European project

People from 13 organisations in 12 countries got together in Dublin this week for the launch of a new project in science teaching. SAILS (Strategies for Assessment of Inquiry Learning in Science) is all about putting in place assessment strategies to support inquiry based science education in Europe at second level (students aged 12-18) and is a key development in the enhancement of innovative STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) teaching.

Speaking at the launch of the SAILS project, Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn, spoke about the importance of innovation in this area and praised Dublin City University for taking this initiative. SAILS is a 4 year support action funded under FP7, ATiT are partners in this project with responsibility for dissemination. Initial information about SAILS is available from the project website.

The European Policy Network on School Leadership brings together ministries of education, associations, capacity building organisations and experts who are actively engaged in advancing leadership in European schools.

This network is being supported by the European Commission for a 4 year period and will provide mechanisms to share knowledge and experience in school leadership initiatives as well as providing opportunities for identifying further research opportunities in this field.

The network is being led by FORTH in Greece and the kick-off meeting for this network involving more than 30 partners took place in Heraklion, Crete on 6-8 September.

ATiT are a partner in this network and will be responsible for putting in place portal services for the network providing collaboration and communication services to its members.

On Wednesday 1st of June 2011, the MEDEA2020 consortium gathered at the Ramada Viking hotel in Waterford, to discuss the progress of this European Project. The project partners also participated in the EdTech conference where the MEDEA Awards were presented.

The E-ViEW project website developed by ATiT is now up and running. This website will support the E-ViEW project partners who are developing and piloting a European Virtual Campus aimed at learners in the work place which will focus on enhancing their management skills and competences within a European context. Concrete outcomes from E-ViEW include a Virtual Campus Framework for Work-based learning with a sample undergraduate module, a pilot implementation of this course and an online handbook with a description of the experiences gained in creating and delivering this course in the Virtual Campus Framework for Work-based learning. The E-ViEW website will provide news and information about the project and its activities and also on the general topic of work-based learning.

A new research project to investigate Virtual School and College Provision called VISCED has just been launched with the support of the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme.
Partners in the VISCED project including ATiT are making an inventory of innovative ICT-enhanced learning initiatives and major ‘e-mature’ secondary and post-secondary education providers for the 14-21 age group in Europe.  This includes a systematic review at international and national levels as well as a study into operational examples of fully virtual schools and colleges. The outputs of this work will be analysed and compared to identify relevant parameters and success factors for classifying and comparing these initiatives. This initiative is open to researchers and policy-makers, all outputs will be published on the VISCED wiki.

Last week, ATiT staff met with project partners for the RURALeNTER project, funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme, to plan the training sessions on public services and ICT services that will be organised in four rural areas in Austria, Greece, Romania and Spain in 2011. In the first year of the project, the partnership has been busy researching rural dwellers' needs and are now ready to begin delivering courses.  These taking part will begin with a self-assessment test which will enable them to choose whether to opt  for a basic computer and ICT skills training before moving on to a training course based on scenarios linked to topics like social networking, e-government or self-promotion through the Internet. 

The RURALeNTER project is funded under the Grundtvig Multilateral subprogramme, which recently celebrated the 10th year of Grundtvig in Flanders with an anniversary event  in the Ministry of Education and Training in Brussels. Staff from ATiT representing RURALeNTER took part in this event  where they learned more about other Grundtvig-supported multilateral adult education projects by Flemish partners, including some initiatives focusing on rural areas. A publication showcasing the best-practice examples of Grundtvig-funded projects was also presented.

The first meeting of the new MEDEA2020 consortium took place on 27 November in Brussels. MEDEA2020 is a dissemination and exploitation project funded under the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme to build on and further exploit the work of the MEDEA Awards. It will do this by expanding the reach of these awards to include Italian, Spanish and Polish speaking practitioners and the organisation of workshops in educational media production in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Ireland as well as by organising an annual conference on Media & Learning.

Cara Roche and Jim O'Sullivan presented the experience of the Irish schools who took part in the SoRuraLL project during the SALL conference held in Patras, Greece on 4-5 November. This conference provided a good opportunity to hear about the experience of rural learners in different parts of Europe who had been introduced to social networking tools during the Lifelong Learning Project SoRuraLL. This conference also brought together the partners and others interested in the use of online gaming as a way to promote Internet safety as the project SimSafety also featured on the agenda.

MEDEA2020 is a new project supported by the European Commission's Lifelong Learning programme which will build on the experience of the MEDEA:EU project in further expanding the work of the MEDEA Awards community.

This project will expand the reach of the MEDEA Awards by involving partners in Italy, France, Spain, Ireland and Poland and will provide the resources to support an ever-growing community of practice interested in the use of media for teaching and learning. Concrete outcomes include national workshops, the continuation of the annual Media & Learning Conference, multilingual newsletters and the support of an online community of practice as well as an online searchable database of relevant materials.

ATiT will lead this project which will begin officially on 1 November.

The Social Applications for Lifelong Learning (SALL) conference takes place on 4-5 November in Patras, Greece. This conference will feature the outputs of two European projects, SoRurall (Rural Social Networking for Lifelong Learning) and SimSafety ("Flight Simulator" for Internet Safety). It is being organised by the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (RACTI) and the Hellenic Open University in Greece. More information available from the conference website.