Jo Turner-Attwell interviewed several teachers who attended the workshops during the TACCLE launch conference

On Saturday October 17, 2009 TACCLE organises a one day conference on e-learning in Ghent (Belgium) at the Department of Trade Science and Science of Public Administration of the university college Gent.  

During this launch conference the results of the TACCLE project will be presented to a broad audience of teachers, teacher trainers and everyone with an interest in education. The TACCLE handbook will be ready by then and will be distributed in Dutch or English to the participants of the study day.
 
The programme looks like this:
 
08u30    Welcome breakfast
09u30    Speech by the head of the department, Frank Naert.
09u40    Introduction by the governor of GO!, Raymonda Verdyck
10u00    Presentation of the TACCLE project by Jens Vermeersch and Peter Druyts
10u15    First workshop: eXe, Personal Brain, Podcasting, Smartschool, Web 2.0 toepassingen
12u15    Lunch
13u30    Second workshop: eXe, Personal Brain, Cartoons, Smartschool, Moodle
15u30    Guest lecture by Graham Attwell, director of Pontydysgu in Wales, on The Future of (e-)learning
16u00    Closing speech by Lieve Van den Brande, European Commission DG Education and Culture on the Comisson's views on the use of ICT in education between now and 2020.
16u30    Reception
17u15    End

The conference will be in Dutch and English. Participation (including meals and TACCLE book) is free of charge.

The conference is complete, unfortunately we cannot accept any more registrations.

With this in-service training our aim is to help teachers to develop state of the art content for elearning in general and for learning environments in particular. We try to achieve this by training teachers to create elearning materials and raising their awareness of elearning in general. TACCLE will help to establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work. The training is geared to the needs of the classroom teachers but teacher trainers, ICT support staff and resource centre staff may find it useful too! Pre-registrations for this course will close on September 15th.

Consult our course page for more information. (if you login you will see a pre-registration form on this page).

The TACCLE book is one of the major outcomes of this project. It is now ready and fully edited in English.  Download it by clicking this link after registering and logging in.

A printed and lay-outed version of the book is also available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. If you want to receive a complementary copy please register on:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=ckJtMnNPdHk3ZzRDZDg3dGVhMVM3RUE6MA. .

On May 8th 2009 the TACCLE project was presented at the first Girl Geeks Dinner Marche. The topics of the evening were based on Social media marketing and it’s use. More than 60 people were present, all interested in new technologies and communication.
A first presentation was made by Sara Maternini who presented the idea behind GGD Italy. After this an online connection was made with Beatrice Finauro, coordinator of Marketing Fox Interactive Media and MySpace Italy who talked about Tools and potentials of social media.
The next speaker was Dr. Federica Pascucci, researcher in Web marketing and social media strategies at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona) who presented a research on social medias and enterprises. As a last presentation Kylene De Angelis introduced TACCLE to the group.

One of the outcomes of the TACCLE project will be an in-service training course which we will offer at least once a year via the Comenius training database, to interested teachers from all over Europe. The first two courses will probaly be organised in March and April 2010 in both Wlaes and Italy.

From 20 - 22 april 2009 we organised a succesfull test course as an outcome of one of the workpackages of our project. The feed-back from the participants makes it possible for us to adjust and fine-tune the programme of the in-service training we plan to offer. The test was only 3 days while a full course will be 5 days of training.

As a first step in developing the TACCLE materials, we have done a survey to get to know Teachers needs. As part of the modelling process of the project, this survey combined with interviews of a selected users groups will be used to bring facts to light about the training system to be implemented. This is coupled with the review of other information sources (e.g. related documents, systems in operation, developers of other trainings) and research into already available resources on learning environments aimed at compulsorily education.

The new generation of eLearning will combine social networks with context-based services. Even though formal content will not vanish, modern technology will support user-generated informal content. And teachers have to adapt to a new role as facilitator instead of a pure information transmitter. CHECK.point eLearning spoke with Graham Attwell, founder and senior researcher of Pontydysgu, and partner in TACCLE about this current progression.

Read the article on check.point-eLearning

The conference is organised by the European Commission and the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) in partnership with the e-Skills Industry Leadership Board. It will bring together experts from government, ICT industry, social partners, academia and other stakeholders to discuss best practices, flagship projects and report on progress. Participation at the conference is free of charge but on invitation only.

As part of our outcomes we have published the report of the TACCLE survey in each of the countries participating in this project. I would like to draw your attention to the results of a similar survey conducted in UK also using surveymonkey. More details are available on : http://www.checkpoint-elearning.com/article/5453.html and on http://www.kineo.com/e-learning-trends/e-learning-survey--3.html Some of the results: the need for support on authoring tools and the growing importance of web 2.0 for learning.