schools

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.

On Thursday and Friday 14 and 15 January 2010 ATiT participated in the mid term project meeting of the European Commission Lifelong Learning Project SoRuraLL, which focuses on using information and communication technologies in rural parts of Europe, especially within the education and training domain.

Partners from Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Poland gathered in the excellent premises of Ellinogermaniki Agogiki to discuss the progress of development and pilots. The pilot activities are beginning now and will continue until July involving teachers in Greece, Spain and Ireland as well as learners in Germany and Bulgaria and citizens in Poland.

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

After a year of hard work, the EduTubePlus partners met for their first annual meeting in Rome on the 15/16 October to review progress and plan for the coming months. This meeting took place in the historical Sala 1 - the first radio studio used by RAI. It was a fitting location given the importance placed on educational content by RAI from the early days of the station during the reconstruction following World War II which continues to this day.

The first version of the EduTubePlus platform is almost ready and video content is being segmented and prepared for incluson. At the same time pedagogical scenarios utilising video material from the library are being prepared. Planning for the first user trials is now underway and will involve schools in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Belgium and the UK.

ATiT has recently joined a new project called Rural Social Networking for Lifelong Learning (SoRuraLL) which will investigate the potential offered by social networking tools and platforms to those living in geographically and socio-economically disadvantaged rural areas.

More specifically, SoRuraLL will develop and implement experimental learning approaches examining the potential offered by these new trends and tools for the alleviation of the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by rural populations in Europe, and in particular for the enhancement of rural citizens’ opportunities for effective and meaningful lifelong learning.

ATiT will be responsible for managing a trial involving schools in the East Clare region of Ireland. This is a Lifelong Learning Programme project (KA3) involving partners from Greece, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain and Belgium. The kick off meeting of the project took place in Patras, Greece on 29-30 of January 2009.

The EduTubePlus consortium launched the project web site this week where you can get up to date news and information about this new eContent Plus project. EduTubePlus brings together 17 European organisations and companies including ATiT to create a European curriculum related video library and hybrid set of e-services for the pedagogical exploitation of video in schools.

At this stage of the project, the partners are engaged in building up the selection criteria to be used in selecting videos for inclusion in the new library, a pedagogical framework for the effective use of video in class as well as creating the design for the web portal architecture. A meeting for the partners involved in the pedagogical aspects of EduTubePlus took place 4/5 November in Brussels.

ATiT staff recently spent several days in Greece providing support to the HERMES project funded by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. HERMES is a pilot project providing two way interactivity based on DVB-RCS technology to remote Greek schools, many of them located in areas for which satellite is the only access option possible. This project will contribute to a national roadmap on how schools Internet access can be provided on a nationwide basis.