On 15th December 2015 we hosted the fourth Education in the Digital Era webinar entitled "Towards a European Education Pioneers Network: Sharing the best ideas & Practices". This webinar gave a platform to five finalists in the Open Education Teachers Contest to share best practices.
For educators, nothing is more important than continuing to learn. Our fourth webinar celebrated the sharing of more than 200 good practices among European educators. Over the final months of this year teachers, trainers, academics and entrepreneurs submitted a variety of fantastic innovations to ensure others learn from them. 118 good practices are already published in the Good Practice section here.
Good Practice Contest Snapshot
Learning is not a competition, but this was a contest. All of the submissions were evaluated according to five specific criteria:
- Innovation—how revolutionary was the practice?
- Openness—did it produce or use OERs?
- Inclusion—was inclusiveness promoted?
- Replicability—could it be scaled?
- Political Relevance—was it a fit with an EC priority?
As one of the judges, I was lucky enough to review more than thirty of the best practices in detail. They were varied in their focus and approaches. For example:
- Contributors ranged from individual teachers running projects in one classroom to pan-European initiatives run by teams of researchers and teacher trainers.
- Users of the practices included both students and teachers, at the early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education level Practices were drawn from all over Europe, including Serbia, Spain, Germany, Croatia, UK, Europe, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Lithuania, Belgium, Portugal.
- Formats were varied and combined in interesting ways. There were examples of distance learning, ebooks, practical in-class projects, blended learning approaches, MOOC, radio learning programs, movie making and more.
- Topics spanned space, CERN, fostering creativity, mapping European history, augmented reality books, social books, media literacy, cyber-bullying, identity and school gardens.
Webinar Overview
In the end, we selected five finalists from the 200+ good practices that we received. Each of these stood out for scoring highly in all categories. The practitioners in each case were invited to present their work in the webinar in front of an audience of 75 registered participants. You can review their presentations in the webinar's RECORDING available here.
- Chrissi Nerantzi told us about the FLEX initiative and some of the associated cross-institutional initiatives that are supporting educator professional development in universities across the UK and further afield. You can check Chrissi's and her colleagues' inspiring practices: 1)Catch the creativity bug and spread it #creativeHE 2) Everybody needs a Greenhouse 3) Facilitating Learning in the Open 4) Everybody needs TLC 5) Food for thought 6) FOS: Enlightened learning, flexible, open and social.
- Daniel Bernsen presented A Classroom for Europe, a site that invites students to submit entries to an ever growing interactive textbook on the history of Europe.
- Maria Gkountouma related the story of her blended learning program to support more than 30 teachers across Greece to ‘get their hands dirty’ and grow their own school gardens.
- Marina Molnar spoke of a program in which she has supported her students in Croatia to make videos designed to prevent violence in schools, cyberbullying, religious and racial violence.
- Friederike Siller presented the Media Literacy Lab, where students come together to produce OERs as an online community of makers.
Contest Winner
At the end of the webinar we were pleased to announce Friederike Siller, Jöran Muuß-Merholz and Matthias Andrasch of the Media Literacy Lab as the winners. With five entries of the highest quality, the judges were initially split in their decision, with supporters of each of the five finalists. Media Literacy Lab was finally selected for its clearly innovative approach—comprising twenty-first-century ‘maker’ skills, encouraging virtual collaboration among students, and for the commitment to seeing students as the producers of OERs. We had thought of good practices at the level of teachers—Media Literacy Lab reminded us all that the future depends on developing students as producers of learning.