workshop

More than 50 teachers from primary through to senior schools coming from the municipality of Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria are taking part in a 2 day workshop organised by MEDEAnet partner ITPIO in association with the Regional Inspectorate of Education on 3-4 April.

This workshop being led by Mathy Vanbuel from ATiT in Belgium includes practical exercises whereby teachers created their own video resources for use in a flipped classroom. Other presentations included inputs from teachers about specific IT related initiatives in the region. These were a project about the use of 3D with autistic children, an experience with an audience respose system and the experiences of a teacher on the use of software for web development.

This is the first workshop to be organised in Bulgaria in the context of the MEDEAnet project. Information about other workshops and webinars being organised is available on the project website: www.medeanet.eu.

Teachers and trainers from 7 different European countries are taking part in a training course this week in Leuven on the use of video to support learning. They include primary and secondary school teachers as well as adult educators and university staff and are working together in teams to produce short educational video clips as part of this highly interactive and practical workshop. Despite the sudden snow storm that descended over Leuven this week, they have already begun to make recordings and are looking forward to visiting the Future Classroom Lab in the European Schoolnet premises in Brussels. Find out more about these courses. 

21 teachers and trainers from all over Europe have converged on Leuven this week to discover how to create and use educational apps.This week-long hands-on training course is providing them with the basics of creating simple apps for the classroom and their goal is to conceive, plan and create a simple app for teaching purposes utilising the skills and knowledge they have gained by the end of the week. Course participants have a variety of experience but all share an enthusiasm for the task ahead. As well as finding out more about creating educational apps, they are also enjoying the experience of getting to know one another and to enjoy visiting the city of Leuven. 

Together with LearningTour in the Netherlands, ATiT is running a 5 day residential training course on Creating Educational Apps beginning on 4 February in the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe. 21 teachers and trainers will take part from Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Spain, Germany and Iceland. The main idea behind this hands-on training course is to provide participants with the basics of creating simple apps for the classroom. the next edition of this course will take place on 8-13 July.

Last Tuesday, on 13 November 2012, ATiT organised a workshop together with KU Leuven (Teaching and Learning Department) about lecture capture in the context of the European Lifelong Learning project REC:all. The workshop called “Lecture Capture: current best practices and future developments in universities” was held in Heverlee, Belgium and was attended by over 60 people and included a mix of people from different countries (Belgium, Estonia, France, Italy,  the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, UK, Singapore, Japan, South Africa, USA) with various backgrounds (academics, industry experts, students, ICT staff etc.).

The first part of the day included presentations that highlighted best practices in lecture capture in different institutions: KU Leuven (by Roman Verraest), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (by Daniel Tan), Estonian Information Technology College (by Marko Puusaar), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia  & the TransLectures project (by Carlos Turro-Ribalta), University of  Manchester & Opencast Matterhorn (by Stuart Phillipson).

After the presentation sessions the participants took part in a World Café where pedagogy, technology, IPR and organisational issues where discussed in small groups.

The agenda also included opportunities for one-to-one discussions with industry experts from Polycom (Marci Powell), Techsmith (Anton Bollen) and Mediasite by SonicFoundry (Matt McCurdy).

The day ended with a final panel discussion which included a strong message from industry representatives: “please give us more of your feedback, so together we can improve products to better meet your needs”.

Recordings of the workshop will be online very soon on www.rec-all.info.

ATiT was runner-up at this year’s GINCO AWARDS 2012 with the course “Using video to support lifelong learning” in the category: “Best Practice in ICT use”. This hands-on course has been organised three times a year since 2011, and aims to teach teachers and trainers how to use and create their own educational video from scratch. The GINCO Award Ceremony took place on 28 September in Hasselt during the international conference “Quality Course Provision for Grundtvig".

There were three award categories:  “Innovative use of ICT in all aspects of course delivery”, which was won by the TACCLE IST course, a course where participants create their own e-learning content. The award in the category of “Excellence in validating outcomes for participants”, went to the course “The Glottodrama Method” which aims to provide language teachers with more creative tools with the help of theatre. The last category: “Quality of course content and pedagogy” was won by ‘UNEC - Stars under the cobblestones’, a course to improve multi-cultural skills for teachers and trainers. ATiT’s next video course for teachers & trainers will be organised in March 2013 in Leuven.

30 officials from the Ministry of Culture in Iraq took part this week in a training course organised by ATiT in Leuven in the use of social media. Speakers from the media and political life in Belgium gave talks to the group during the week on topics like journalistic freedom, dealing with the press and government communications. The group visited the European Parliament, broadcasting station VRT and the European Commission and visited local sites and buildings in Leuven.

13 teachers from Croatia, Greece, France, Turkey, Italy, Romania and Belgium have been working all week in Belgium to create educational video materials as part of the course "Using Video to Support Lifelong Learning". This residential training course is aimed at trainers and teachers who would like to find out more about using video to support their teaching activities and covers the use of existing video as well as the creation of their own materials. A presentation of their outputs takes place on Friday 6 July in the Irish Institute in Leuven. 

Mathy Vanbuel from ATiT led two capacity development workshops in Jordan on 18-19 May for the Jordanian Higher Council for Science and Technology. The workshops were on Guidelines on Proposal Evaluation, Selection Procedures of FP7 projects and Individual Evaluation of FP7 proposals.

These workshops were organised in the context of the Program for Capacity Development for the Jordan Research Community funded by SRSF, the Scientific Research Support Fund at the Ministry of Higher Education.

ATiT is running its first course for Iraqi civil servants from the Ministry of Culture on social media, journalism and public relations this week in Leuven. 25 trainees are taking part from all over Iraq in this course which has been tailor-made for these trainees who will travel to Belgium in groups of 25 in the coming months.The course involves a mix of talks by experienced practitioners, practical hands-on sessions and visits to various relevant institutions in the area including the European Parliament, Television stations and newspapers.

The purpose of this course is to both raise awareness and skills in relation to how social media can be used to support the work of journalists, public relations staff and spokespeople while at the same time exposing participants to the daily practices, working norms and realities of a variety of professionals working in journalism, communications and public relations in democratic countries. Trainees are expected to put their experience in Belgium into practice in Iraq as part of the ovcerall movement of the government towards a more open and participative state.

These courses are organised by ATiT and the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe with their partner in Romania, the EU Innovation Center for the Iraqi British Cultural Center Organization located in Baghdad which is part of the Iraq Ministry of Culture. The next group of trainees will travel to Leuven in May.