Happy New Year from myEUROPE and best wishes for a successful year with good ideas and interesting European projects!
This newsletter features the most relevant news items that were published on the myEUROPE portal, in January 2007. As we are at the beginning of 2007, it is time to make a year review of 2006, in terms of myEUROPE and its Web portal. According to our statistics tool, almost 200,000 unique visitors came to the myEUROPE portal, in 2006. The most visited sections were: Learning objects to teach European citizenship, Citizenship and Culture Activities, ICT Stories, Teaching ideas, and Teacher Corner. I would like to thank you all for your contributions that make myEUROPE a referential portal in terms of using new communication technologies to enhance curriculum on European citizenship and offer various intercultural learning opportunities to your students.
Kind regards, Petru Dumitru
Energy school competition You and your students may win important prizes including a trip to Brussels, in June 2007! The top three winners of each category, a total of 12, together with their coordinating teachers, will be rewarded with a trip to Brussels to attend the “Energy is our Future” Awards ceremony. A competition entry should be composed by a slogan, a poster and a short text in one of the three languages: English, French and German. Read more and take part in with your classes! (Note that the competition information is available in 19 languages; choose your language code from the top right list).
Learning to make a difference for the energy of tomorrow This was the motto that gathered 16 myEUROPE schools in an online chat on the Futurenergia website, on 23 January 2007. The activity aimed to bring the EU Sustainable Energy Week to all schools participating in the “Energy is our Future” project. More on the same subject:
EU welcomes Bulgaria and Romania On 1 January 2007 Bulgaria and Romania joined the European family. Both countries brought about 30 million people into the EU, creating a Europe of almost half a billion citizens. The event is an important step towards peace, democracy, stability and prosperity in Europe. Discover the two new Member States and their natural and cultural heritage with our learning objects:
A Blue Ribbon Connecting East and West, in English and German (by Susanne Bachtrog, Austria), Bulgaria in a cross-click (Anna Ananieva), in English and many other learning objects in 25 languages available in our repository.
The European Union: To be or not to be a Country? Laurent C. Patenotte teaches all levels of French at St. Paul's School, New Hampshire, in the USA. In this article he shares the way he introduced the EU flag and the Member States, following a discussion in an American school. Read more.
Finland: Latest news from ENO programme Mika Vanhanen, the coordinator of the ENO Programme, shares with us the latest news about a global campaign week on climate change that took place between 15 and 21 January 2007. Read more.
Romania: Our school, a European Culture Knowledge Centre Otilia Moldovan teaches English at “Ioan Bob” School, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In this article she describes an activity she and her colleagues organised during the “School Day” event. Read more.
Survey: Why do teachers use a learning resources portal? Teachers have an increasing choice to look for suitable digital learning resources. Many national and regional portals offer resources for teachers (see the report: http://wiki.eun.org/life-wiki/), there are thematic resources available and also digital resources on the European level available (e.g. myEUROPE).
In order to better serve the needs that teachers have, the developers of these portals need to know more about the reason why teachers go to those portals and what kind of resources they are looking for! Please answer to this one question "Digital learning resources: what do I mostly look for?" and help us to make better services to teachers and learners in Europe.
myEUROPE is a European Schoolnet project. It aims to help teachers raise their pupils' awareness of what it means to be a young citizen in Europe. By involving a network of more than 6000 schools, the diversity of Europe is brought into the classroom via the Internet.
EUN Office - Rue de Trèves, 61 - B-1040 Brussels Tel: +32 2/790 75.75 | Fax: +32 2/790 75.85 Website: http://www.eun.org | Project coordinator: Petru Dumitru
