medea:eu

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.

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.

The European network that has been building up around the annual MEDEA awards was further expanded during the 13th annual ICL conference held in Hasselt from 15-17 September when Sally Reynolds presented MEDEA. During her presentation, Sally described the way in which the competition operates and the type of entries it attracts.This presentation included a discussion about the selection criteria used in the judging process and highlighted the growing level of interest in the use of media in teaching and learning. It also included samples of entries from previous years. More information about MEDEA is available from this website.

This month's newsletter includes an introduction to EuroCreator, which is offering video resources to European teachers. It also gives an insight into an innovative special interest group on educational podcasting and tells the story behind the MEDEA 2009 Finalist, Studiecoach, produced by the Dutch Open University. 

Readers of the May issue can read about KlasCement, offering video resources to Dutch-speaking teachers, learn about several calls for related competitions such as the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards and the JAPAN PRIZE and find out more about what is happening in the field of media and education through the articles and announcements about recent developments and publications contained in the May edition.

Read the newsletter on the Media in Education website.

The April edition of the Media in Education Newsletter is now available and includes a report about EdReNe's recently held strategic seminar on repositories of learning resources.

It also includes an article about Planet SciCast, an online video-sharing repository which was one of the finalists in the MEDEA Awards 2009, articles about two different IPR-related websites and an introduction to the MEDEA National Contact Point in Malta which is the Centre for Literacy at the University of Malta. 

The April edition also includes information about the call for submissions to the Media and Learning conference being held 25/26 November in Brussels.

This edition is available on a dedicated newsletter website where you will also find issues of this monthly newsletter dating back to September 2009 as well as information about how you can sign up to receive the newsletter every month.

ATiT has also recently launched a website dedicated to the MEDEA:EU project which supports the organisation of the MEDEA Awards and which is partially funded under the European Commission' s Lifelong Learning Programme.