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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 second Media & Learning 2011 Conference website is now online with more information about this year's event. The aim of this conference is to bring together people interested in the take up of media in support of learning across all sectors, to discuss future trends and developments in media-supported learning, to share experience in how best to promote digital and media production skills and competences including media literacy, and to debate the best way to use and re-use existing media resources in education and training at all levels.

If you would like to contribute to the conference programme with a presentation, workshop or demonstration, the deadline for receipt of contributions is 1 June 2011. Visit the website to find out more.

If you want to get a sense of what the conference offered in 2010, you can view the photographs, videos, programme and discussions of last year’s conference in a flashback of Media & Learning 2010.

The dates for the next Media & Learning Brussels 2011 Conference were announced today and this conference will take place on 24-25 November in the Flemish Ministry of Education & Training Headquarters in Brussels. The annual awards ceremony for the MEDEA Awards will take place during Media & Learning on 24 November.

Aimed at policy-makers and practitioners, Media & Learning 2011 will bring together people interested in the take up of media in support of learning across all sectors, media literacy and the re-use of media based resources in education and training as well as broader issues related to ICT skills and digital competence generally.

More information including the public call for input will be available from the Media & Learning website shortly. The deadline for receipt of ideas for the agenda is 1 June 2011.

ATiT is organising the next week-long course Using Video to Support Lifelong Learning  from 4-9 July in the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, Leuven, Belgium. This week-long course will provide participants with the basics of video capture and editing as well as training on how to publish their video materials online. Aimed at enthusiastic newcomers, this course will also address issues to do with video as a learning tool and how best to use video at all levels of teaching and learning. Funding to cover the full costs of participation including accommodation and flights is available through the Comenius/Grundtvig programme of the European Commission, full course details are available here. The deadline for application for this funding is 14 January 2011.

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 December issue of Media in Education is now available. In this month's newsletter you will find a short report about the Media & Learning Conference. Video recordings, presentations, photos and a final report about the conference are now available from the conference website.  

You will also find a report on how media is being implemented in French universities and a feature article by Paul Bottelberghs on a radical new approach to media literacy in education, based in the new digital culture. This issue also contains an article on electronic whiteboards, an announcement of the winners of the MEDEA Awards 2010 and lots of other news and information.  

Media in Education will be re-launched in January 2011 as "Media & Learning" and bi-monthly editions will be available in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish as well as in English.

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.

BBC’s highly engaging project School Report which gives 11-14 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience was a popular overall winner of this year’s MEDEA Awards. The MEDEA Awards were announced during the Media & Learning Conference which took place 25-26 November in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training headquarters in Brussels and which included workshops led by this year's finalists as well as previous winners and finalists. 

BBC School Report was also the winner of the Professional Production Award sponsored by AVID. The winner of the User-Generated Content Award sponsored by SMART was Et si c'était toi?, submitted by the Lycée Technique du Centre in Luxembourg and represented by Laurence Streitz. This 4-minute film was produced by 17 to 18-year old students of the secondary school Lycée Technique du Centre in Luxembourg and deals with bullying and domestic violence. The Adobe-sponsored European Collaboration Award went to Evolution of Life, a website created by LMU Munich in Germany and CNDP (Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique) in France and represented by Yannick Mahé, offering original teaching materials about the evolution of life. A special prize was given to Pocket Anatomy, submitted by eMedia Interactive in Ireland and represented by Mark Campbell. Pocket Anatomy is a fully searchable interactive atlas of the human anatomy designed to run on a mobile device.

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.