The aims of this course is to bring together and further develop content, services, pedagogies and practices for lifelong learning in school, formulating specific scenarios of use of learning tools and platforms. Additionally it aims at exploring and promoting the contribution of ICT and digital media in supporting the development of learning to learn competencies in lifelong learning transitions. This way, the summer school aspires to address the necessity to develop an integrative approach in collecting and disseminating best practices that promote ICT enabled learning using innovative teaching and learning practices. To this end, a European network of all relevant actors shall be formed and motivated through specific educational actions, contests, conferences and summer schools, to develop the competencies necessary in order to properly educate in digital competence and learning to learn skills and thus supporting the transition of Europe to a leading knowledge based economy. The resources to be used have proven their efficiency and efficacy in promoting inquiry based-education. These resources do not impose a fixed curriculum but support the development of a model that can be customised to reflect location and culture as well as cross-disciplinary situations where the curricular areas that might be applicable are not and thus are ideal to be used in the European context. Moreover, since these best practices provide a “window” to live scientific experiments, ongoing research, their use can only strengthen the course’s socially cohesive and Europe-wide dimension. At the same time, participants will develop their learning-design skills by creating learning activities into a workflow and a vehicle for the sharing and re-use of learning design patterns in schools. In addition, teachers will be trained to select appropriate learning-design ICT tools that suit their own needs in terms of planning, implementing and sharing pedagogical ideas.

Participation in this event is funded by the European Commission through the Comenius and Grundtvig programmes: therefore interested teachers or trainers can simply contact their relevant National Agency. The list of eligible countries (EU ones plus Turkey, Croatia, FYROM) and the contact details of the National Agencies can be found here:

http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-programme/doc1208_en.htm.

The deadline for applications is January 16th, 2013. So we strongly suggest that:

(a) You ask the members of your teams that are working with the learning design and implementation of learning scenarios to apply for Comenius (for school staff) and Grundtvig (for university/adult training staff) funding through your National Agencies, so that they can participate in the Summer School.

(b) You forward this opportunity to contacts that could be interested (e.g. external institutions with which you are already working on learning design activities), letting them know about this training opportunity and inviting them to apply for funding. We would particularly encourage the participation of teachers/trainers that have been involved in the past in one or more of the project workshops.

For any further information please contact our colleagues from EA who are coordinating the organisation of the event (chelioti@ea.gr), together with the local hosts from Crete (neofotistos@physics.uoc.gr).