Teachers' Newsletter - Published by European Schoolnet

Teachers' Newsletter No. 129
7 July 2008

Dear colleagues,

Most of you are probably sitting on packed suitcases or you are just getting ready for your holidays – some lucky ones have gone already, for sure. Please find below the last newsletter of this school year. The next newsletter will be sent in September for the start of the next school year.

Commissioner Figel’ teaches online about intercultural dialogue and understanding

Commissioner Figel’, responsible for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, hosted an online debate on the Spring Day website on 16 June 2008. The debate has been the fourth event of this kind since 2005, when the guest decided to interact with Spring Day schools on a yearly basis. The debate focused on intercultural dialogue and understanding as topics that are introduced and learnt at school. Students and teachers from 14 schools representing 12 countries came online to interact with Commissioner Figel’ and his team of experts.

Key public figures join Spring Day 2008

A number of key public figures joined Spring Day by visiting schools and hosting online and traditional debates:

French minister Xavier Darcos met a group of Spring Day schools in Paris
Euripidis Stilianidis, Greek minister of education, joined in Spring Day
Portuguese President Cavaco Silva went back to school
Commissioner Figel‘ paid a visit to the Základná škola s materskou school in Slovakia
Slovenian president, Dr Danilo Türk, welcomed students to the National Parliament
Margot Wallström encouraged young people to make their voices heard
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus went back to school
MEP Katerina Batzeli encouraged young people to open school doors to intercultural dialogue
European Commission Vice-President Margot Wallström visited the Katedralskolan in Uppsala, Sweden
European Economic and Social Committee President, Dimitris Dimitriadis, hosted an online debate.

Other 280 local, regional, national and European public figures also joined in Spring Day 2008.

Women in IT – Helping young women to realise their potential in technology

Microsoft together with UNESCO, INSEAD, the Women’s Forum, the SciTech Girls and European Schoolnet, will be hosting a high level roundtable and debate "Women in IT". This aims to raise awareness and policy makers’ attention to the need of promoting a deeper participation of young women in technology and science studies. The “Women in IT” event will take place on 7 July 2008 in Paris during Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition. The debate will include high level participants, such as Ján Figel’, European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, and Claudie Haigneré, former French Research Minister and first European female astronaut.

MELT Project Summer school in Mechelen

The former capital of the Low Countries was the meeting point of teachers and others involved in the MELT project for their summer school.

The aims of this summer school were to bring together the different groups that have been working on the MELT project: a first focus group of expert teachers, a second pilot group of practitioners from schools who have been using the Melt portal in their work and the evaluators and leaders of the project. They came to share their experiences and evaluate the work so far so that their feedback can be used to improve the system.

eLearning Awards 2008 to start soon!

The next eLearning Awards competition will start soon.
Its objective is to identify and highlight best practice examples in schools that make good pedagogical use of ICT. Many teachers use their technical and creative skills to find new and innovative ways of teaching and learning based on the use of new technologies, but often their work is not known outside a small circle.
So use this unique opportunity and get prepared! This year there will be more prizes in different categories from more well-known companies to be won.

The prize-giving ceremony will take place in Rome on 4 December 2008.

Contact

Read more about last year’s competition and get inspired.

FuturEnergia to strengthen its impact in school and society in 2008-2009

PlasticsEurope and European Schoolnet are delighted to announce that the third year of the Energy is our Future (FuturEnergia) school programme will start in September 2008. The school programme will continue to strengthen, enhance and support energy education across the curriculum in schools by raising awareness on how energy consumption may affect climate change and how advanced materials help save energy.

Take part in the online survey on the Environment for Young Europeans website

The Environment for Young Europeans website is looking for an enhanced way to communicate with young people. In May approximately 100 teachers and 1000 students participated in the evaluation of the current website. Now all teenagers and teachers from across Europe are invited to give their opinion through an online survey which will be launched on 7 July 2008. The survey is reachable from banners placed in a number of web sites like eun.org or xplora.org

Contact

XPERIMANIA continues in October

The first year of “Xperimania – From molecules to materials” was a success: in all, the competitions collected 450 submissions from 18 European countries! The winners will be awarded their prizes at the ceremony on 16 September in Brussels. Xperimania will continue next school year. Besides the old activities – choose your experiment, create a timeline of material discoveries, and the popular chats – a new competition will be launched. Further information will be published on the Xperimania website after the summer holidays.

Teachers learn about personalisation of learning at iClass workshops

In recent months, European Schoolnet has organised several validation workshops as part of the iClass project. Some 80 teachers and 20 students participated in six workshops in Austria, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Spain. Participants involved in the workshops showed great interest in the project and we would like to thank them for their support! The workshops were the occasion to demonstrate the pedagogical model at the core of iClass called Self Regulated Personalised Learning and the technical system developed by a team of software engineers which ‘translates’ the SRPL model into an online platform. Self Regulated Personalised Learning is a pedagogy which promotes personalisation of education and empowers learners to enable them to make choices and create their own learning paths based on their preferences and characteristics. If you wish to know more about this topic, European Schoolnet produced a booklet to inform policy makers, researchers and practitioners about the project’s results. The publication is entitled ‘The Future of Learning?

Validation report

‘Decide for Europe’ with a Swedish team

I am a teacher of civics at a Swedish gymnasium. This autumn I will have a group of approximately 25 students, around 16 years old, studying the subject entirely in English. I would like to use the ‘Decide for Europe’ role play as a learning tool about the European Union; if possible I would like to do this together with two other classes in Europe.

Preferred period: around November 2008- February 2009

Preferred subject: 1)environment, 2)energy 3)citizens’ rights

Contact

European Schools Film Contest about climate change & ocean ecosystem:
Commissioner Joe Borg awards young pupils from the United Kingdom

On 5th June, World Environment Day, the EUROCEANS network of aquaria announced the winning class of its competition “The impact of climate change and human activities on ocean ecosystems”.

Very concerned by the climate change consequences on the ocean ecosystems, the children used humour and science-fiction to communicate their important messages. As future stewards of the planet, these European pupils are more than ever aware of the importance of scientific research, of the necessity of exchange between communities and the current lack of communication in raising the awareness of the general public.

Twin up with a school in Uganda

Greetings to you fellow teachers. I am John seeking school partners in Europe. My school is St. Veronica Community School (Primary), in the Kibaale District, Uganda, Africa. I was looking at the eTwinning website and found out about the opportunities for school collaboration. If you are interested in working together with a school in Africa and involve them in your project work, I would be very happy if you got in touch with me.

Contact

Find a partner school in Russia

Hi! I’m Andrei Putilov, an English teacher. I know Russia is not in the EU, but may be there are other schools abroad that would like to visit Russia? You might like to contact me if you are interested in coming over here on an exchange programme, just visiting the Urals or making other projects. The greatest achievements of my school are connected to studying biology and chemistry.

Contact

INSAFE newsletter

Recent newsletters from the Insafe network on safer internet use deal with topics of particular interest to teachers.
Many young people spend a lot of their leisure time playing a wide variety of games both online and on their consoles. A number of issues and initiatives undertaken by Insafe national nodes are highlighted in the issue on games.

Social networking, wikis and blogs

Your students are using the internet in a much more interactive way than you might think. Web 2.0 opens up a whole world of possibilities and, at the same time, an ever-increasing number of possible pitfalls. Learn all about this new phenomenon.