medea awards

This month's issue of Media & Learning News was published on 7 February 2012 with highlights such as EUscreen adding Television History to Europeana, EAVI’s Investigation into Media Literacy in Europe and the Making of Monkey Tales, winner of the MEDEA Award for Professionally Produced Educational Media 2011.

Other articles include a review of 3D Television, a book review of Designing Video and Multimedia for Open and Flexible Learning by Jack Koumi, the announcement of the first University Educational Film Festival in Lyon and the DIVERSE Conference's call for proposals. You will find plenty of other interesting news, notifications and announcements related to the use of media in education and training in this issue that you can download online.

Last week on 26 January, the Kick-off meeting for the European MEDEAnet project took place in the Irish Institute in Leuven, Belgium. This 3-year networking project resulted out of the success of the MEDEA Awards, an annual competition that encourage innovation and good practice in the use of media (audio, video, graphics and animation) in education. The motivation behind MEDEAnet is first of all to extend the reach of the network of the MEDEA Awards by providing opportunities for local events linked to the MEDEA Awards and to involve not only early adopters, but also mainstream practitioners in networking opportunities.

MEDEAnet partners will organise workshops in 7 countries sharing best practice with the input of MEDEA Award winners and finalists; provide a 12-part series of public webinars on related topics; publish an annual report on media literacy, skills in educational media production and the use of media-based teaching resources; promote knowledge building and sharing amongst practitioners and roll-out a large-scale dissemination and exploitation strategy on media and learning. Secondly, plans to establish the MEDEA Foundation as a legally constituted membership organisation in 2012 are underway. MEDEAnet, which is supported under the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme, involves partners who either have a national or a large-scale regional brief and who are mandated to support innovation in teaching and learning as part of their organisational responsibility. Through them this network will reach teachers and trainers who are less skilled and motivated to use media-based learning approaches.

The first 2012 issue of Media & Learning News has just been published and in it you can read articles such as 'Media Literacy – a View from the US', 'Belfedar, a fun way to learn to cooperate and manage conflict', and a feature article about the Merchant of Venice, one of the MEDEA Awards 2011 winners, on which you can read more in 'Having fun and learning accountancy at the same time'.

Other highlights include a 'New initiative on Lecture Recording', Tools of the Trade:  Animation, what software or tools to use…', the 'New Voices in Media Education event in London' and 'Commonwealth film competition about relationships'. As always, you will find plenty of other news, notifications and announcements related to the use of media in education and training in this issue.

The December issue of Media & Learning News was published yesterday. In it you will find news about the winners of the MEDEA Awards 2011 and a feature article on "Developing media literacy skills for science communication", as well as information about the iTEC Designing the future classroom project, and an insight into the International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media based in Sweden.

You can also read about The Center for Media Literacy in the US and the Media & Learning Conference in Brussels which attracted 298 people from 39 countries,as well as plenty of other news items, notifications and announcements related to the use of media in education and training.

The winner of the MEDEA Award for professionally produced educational media is the Belgian entry Monkey Tales Games and the winner of the MEDEA User-Generated Award 2011 is the Austrian game The Merchant of Venice. Both winners were announced during the MEDEA Awards Ceremony which took place on 24 November 2011 as part of the Media & Learning Conference in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training in Brussels.

The European Collaboration Award 2011 was awarded to The European Chain Reaction by Qworzó Primary School (Belgium) and this year’s special Award recognising excellence in the use of media to support volunteering was awarded to Changing Lives by Drogheda Special Olympics Club (Ireland).

A further prize for the audience favourite which was voted on during the MEDEA Awards Ceremony was given to Monkey Tales Games. You can read more about the awards and the winners, finalists and those which were highly commended by the 75-person strong judging panel on the MEDEA Awards website. The closing date for receipt of entries for MEDEA Awards 2012 is 17 September 2012.

The DiVa project, which focusses on Good Practice for Dissemination and Valorization of Educational Projects, has recently published its final products: a handbook for project co-ordinators, a best-practice catalogue and recommendations, and the MEDEA Awards are mentioned in the best-practice catalogue thanks to the dissemination activities undertaken by the MEDEA:EU project, of which ATiT was the project coordinator. The successful actions of the MEDEA:EU project, the European Commission-supported project which helped to extend the European identity of the MEDEA Awards through a multilingual newsletter and the European network of national contact points, have been taken up and are being enhanced by our current MEDEA2020 project.

By carrying out European studies about successful educational projects and evaluating them based on certain criteria, the DiVa project has already proven to be very useful for new as well as already started European projects and through these publications everyone can now benefit from this collection of different and innovative ways to promote, disseminate, exploit and valorize.

On Tuesday 31st of May and Thursday 2 June 2011 the first 2-day MEDEA2020 workshop took place alongside the annual EdTech conference organised by the Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA). This conference took place in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT).

This workshop on animation took place over 2 days. The first part, aimed at beginners, provided an overview of different animation techniques and included hands-on practice with different tools. Topics covered getting started with animation as a way of engaging learners, different types of animation for example 2D, 3D. The session continued with hands on sessions with different software tools (Flash and Animate) for the creation of animation. Participants carried out the first steps in creating an animated movie, and explored in that way the principles of animation.
Winning examples of animation from the MEDEA Awards were presented by Deborah Arnold from Videoscop Universite Nancy2 (France) and invited guest Yannick Mahé from CNDP (France) who is the director of award winning educational media Evolution of LIfe. Demonstrations and presentations were followed by discussions with all participants.

The second part of the workshop, aimed at more advanced users, took place as part of the EdTech programme on 2 June. On that day, examples and explanations on the use of animation in a pedagogical context were discussed: how was it produced and what is the impact on learning. How can animation motivate and stimulate the learner and aid understanding of complex abstract concepts. Also on the second day, there was a hands on session on the creation of scenarios that continued where the first day ended based on the scenarios created during day 1 from an educational and media production perspective. The workshop showed the participants clearly the first steps in the development of a short animated movie plus discussions.

The tutors on this workshop were Deborah Arnold from Videoscop, France; Yannick Mahé, from CNDP in France, Philip Penny from IADT, Ireland and Mathy Vanbuel, ATiT, Belgium. Altogether 30 participants attended the workshop over part or whole of the two days.

The next MEDEA workshop will take place in Poland in July and will cover the topic of Webinars. More information soon on this site and on the MEDEA Awards site.

The MEDEA Awards 2011 website is now available in French and German with updated information as well as the complete entry process available in not only English but also French and German. These translations have been taking place during the month of February and from now on French-speaking and German-speaking people that are interested in finding out more about the competition and possibly participating, can now roam the site in their own language. The organisation is currently working hard on the Spanish, Italian and Polish translation of the entire website, which will be available by the end of March 2011. Deadline this year is 16 September 2011!