ITEMS project

Berlin, 1.12.2010. The Online Educa in Berlin is a high level annual international conference, where researchers and companies from the field of online education meet. Since 2009 a school forum has been added to the conference, which is open for those who do the daily job: Teachers. This year, ITEMS was present two times. This report is about the presentation of ITEMS in the school forum. Here Karl Sarnow presented the available ITEMS modules in German language, as the school forum was visited by German teachers. A number of teachers visited the booth and asked detailed questions about the structure of the moodle courses of ITEMS. About 50% of the visitors had an idea what Moodle is, but most visitors have never worked with Moodle. They have been informed, that ITEMS offers free access to their own ITEMS courses on the ITEMS Moodle server. It has been well accepted that they can expect help from real humans in real time. Finally teachers received the email address and link to the server in order to dive into the modules as a guest and eventually ask for their own course. A large number of copies of the flyer has been taken away in order to spread the message about ITEMS in the teachers rooms of their schools.

On Wednesday, October  27, 2010 there was InfoKomTeh conference  in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Items modul Earth In The Universe was presented there to the partcipants of the conference  by Breda Poličar.

InfoKomTeh 2010 is the  international expert science conference – The New Vision of Future Technologies that was taking  place  at Tehnološki Park in Ljubljana. Participants of the conference are people, who want to be in touch with the most recent ways of using new technologies – not only teachers, but also busnissmen,university professors, assistants, researchers and students.

There was an E-twinning contact seminar in Reims from October 13 to October  15 , 2010 for teachers from France, Slovenia and Hungary. About 50 teachers from primary and  high schools spent three days together trying to find some ideas for the future eTwinning projects.

Breda Poličar from Slovenia has been presenting  ITEMS project  there.

There was an eTwinning Profesional Development Workshop in Ptuj from 24. – 26. 9.2010. Professional Development Workshop in Ptuj  was aimed  to natural sciences teachers, who are aware of the importance of the use of ICT in the educational process and include that component in the international projects. More than 75 teachers from 18 european countries  gathered in Ptuj in order to collect ideas for new projects, to meet with colleagues from Europe and to learn more about possibilities within eTwinning  actions.

ITEMS module Earth in the Universe was presented in Ptuj as an example of good practice. Math and science teachers were also invited to participate in the ITEMS online courses which will take place in October and November.

On September 24, 2010  more than  60 Slovenian primary and high school math teachers  gathered in Kranj, Slovenia on Math Teachers’ Conference. The conference was organized by The Slovenian National Education Institute.

Breda Poličar has been leading two ITEMS modules workshops there:  Introduction to Functions, Linear function module and Elementary Geometry module (Lines, Angles and Circles).  There were more than 30 math teachers participating in both workshops.

All of them were also invited to participate in the 24 hour course on the ITEMS modules (Moodle classroom as matehematical learning environment) in autumn 2010.

Slovenian math teachers showed great  interest in ITEMS project modules again. Some of them wanted to browse also through other ITEMS modules.

Frontiers of Physics is an annual conference of physics educators at second and third level.

This year there were presentations and workshops on measurement apps on ipad / iphone / ipod and various space and atmosphere science research projects based in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. ITEMS was presented as a poster and in many discussions with teachers and third level representatives. Some teachers expressed interest in using courses with students. The third picture is from the museum in Maynooth. It shows a medium size induction coil made by Callan in the 19th century.