compulsory education

The kick-off meeting of the EUscreen project took place this week in the impressive home territory of Beeld en Geluid (Sound and Vision) in Hilversum, The Netherlands. This new project funded in part through the European eContent Plus Programme is a Best Practice network which brings together 27 partners from 17 EU member States as well as Switzerland in order to provide access to a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material.

This three year project will result in an interoperable EUscreen platform, including a core collection of 35,000 television items. Partners include 18 core content stakeholders, these are European broadcasters and television archivists like DR in Denmark, Deutsche Welle, RAI in Italy,  VRT in Belgium, Television de Catalunyo, RTE in Ireland, ORF in Austria, INA in France and many others.

ATiT is a partner in this project and will be responsible for exploiting use of these materials in the educational sector.

myEUROPE is a Web-based project which aims to help teachers raise their pupils' awareness of what it means to be a young citizen in Europe. By involving a network of more than 5000 schools, the diversity of Europe is brought into the classroom via the Internet.

This website is a useful resource for teachers as well as students (between the age of 5 and 18). MyEurope offers the schools the possibility to take part in a variety of activities on the topic of Citizenship and Culture. Apart from this, plenty of tips regarding using ICT in the classroom and teaching ideas are available on this web site. Furthermore there is the opportunity for teachers to look for a partner school and to set up a twinning project together.

It is almost becoming a cliché: the spate of images on web sites and television, in computer games, videoclips, movies and commercials affects young and old. Because young people of today are not always duly conscious of how to deal with the massive input of images in a well-considered way and how to see through the audiovisual communication strategies, education focuses increasingly on audiovisual training. This research report, "Audiovisual training in Flemish education 2004", an initiative of the Flemish Initiative for the Audiovisual Arts and the Cultural Unit of the department of Education (Flemish Ministry), tells us where we are in Flanders.

In 2003, Datanet, an Irish telecoms consultancy, was given the job to carry out a study into the provision of broadband Internet connectivity to more than 4000 schools in Ireland where broadband connectivity is agreed to be unacceptably low. Their report, now available from here makes a good argument for the provision of a nationwide Schools Network facilitating centralised management and control over all network functions.