sorurall

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.

The programme for the Social Applications for Lifelong Learning (SALL) conference taking place on 4-5 November in Patras, Greece is now online.

This conference will feature the outputs of two European projects, SoRurall (Rural Social Networking for Lifelong Learning) and SimSafety ("Flight Simulator" for Internet Safety).

The programme will include a presentation from Sally Reynolds on matching the communication needs of rural learners to Web 2.0 tools and services as well as a presentation about the experience of using social networking tools in Irish rural schools to be given by Jim O'Sullivan and Cara Roche. 

Registration for this conference is open, for more information visit the conference website.

The Social Applications for Lifelong Learning (SALL) conference takes place on 4-5 November in Patras, Greece. This conference will feature the outputs of two European projects, SoRurall (Rural Social Networking for Lifelong Learning) and SimSafety ("Flight Simulator" for Internet Safety). It is being organised by the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (RACTI) and the Hellenic Open University in Greece. More information available from the conference website.

Partners from the SoRuraLL initiative which is testing the viability of various types of social networking tools met in Krakow, Poland on 3-4 June to discuss the progress of the pilot activities taking place in different parts of Europe. Part of their meeting was held in the Raba Wyzna Telecentre in the Rokiciny Podhalanskie region, a rural area about an hour from Krakow.  This area is currently suffering a lot from flooding in the region and the meeting served as a good opportunity to find out more about the needs of rural populations when it comes to ICT and the ways in which social networking tools can help to relieve isolation and provide useful community services to the region.

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.

Jim O'Sullivan and Sally Reynolds presented the results so far of the SoRuraLL project during the CESI annual conference held 5-6 February in Portlaoise, Ireland.

This conference, entitled Creative Technology for Challenging Times brought together about 150 teachers and others working with ICT in primary and secondary schools in Ireland for a day and a half of presentations, exchanges and discussions about the effective implementation of ICT in Irish classrooms. One of the highlights of this conference was the presentation given by Joe Dale on 'New Tools, New Curriculum, New Opportunities', to find out more about Joe and the tools he recommends, visit his blog.

The SoRuraLL presentation provided an opportunity to showcase some of the blogs and websites being developed by rural schools in Co. Clare as part of this project.

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 second meeting for the SoRuraLL project consortium took place in Barcelona this week in which ATiT is a partner. SoRuraLL is experimenting with various social networking tools to support educational objectives in rural schools and telecentres in different parts of Europe.

The user trials being organised by ATiT involve primary and secondary schools in County Clare in Ireland who from September 2009 onwards will take part in a series of trials involving the creation of local content-driven, community-orientated web sites, school blogs and the use of Skype for learning purposes. Other trials in SoRuraLL involve Greek Farmers, the unemployed in Germany and Poland and teachers in Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and Greece.

As part of the European Commission supported SoRuraLL project, ATiT held a workshop in the Clare Education Centre in Ennis on Thursday 7 May on the topic of Social Networking and how tools supporting the creation of user-generated content can be used in primary and secondary schools.

Teachers from 5 primary schools in County Clare took part in this workshop which also provided an opportunity to talk about the trials that will take place in the 2009 - 2010 school year.