A month before celebrating its sixth anniversary, myEUROPE has grown to 5000 schools. The 5000th registered school is Ysgol Gynradd Llanfyllin Primary School in Wales, the UK.
Martin Roberts, deputy headteacher at Ysgol Gynradd Llanfyllin Primary School explained why he registered his school: “I have recently been on a Global Citizenship course for schools in our Local Educational Authority (LEA) and your project was listed as a means of contacting schools in Europe to plan common projects and activities. myEUROPE has certainly helped us in our work on Europe because I have already received several emails today and I only registered yesterday!”
The myEUROPE project was launched in May 2000 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Year by year the project has had various focuses: encouraging teachers from former candidate countries to get in contact with their peers in the old member states, supporting them to integrate easy ICT-based activities in their daily teaching, and sharing examples of teaching European citizenship at school.
This school year, myEUROPE focuses on setting up a repository with learning objects (LOs) on European citizenship. A group of 40 teachers are currently working to design and implement objects in 25 languages. The objects will be stored in a repository and classified and described according to specific criteria and metadata.
So far the teachers have designed about 170 learning objects. At the moment, these objects are piloted with schools from the network. They are published on this page. The objects may help teachers prepare lessons of citizenship and civics or may be used when teaching other school subjects, in a cross-curricular manner, such as language(s), mathematics, social sciences, geography and history.
One of the most popular sections of the myEUROPE website is Inside Schools, a gallery with school portraits. It gives visitors an overview of the wealth of cultures, languages and countries from all corners of Europe, and of classroom and school practice.
Learning objects make learning easier This article briefly introduces “learning objects” and discusses some of their attributes to understand why they have become very attractive instructional and pedagogical tools.
