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| SUMMARY |
Issue 49 - May 2010 |
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| HIGHLIGHTS |
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From 21-22 May 2010, science education experts and teachers met in Brussels for a joint project meeting for DG Research's new Scientix Portal and DG Education and Culture's Spice project. The expert panel, selected by Ministries of Education in eleven countries, met on 21 May to discuss and share information about the two projects; while the teacher panel, made up of teachers from sixteen countries, joined on 22-23 May for an introduction to both projects. Read more...
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Do you want to share your experience with NANOYOU? Do you want to see what schools from all over Europe are doing?
Visit the teachers'blog! Nanoyou is a European project under the 7th Framework Programme to increase young people's basic understanding of nanotechnologies. Read more...
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picture credit: Nadia Circu "Calistrat Hogas" school, Romania |
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| PROJECTS |
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Fifteen country reports on ICT in education (2009/2010 series) are now published on Insight. The reports are drafted based on the information provided by Ministries of Education through an annual questionnaire. This initiative is one of the major activities undertaken by European Schoolnet to gather and analyse information on ICT in education for Ministries of Education across Europe.Read more...
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An add-on is a self-developed tool that will provide useful,helpful or otherwise additional functionality to a software application. An add-on extends the usability of the software, often cuts out repetitive steps in a process and can provide an innovative path to cater to a specific need or solve a problem. It can be a game, an interface between two different types of applications or even a new way of using a standard application - your imagination and skills are the only limits.
The Add-on competition will run from 19 March 2010 to 25 August 2010 and is open to all young people aged between 12 and 18 years. Read more...
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| SPRING DAY |
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Have you been organising interesting Spring Day events? Have you been working on this year's themes? Until 15 June, you still have the chance to send us your contributions and material for Spring Day activities, competitions and events.Read more...
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The Acer Netbook Pilot has prepared two different 1:1 pedagogical scenarios to be used with netbooks. 1:1 scenarios highlight the fact that the learners have netbooks available at all times, taking advantage of blended learning approach alternating online and offline activities as well as individual and collaborative ones. More scenarios will be planned throughout the project. The two scenarios are developed in the framework of the "Spring Day 2010" campaign and are called "Becoming teacher for 1 day" (available in EN, IT, ES, FR, DE and TR) and "Big Quiz" (available in EN). Read more...
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| SCHOOL ACTIVITIES |
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eTwinning is a rich source of professional development opportunities for teachers. This year a variety of programmes have already taken place in Italy, Portugal and Sweden and more workshops are planned from September onwards in Turkey, Slovenia, France, UK, Austria and Finland.Read more...
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Children can now pool reward points earned playing football-themed learning games on Footee, so that a class can run their own Footee team and take on other teams in the same or different countries. With 50,000 users and numbers doubling every six months, Footee is a highly popular free online education resource that builds on football's appeal to young people 6-12 and their love of games, competition and social networking to make learning maths, language, science, geography and history effective and fun. Read more...
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| LANGUAGE TEACHING |
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The teaching of foreign languages is always a popular motivation for teachers. The results of a research project in the teaching of foreign languages have recently been completed and the resulting set of online case studies is of interest to all teachers of language. This research is the result of the MOLAN network project, financed by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP), is coordinated by the Free University in Berlin, in co-operation with European Schoolnet. The MOLAN project worked with the goal of exploring, analysing and then making accessible to a wide public examples of successful initiatives in the field of language learning within primary and secondary schools as well as in higher education.Read more...
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| LEARNING RESOURCES |
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A series of webinars is now available from the ASPECT project to promote the adoption of learning technology standards by publishers, content/tools' developers and educational institutions. Although technical, these workshops are accessible to non-technical people as the objective is to understand the benefits of standards. All webinars run at 12 am CET (11 am GMT), on the second and 4th Tuesday of each month. Duration is 1 hour, and participants can join 30 minutes in advance on the Elluminate Live! platform.
Next webinars (to be added to calendar):
* 25 May 2010 - Common Cartridge, by Warwick Bailey, Icodeon, UK
* 8 June 2010 - Content Packaging, by Lars Ingesman, UNI-C, Denmark
* 22 June 2010 - Conformance Testingm by Ingo Dahn, University of Koblenz, Germany Read more...
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What makes some educational resources more useful for different cultural and linguistic contexts? This is a difficult question to answer but, in a number of its projects, European Schoolnet has found that some resources in its Learning Resource Exchange have the potential to 'travel well' and can be used cross-border. Now we are trying to define 'travel well' quality criteria so that Ministries of Education and other LRE content partners can more easily identify those resources that can be easily shared and reused by teachers and learners across Europe. Read more...
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The European Schoolnet Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT Best Practice Network are inviting a small number of key organizations to a two-day workshop at the European Schoolnet Office in Brussels on 15 and 16 June 2010. The workshop is intended for developers, repository administrators, and technical and semantic interoperability specialists of the represented organizations. There is a limited number of seats for this event and thus registration will be on a first come, first served basis. Read more...
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During the ASPECT project's Summer School on 8 May 2010 in Estoril (Portugal) over 40 teachers from Belgium, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania came together to discuss the use of online learning resources and learning content repositories in mathematics and science lessons. The aim of this Summer School was particularly to explore how learning content standards (such as SCORM and Common Cartridge) can be exploited by teachers and how different types of 'content packaging' can add value to the learning experience. Read more...
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| UPCOMING EUN MEETINGS |
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09-13 June: NSS Professional Development Workshop - Bruges, Belgium |
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22-25 June: eTwinning Management Meeting (CSS/NSS) - Riga, Latvia |
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Fifteen ICT in education country reports launched
Add-on competition
ASPECT Webinars: making sense of learning technology standards
