European project

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.

The ICL conference held in Villach 23-25 September provided a good opportunity to promote the Virtual Campuses wiki created by the Re.ViCa consortium. Re.ViCa team member Sally Reynolds gave a presentation about the extensive Virtual Campus inventory available in the wiki and invited conference participants to visit, use and update the wiki. She also described some of the analytical work carried out by the team supported by international experts which identified factors influencing the success or otherwise of virtual campus initiatives worldwide.
 

This month's edition of the Re.ViCa Newsletter is now available and has been sent to an extended mailing list of researchers, stakeholders and others interested in the Virtual Campus phenomenon.

The lead article deals with the question as to whether European Virtual Campuses are intrinsically different to Virtual Campuses in other parts of the world and describes some of the conditions that appear to have had an influence on the set-up and operation of Virtual Campuses in Europe. In the rest of the newsletter you will find information about relevant forthcoming events, summaries of articles on related topics and information about project activities and events.

For more information about Re.ViCa, visit the Virtual Campus wiki.

The first 2 day training course for teachers in the EduTubePlus project will take place on 17/18 September in the International School of Budapest supported by project partners SZÁMALK Education and Information Technology Ltd. and ATiT. This hands-on workshop is aimed at teachers and others interested in the use of video for teaching purposes and will cover the creation and adaptation of video resources for use in the classroom

The MEDEA channel has been launched on YouTube where you can see interviews with previous entrants including several 2008 winners as well as samples of entries from 2008.

Interviews cover topics like how the specific example of educational multimedia was made, how it was used and the equipment and skills required. Subscribe to the channel to be kept up-to-date with new additions.

The closing date for 2009 entries is 30 September 2009, find out more about this competition from the MEDEA web site.

The July/August edition of the Re.ViCa newsletter about Virtual Campuses is now available and features an article about the popular Virtual Campus wiki which has attracted 3,506 unique visitors since the beginning of July.

The newsletter also includes news and reports about recent relevant publications and events, information about forthcoming conferences, introductions to several experts and project news.

Access the latest edition and check out the Virtual Campus wiki, contributions to the wiki welcome!

The second meeting for the SoRuraLL project consortium took place in Barcelona this week in which ATiT is a partner. SoRuraLL is experimenting with various social networking tools to support educational objectives in rural schools and telecentres in different parts of Europe.

The user trials being organised by ATiT involve primary and secondary schools in County Clare in Ireland who from September 2009 onwards will take part in a series of trials involving the creation of local content-driven, community-orientated web sites, school blogs and the use of Skype for learning purposes. Other trials in SoRuraLL involve Greek Farmers, the unemployed in Germany and Poland and teachers in Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and Greece.

The MEDEA Secretariat now has A2 size posters as well as leaflets for promoting the 2009 Awards and can provide them to anyone interested in helping to spread information about MEDEA. These are available in French, German or English and are part of the current promotional work being undertaken by the MEDEA team.

The network of MEDEA National Contact Points is also growing and there are now partners active in 15 European countries, partners willing to promote MEDEA are still being recruited, so if you are interested, please contact the MEDEA Secretariat.

To find out more about the Awards and how to enter, visit the MEDEA web site. Participation in this competition is for free and the closing date is 30th September!