management

The closing date for the MEDEA awards is coming up soon and so we invite all producers of media resources to submit their entries by 31 July. Entry to the MEDEA Awards is free!

This year there are two main MEDEA Awards, the MEDEA Overall Award and the European Collaboration Award. The European Collaboration Award recognizes excellent media-based productions and projects that come about as a result of European cross-border collaboration. This year the organisers are making a distinction between professional and non-professional producers, awarding the best entry in each category.

You can submit your entry in French, English or German and once your entry is completed, you can then follow its progress online. Find out more from the MEDEA Awards website.

11 schools in the west of Ireland are now actively using web 2.0 tools thanks to the SoRuraLL project in which ATiT is a partner.

These schools use a variety of different tools to share information about what they are doing. They include schools like Feakle National school which has put junior and senior classes' bookweek photos online and Moveen national school which has posted photos of pupils making pancakes for Pancake Tuesday. Other schools like St Joseph's secondary school use their own website which the teachers manage themselves to post reports about how well the hurling team is doing.

A number of other schools are getting involved in using these tools to support their links with schools in other parts of Europe like St Mochullas national school which now posts its own photo gallery of their work in the Choir project.

Work on SoRuraLL will continue for the rest of the school year and a conference called Social Applications for Lifelong Learning highlighting outcomes of this and other related projects will be held on 4 - 5 November 2010 in Patras, Greece.

This conference, entitled Media & Learning: towards the era of digital fluency is being organised as a collaboration between the Flemish Ministry of Education and the European Commission Directorate-General for Education and Culture and will take place in the Flemish Ministry of Education Headquarters in Brussels to co-incide with the Belgian Presidency of the European Union.

Organised by ATiT in Brussels, 25-26 November, this conference will bring together practitioners and policy makers in a two day event which will highlight the latest developments, services and digital and media competences in education and training. This event will incorporate the annual MEDEA Awards and interested individuals, project teams, institutions and organisations are invited to submit proposals to give presentations, demonstrations and workshops at this conference, the closing date for submissions is 1 June 2010. Visit the conference website for more information.

The MEDEA Awards 2010 have been launched with the publication of a brand new website which features samples and stories from winning entries in 2008 and 2009.

Online submissions are welcome up to the closing date for receipt of entries which is 31 July 2010. This European awards scheme recognises, rewards and encourages excellent use of media in education and attracts entries from all education and training sectors. Last year more than 250 entries were submitted and they included cartoons, videos, media repositories and animations.

The overall winner of the MEDEA Awards 2009 was announced by Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz, Advisor to the Director of the Lifelong Learning Programme, European Commission on 4 December during a well attended reception in Berlin.

It is Know IT All for Primary by Childnet International (UK), which was represented at the prize-giving ceremony by Lucinda Fell, Policy and Communications Manager, who graciously accepted the bronze MEDEA statuette as well as hardware and software sponsored by Avid and Adobe. In addition to the overall winner, the MEDEA Award for Creativity and Innovation 2009 was won by Daisy and Drago by Terakki Foundation Schools (Turkey) represented at the awards by Özge Karaoğlu.

Traditions Across Europe by Istituto Comprensivo “Don Bosco” (Italy), represented at the awards by Gina Mango won the MEDEA European Collaboration Award 2009 and a special jury prize was given to Eyes on the Skies by European Southern Observatory (ESO) (Germany) in recognition for what the judges described as “a superb example of the value high quality video imagery can bring to an educational production”. For more information visit the MEDEA web site

The MEDEA Secretariat announced today the 8 finalists for the annual MEDEA awards. These are in alphabetical order: Daisy and Drago by Terakki Foundation Schools (Turkey), Eyes on the Skies by European Southern Observatory (ESO) (Germany), INgeBEELD by CANON CULTURAL UNIT (Belgium), Know IT All by Childnet International (UK), Les TIC en Classe by VISION FUTURE (France), Planet SciCast by NESTA (UK), Studiecoach by the Dutch Open University (The Netherlands) and Traditions Across Europe by Istituto Comprensivo “Don Bosco” (Italy). The overall winner will be announced during the MEDEA Awards Ceremony on 4 December 2009 in the Hotel InterContinental in Berlin.
 
This year the competition attracted 254 entries from 39 countries which was a significant increase in entries compared to last year. The finalists were chosen by a jury made up of 76 education and media experts from 26 countries who assessed the MEDEA entries in October.  All finalists will attend the Awards Ceremony on Friday 4th December 2009, where they will have the chance to win the main MEDEA Award as well as several other prizes, including software sponsored by Adobe and AVID.

If you would like more information about these awards, visit the MEDEA web site.

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.

Entries to the annual MEDEA Awards have been arriving daily to the MEDEA Secretariat in recent weeks and more than 250 were received by the competition deadline of 30th September. The highest number of entries have been submitted by French organisations with organisations in Italy, UK and Germany also submitting a significant number. Judging will begin in mid-October and the organisers hope to have a list of finalists available at the beginning of November.

The number of organisations supporting the promotion of the MEDEA Awards for 2009 is growing, and MEDEA now has contact points in almost 20 European countries. Recent organisations to join include Masaryk University Brno in the Czech Republic, the Estonian e-Learning Development Centre, Webstroom in The Netherlands and CSP - Innovazione nelle ICT in Italy. To see the full list, check out the list of partners on the MEDEA web site.

Staff from University of Hull and ATiT met in Hull last Thursday to work on the pedagogical framework which will be used in the EduTubePlus project. This framework will build on the work of both partners and will match in part the selection criteria used to categorise video clips describing the different activities video can support in the classroom.The framework will be used both as a way to make available examples of good use of video in the classroom as well as a way for teachers to create their own learning scenarios using video resources.