The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international, non-profit, independent association of benchmarked Living Labs.
The Living Lab Green Schools of the Province of Treviso aims at changing users’ behaviour to foster energy saving. To achieve this goal Green Schools uses the management of the school building as a model in which the user/student/teacher can actively participate thanks to the IT tools used for the managing activities, which are accessible through a web portal (www.trevisoscuole.it). Thus, Green Schools is an answer to the need of reducing the costs for managing buildings through a reduction of energy consumption and through a rational and conscious use of the common good. Green Schools furtherly provides an important educational added value as activities aiming at energy saving and sustainability are mainly addressed to, and performed by, students and teachers. The main characteristics of Green Schools Living Lab are: i) users themselves, as well as technology, become a real “tool” for energy saving; ii) in the Green Schools Living Lab the roles of technology and users are complementary; iii) technology is the lever through which users are stimulated towards a virtuous behaviour and users efficiency can boost new technological investments on energy efficiency, creating a virtuous circle; iv) it has a spill over effect in the social context (socialization and respect for common resources), in informal learning (it stimulates learning through acting and action, even from a competitive point of view with the Green Schools Competition), in the technological field (users stimulate technologies such as smart metering) and in the economic field (virtuous behaviour reinforces the energy saving potentialities and therefore costs).
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