bridges, we successfully organised a Slovenian project - distance reading of a Slovenian book in elementary school and we even tried Blackboard environment as a working platform for a project together with a school from Antwerp. Students have improved their language knowledge and also learned about cultural differences and similarities.

This year we have become partners of ENO family, a quite demanding project with partners all over the world. Students use a special Internet environment to learn and exchange information with the peer students all over the world.

We have our own school site which attracts quite a lot of visitors, mostly, because many useful materials, as interactive exercises and other Internet-based material useful for self-learning for teachers and students, can be found in our so called virtual school. The pages have been designed by me - not at all a professional 'webmaster'. It took me a lot of time, because I learned things by doing myself. Now I try to pass my 'knowledge' to a group of students (13-14 years) who assist me and help me choose the topics, design the pages in FrontPage, so they develop their skills in creating sites. Last year they tried themselves in preparing their own class site. They entered the competition and they came out third and got an award. Now they are even more enthusiastic to make their site interesting and challenging.

Headmaster Marijan kogoj