Management

BBC’s highly engaging project School Report which gives 11-14 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience was a popular overall winner of this year’s MEDEA Awards. The MEDEA Awards were announced during the Media & Learning Conference which took place 25-26 November in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training headquarters in Brussels and which included workshops led by this year's finalists as well as previous winners and finalists. 

BBC School Report was also the winner of the Professional Production Award sponsored by AVID. The winner of the User-Generated Content Award sponsored by SMART was Et si c'était toi?, submitted by the Lycée Technique du Centre in Luxembourg and represented by Laurence Streitz. This 4-minute film was produced by 17 to 18-year old students of the secondary school Lycée Technique du Centre in Luxembourg and deals with bullying and domestic violence. The Adobe-sponsored European Collaboration Award went to Evolution of Life, a website created by LMU Munich in Germany and CNDP (Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique) in France and represented by Yannick Mahé, offering original teaching materials about the evolution of life. A special prize was given to Pocket Anatomy, submitted by eMedia Interactive in Ireland and represented by Mark Campbell. Pocket Anatomy is a fully searchable interactive atlas of the human anatomy designed to run on a mobile device.

Over 220 people from 31 countries are taking part this week in the Media & Learning conference organised in collaboration with the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training. This conference combines presentations, discussions, demonstrations and workshops and includes the MEDEA Awards Ceremony where the winners of this year's MEDEA competition will be announced.

Online discussions have already started and are open to the public and you can follow many of the presentation sessions live online from 09.30 on Thursday 25 November until 17.00 on Friday 26 November. Conference themes include the role media can play in supporting learning at all levels, media literacy and the use of media-based learning resources.

People who have registered are already using the online conference community to extend their network and to manage their participation in this event and its related community of practice.

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.

MEDEA2020 is a new project supported by the European Commission's Lifelong Learning programme which will build on the experience of the MEDEA:EU project in further expanding the work of the MEDEA Awards community.

This project will expand the reach of the MEDEA Awards by involving partners in Italy, France, Spain, Ireland and Poland and will provide the resources to support an ever-growing community of practice interested in the use of media for teaching and learning. Concrete outcomes include national workshops, the continuation of the annual Media & Learning Conference, multilingual newsletters and the support of an online community of practice as well as an online searchable database of relevant materials.

ATiT will lead this project which will begin officially on 1 November.

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.

9 finalists for the annual MEDEA Awards were announced by the MEDEA Secretariat on 4 October and are (in alphabetical order): BBC News School Report by BBC (UK), Bla Bla Bla e-democracy e minori by Civil Life Lab (Italy), Et si c'était toi by Lycée Technique du Centre (Luxembourg), Evolution of life by CNDP (France), Level 7 by Careersbox (UK), Monkey Labs by Die Keure/Larian Studios (Belgium), Pocket Anatomy by eMedia Interactive (Ireland), Theorem of Fire by Nafta Films (Estonia) and The Classroom by Cornerhouse (UK). 

The overall winner will be announced during the MEDEA Awards Ceremony which takes place on Thursday 25 November during the Media & Learning Conference in Brussels.This year the competition attracted 140 entries from 31 countries and for the first time, those entering could chose between submitting their entry as a production made by a professional company or semi-professional production unit or as one made by teachers, students, learners, parents, professors, individual or organisational representatives in primary education, secondary education, higher education, adult education, vocational education and/or training. This means that this year as well as the overall MEDEA Prize, there will also be a prize for the highest scoring entry in each of these two categories. There will also be a special prize, the European Collaboration Prize which is supported by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme. Prizes are sponsored by Adobe, Smart and AVID.

The finalists were chosen by a jury made up of 74 education and media experts from 26 countries who evaluated the MEDEA entries during August and September. All finalists will attend the Awards Ceremony on Thursday, 25 November which is a highlight of the Media & Learning conference and presentations by each of the finalists will be included in the conference programme.  

The European network that has been building up around the annual MEDEA awards was further expanded during the 13th annual ICL conference held in Hasselt from 15-17 September when Sally Reynolds presented MEDEA. During her presentation, Sally described the way in which the competition operates and the type of entries it attracts.This presentation included a discussion about the selection criteria used in the judging process and highlighted the growing level of interest in the use of media in teaching and learning. It also included samples of entries from previous years. More information about MEDEA is available from this website.