web application

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.

A small team from ATiT spent the week of 20th April in Freetown, Sierra Leone, working with the Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA) to prepare for the creation of a content driven web site and intranet, including the necessary training to operate the website in the future.

This service will target both companies from within Sierra Leone as well as potential foreign investors and will be used to help drive the economy forward by identifying international markets for products from Sierra Leone as well as finding investors to work with companies in Sierra Leone.

The site will be built using DRUPAL as the Content Management System and will be available in June 2009.

ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conference organisers, ICWE, launched their MyOEB sevice this week for participants. This service, built by ATiT making use of the Drupal framework, allows participants to create their own personal agenda. Given the range of choices available, MyOEB means that participants can prepare a plan for themselves based on their own objectives and interests as a way to get the most out of what has become the largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors. ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN takes place from 3-5 December.

ATiT offers web site and web application development to their customers and we find ourselves using Drupal more and more lately. Drupal is an open-source content management system and framework that can be modularly extended by either third party or custom written software modules. It has gathered a large following of users and developers around the world and is getting bigger all the time.

Last year, we created the Fortis Coaching Game, a serious game based learning tool for bank managers. Development could be brought right up to speed by using Drupal as an underlying framework, cutting down on development time and costs and offering a solid code base at the same time. This web site, the ATiT site v3, is also powered by Drupal. It only contains a small amount of custom coding; most functionality used here is present in Drupal core or by freely available third party modules.

If you want to learn more about Drupal, please visit www.drupal.org. You can of course always contact us for further enquiries.

The campaign for the MEDEA Awards 2008 is in full motion and we're still welcoming participants, partners and sponsors! The aim of the MEDEA Awards is to encourage innovation and good practice in the use of sound, video or media-rich applications in education. If you're interested in becoming a sponsor and supporting this competition, please download our PDF with conditions and benefits for our different sponsoring categories. For more information you can visit the website  http://www.medea-awards.com.

ATiT recently started work on a new project called Learn@Work. It’s aim is to enhance the induction and support for learners at the workplace by building ICT models developed and tested in distance learning and e-learning. Four other partners are involved in this project, Glasgow Caledonian University (UK), the e-Learning Lab of Aalborg University (Denmark), Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland) and the Institute of Future Technology (Austria).

The objective behind SchoolCast was to plan, to design, implement and bring to pilot utilisation a content delivery system, whereby a variety of multimedia files (websites, video, audio, images) could be multicast to Irish schools using a 2-way satellite infrastructure, and cache the files at the school server for fast local access. Following its successful pilot phase which ran from February 2005 to December 2005, the SchoolCast project is now finished. Meanwhile the SchoolCast partnership continues between the 4 companies involved. ATiT, GCS and Intel are focused on opportunities in Ireland and Greece, while ATiT, Web-Sat and GCS are following opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa. More about SchoolCast also on the ESA Telecom website.

SchoolCast has been extended to allow for the development of several enhancements to the system and the team are working hard to make sure the service is ready to go for the new school term starting in September when it will operate for 10 primary and secondary schools and will be managed by NCTE. Part of the extension work will also be to carry out a study into enabling SchoolCast to operate as a viable multicast system over networks other than satellite.

The SchoolCast consortium led by ATiT had a successful Pilot Qualification Review in Dublin on 14th January with ESA when the lab version of the SchoolCast Schools Content Delivery System was successfully demonstrated. SchoolCast will now be trialed for a 14 week period with a schools network in Ireland over both satellite and terrestrial networks. Also see schoolcast.atit.ie