Are you interested in organising high quality Erasmus+ KA1 training for adult education staff?

The team of GINCO Tools & Training organises a

 

Second Pilot Course and a Conference

on competence development for international course or¬ganisers and trainers on 9th  – 12th of September 2014 in Alden Biesen + Leuven (BE).

The course will be led by the question: Which competences are needed to organise high quality European trainings for adult education staff?

During the course you will

• receive answers on your burning questions regarding the new European education programme Erasmus+ and it affects the organisation of European IST courses and
• go through the process of organising European in-service-training (IST) courses and develop vital competences to reach a high level of quality.

Thematic focus will be on validation of learning outcomes, evaluation and quality, PR, marketing and outreach as well as management and organisation.


Since the GINCO T&T team assesses competence-based teaching and learning as a key element, it will reduce theoretical inputs and presentations by trainers to a minimum. Instead you will be learning in an applied competence-based methodology and setting.


As a part of course the GINCO T&T conference, where the audience will be enriched by additional stakeholders, will take place in Leuven.

Course venue: 9 – 11 Sept.: Landcommanderij ALDEN BIESEN, Kasteel¬straat 6, B 3740 Bilzen, Belgium, Web page: www.Alden-Biesen.be

Conference venue: 11 – 12 Sept.: Park Inn hotel, Leuven (Louvain) , Belgium.
(http://www.parkinn.com/hotel-leuven). The hotel is situated next to the railway station with a direct connection to Brussels international airport (15 minutes).

The GINCO T&T team is looking forward to your application (download form:
www.ginconet.eu/pilot2candidate.doc) which will be received by the coordinator guy.tilkin@alden-biesen.be.

WikiSkills - Enter into Wiki Culture

Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet, it's been sometimes described as a composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, and a tool for collaboration.

 

A wiki is a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified mark-up language or a rich-text editor. There are over 100 different wiki software systems. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access), others may permit access without enforcing access control or particular rules may also be imposed for organizing content.

The EU project WikiSkills develops and implements a wiki training to teach educators how to make the best use of wikis in education. die Berater® will be piloting the Wiki training in Vienna in March. Through this, the project promotes innovative pedagogical approaches to foster digital literacy, as well as social skills, writing skills and critical thinking. By working with wikis, students and course participants can learn not only how to publish content, but learn to acquire and improve cooperative skills.

Benefits of using wikis
Wikis embody the idea of a potentially collective, democratic, open, and dynamic design. However, this somewhat romantic vision has been challenged by vandalism and “information wars” and required registration is not uncommon in some wikis.

Wikis allow users, with both author and editor privileges, to edit the overall organization of contributions as the content itself. Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems and note-taking. Many wiki platforms are open to alteration by the general public without requiring them to register user accounts. On the other hand, private wiki servers require user authentication to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them. Some wiki platforms welcome thousands of editors at the same time. But most wiki platforms have much less participants, ranging from a handful to a couple hundred. It is also possible to run a personal wiki. Thus, a wiki holds technology as well as community aspects.

When wiki activities enter schools or universities there are consequences for learning and teaching. Content and networked structures are built from within as users add material and make use of a simplified hypertext mark-up language to create links and add features. In LMSs and groupware, activities are often linked to individual work (learners’ personal folders etc.) that can be shared later, while in a wiki it is the collective (e.g. class) activities that give rise to content formation, structure, and (indefinite) growth. And while degrees of interdependence can be observed when people jointly draw and take notes, the wiki affords immediate and unlimited participation due to its distributed character; interdependency is not an option but its rationale.

What can a wiki be used for?

Wikis may serve many different purposes. Examples include community websites, corporate

intranets, knowledge management systems, and note-taking.

 

Here are some examples of uses:

• Collecting historical data; building encyclopedic content: purpose heavily inspired from wikipedia, it is frequently used within companies as well or on local territory wikis.
• Drafting and reviewing material: promotional flyers, public documents, reports, books, grant requests, documentation, annotated bibliography, minutes of a meeting, writing
• assignments etc.
• Directory for team, officials, local media: great use for a wiki, each person can keep her or his information up-to-date.... as well as information for others. Administration is quick and easy. A famous example is Diplopedia, the wiki of the US Diplomatic Department.
• Project knowledge management: brainstorming, sharing of ideas, coordination of activities etc.
• Publishing: all of the above, course resources
• Website supporting a temporary event, such as a conference: the wiki may host information about the program, about the speakers, content of talk, list of attendees, travel details and much more. Information can be easily and quickly updated by editors in a context of relative urgency.

Three ways to combat Violence Online!

Are you a Facebook user? Do your kids chat with their friends online?  Are you a parent or teacher who is concerned about what internet content is available to young people – and how they use it?

The European Project Virtual Stages Against Violence - VSAV (Daphne III Programme) has been developing material for young people 10-16 years old to highlight the dangers of the digital age.  An online game, pieces of interactive educational theatre and a teachers’ toolkit were developed on the basis of the research and needs analysis with the young people, teachers and parents at European schools, and have all proven popular and successful strategies for sensitising young people to the perils of the internet. 

With the Online-game “The Big Brain” and the theatre plays young people may learn how important it is not to reveal personal data or passwords when using new technologies. These innovative materials also show young people how false identities on the internet can be damaging. Besides the risks of new technologies the project VSAV especially addresses the positive potential that new media and other technologies entail:

• The Big Brain: Online-game
• Channel Troy: Watch the whole theater play here
• Teachers’ Toolkit: Download the toolkit for free

The toolkit will be soon available in German for download on the project website. A Training Course  was held in Palermo Italy for educators and teachers coming from the four countries participating in the project (Italy, Romania, Austria and Germany) where the Educational Guide “Toolkit – Digital & Media Literacy Education” were presented.  The text, written by Maria Ranieri (University of Florence, Department of Education, Educational Technology Laboratory), focuses on five key themes: Participation, Credibility, Identity, Privacy, Authorship and Creativity.

During the Training, educators could learn about and experiment the proposed activities in Toolkit which they have tested in the classroom in their countries.  The toolkit was tested in Austria in November 2012. The testing was carried out with pupils of secondary and vocational schools, aged 13 to 17. 

One example of the educational material is in the form of a WIKI – co-authored by teachers and pupils, this tool gave young people the opportunity to conduct guided research and engage in online  classroom discussions, using new media to contribute to web-content.

State of the Art: Wikis in education

Wiki tools are used worldwide as a collaborative and participative working processes tool mostly to organise and develop information from an open group of users. Those collaborative groups, beyond the technical knowledge, need a set of rules governing users’ behaviours, so a respectful and civil interaction can take place.

WikiSkills aims to join the Information Technology learning dynamics with this social collaborative aspect that can be an important added value for society. Wikis are not only an Information Technology tool; WikiSkills aims to investigate their impact on society as it implies very important social behavior such as cooperation, respect, team working, content development and community management.

The WikiSkills project aims to analyse and apply benefits of using wikis for lifelong learning programmes, thus empowering civic behaviour, social inclusion, employability, cultural understanding and abilities to learn autonomously.

Within WikiSkills a European State of the Art Report was developed, which aims at describing the European situation regarding Wiki tools uses within the 4 LLP targets groups. To this end, a desktop research, and a selection of good practices, has been conducted in each partner’s country, in order to identify the status of those wiki tools in European educational environments. Moreover, the report includes an on-line national survey addressed to educational practitioners of each partner's country.
The present document sums up the results of the desktop research of wiki tools, existing projects, good practices and results of the national on-line survey. Finally, an analysis of success factors using wikis in educational contexts as a result of the previous parts of the report.

The full European State of the Art Report can be downloaded here:
http://newsletter.dieberater.com/download_berater/doc_wikiskills_stateoftheart.pdf

Wikis in Education

Wikis are based on the principle of collaborative learning and making knowledge available for all.  Occasionally, however, it can also be useful to restrict access to certain knowledge to defined groups of people, for example, people in individual courses or even whole schools.  In this way, knowledge can be compiled and stored for current and future use, without the whole world having access to it.
Through such activities, schools or organisations can develop large knowledge pools that can be called up, enhanced and edited by everyone, whilst at the same time networking with other schools and organisations.

The EU project WikiSkills develops and implements a wiki training to teach educators how to make the best use of wikis in education. Through this the project promotes innovative pedagogical approaches to foster digital literacy, as well as social skills, writing skills and critical thinking.

In May 2012 die Berater® held a focus group with trainers in adult education on developing different ways and scenarios for integrating wikis in education (i.e. for project management, for the employees of a company to network and to share knowledge, for team building etc.). die Berater® is also responsible for the exploitation of the project results.

The project aims at :

• Developing collaborative leadership skills, collective decision making skills, conflict resolution skills, governance skills, etc., whilst contributing to the growth of a learning and working community
• Improving skills on collaborating with others to edit and develop texts
• Valorising existing cultural patrimony
• Acquisition of digital fluency basic knowledge

Collaborative Learning
For trainers to work with wikis, it is essential for them to be able to collaborate well with their students; good exchange between teachers and students is paramount to a successful wiki.

A lot of learning environments are characterized by one-way knowledge transmission processes in which the teacher is seen as the only source of knowledge. The teacher therefore assigns a learning activity that is carried out autonomously by the student.

By working with wikis students and course participants can learn not only how to publish content, but learn to acquire and improve cooperative skills.

What exactly is a wiki?
A wiki is a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content simply via a web browser. Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet. What separates the wiki from other online, distributed environments, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and groupware applications, is its open architecture. The design implies that structure is not imposed or predetermined (as in an LMS) but emerges as a result of participation.

The essence of the wiki concept may be described as follows:

• A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki website, using only a web browser.
• A wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages, by making page link creation intuitive and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape.

8th WikiSym - International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
The next WikiSym is held in Linz, from 27th to 29th August. WikiSym is a symposium (conference) series dedicated to wiki and open collaboration research and practice.  This symposium has been a gathering place for those interested in how we can use technologies like Wikis to support, develop, and change collaboration and collective action.

Schools partner-up to improve international cooperation

 

Collaborations between schools improve cultural awareness, intercultural learning and understanding and introduce international perspective into the classroom.


Teachers acting as international school coordinators around Europe play a crucial in fostering this international perspective and intercultural awareness. Offering trainings for intercultural school coordinators is the main goal of the Multilateral Project 'International Coordination Training for Intercultural Education and Diversity' (ICTPIED), coordinated by the British Council.

The pilot training course took place at Easingwold (UK) in March 2012, the participants came from 7 different EU countries as well as from India, Lebanon and Algeria. This enhanced the intercultural dimension of the course. The next “intercultural training course for the School International Co-ordinator” is now advertised in the Comenius Catalogue online:

Course 1 (Belgium): From Sunday 24 February to Friday 01 March
Course 2 (Romania): From Sunday 14 April to Friday 19 April

(Deadline for both courses: 1st September 2012)

The main objectives of this new training course are to:

• enable international coordinators in schools to gain intercultural competences
• demonstrate how intercultural issues can jeopardise school partnerships and to offer practical solutions and ideas during the course
• develop project management skills with a focus on the intercultural context
• encourage participants to develop their leadership role in school and to become active disseminators for intercultural education for other staff and students.

The course is the result of the ICTPIED project which involved partners from the UK, Austria, Germany and Romania in constructing and testing all of the activities. This process was supported by over 300 teachers in focus groups.

Methodologies
The course will use a range of methodologies including presentations, group work, role play and open discussion. Participants will receive information on intercultural education, leadership, project management, student perspectives and opinions, and the creative use of school partnerships. One important feature will be the inclusion of a number of intercultural scenarios which feature some of the main issues faced by those who manage international activities in school.

The collaborative forum created for each course will allow participants to keep in touch after the course is over. Course participants will be encouraged to undertake an intercultural task in their own school (modeled on one of the course activities), record their impressions of how this went and share this work with the others.

What defines a good school partnership?

A good partnership …
…is sustainable, not entirely funding led, soundly managed, motivates staff and pupils alike, is supported by senior management, involves the wider school community, is integrated into the curriculum, is strategically planned, addresses global issues and contributes to key competence development of teachers and pupils.

All of these factors were included in the development of the intercultural training course for the School International Coordinators (UK-2013-1676-002).

Teachers and teacher-trainers have the opportunity to apply for a Comenius In-service Training Grant to attend this course.The Comenius website will include full instructions on how to apply for the Comenius grant covering travel, accommodation, meals and course fees. If you are having any problems with this process please email: R.Kirtley@hull.ac.uk

Project website: http://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/ictpied