EUROPE AND EDUCATION : Professional Development for Teachers

Europe and Educators : a great  level of engagement for teachers who have chosen online Professional  Development


My first attendance online was a Mooc by Futurelearn.com, then I discovered Coursera and many MOOC course providers.  
As a teacher who is interested in self-development and getting to know more as regards my profession I wanted to find online courses that might be  focussed on English language teaching and learning and  teaching  in  virtual environments. I was pleased to learn more by doing some MOOCs and I must admit that some were really " engaging" in terms of  support, weblink references and interesting topics presented.

Last year I discovered  http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/ 
and I could get more engaged into MOOCs dealing with new technologies and  other European  projects aimed at  training teachers and sharing  projects. 

Now Europe has added more websites related to education and supporting education and  teachers'  development:
Tweet di @OpenEduEU


This year I came  across a new website which is promoted by the European Union: schooleducationgateway.eu

http://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/index.htm

I was surprised to learn that they are going to start some courses for teachers dealing with important issues like integration of students with special needs, project based learning and many  more interesting topics . They have  created an institution named   Teacher Academy - here is the link to the web page:

 http://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/latest/news/teacher_academy_europes_answ.htm

They have just started and in the next months there will be many more online courses for busy teachers. I have just enrolled to see how they are going to run their course.

The first course is about  Project Based  Learning: it started on 6th June .
Here is the  video presentation online :

Last Sunday I could enter the platform and see what they were going to present in the MOOC.

The course makes use of content coming from eTwinning Professional Development activities and is  based on the hard work of eTwinners like Kornélia Lohyňová, Bart Verswijvel, Anne Gilleran, Rute Baptista, and many others. Next to this content, the course uses a variety of content coming from other sources, in particular the work of the Buck Institute of Education and Edutopia. 

We will be asked to watch videos, to have access to resources online, to think about our  projects, to discuss about what we have presented, to assess projects  designed by other teachers and to write a diary online about what we have learnt. I have already done this experience online  with European Schoolnet  Academy and I am going to present the new one in the next weeks.

The activity seems to be challenging and  I am going to start it now once my school year finishes by 15 June. Later I will be busy with the final year exams with secondary school leavers but it will be nice to continue learning about new approaches, new tools and discuss and share ideas with other  teachers.

Practical Project Based Active Learning- https://www.flickr.com/photos/aalto-cs/8682735735

Attribution   CC BY-SA 2.0- photo by  Seungho Lee