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		Newsletter 01 is Out!

Editorial

RIGHTS consortium held its kick off meeting on October 19-20 2011 in Rome at Università degli Studi "Guglielmo Marconi" (USGM), project Coordinator. The meeting aimed at officially opening the project. It was a successful summit since all partners got to know each other and had the opportunity to have an open discussion on the main issues related to future steps and activities.

RIGHTS is a two-year Comenius project co-funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Program. The project started in October 2011 and will finish in September 2013.

The RIGHTS project addresses European high school teachers and students through the following key actions:

Bringing new digital tools into the classroom to empower teachers to experiment with new technology and render teaching and learning more up-to-date and interesting

Encouraging teachers to work together with their students to create and produce their digital stories on EGC, allowing them to discover new ways to approach digital education and to be more active and aware as European and "global" citizens.

RIGHTS aims to identify, implement and test a didactic methodology that can help teachers acquire new skills through using the Digital Storytelling approach applied to Global Citizenship Education in order to help motivate new generations of young people to be active as global citizens.

The main project result will be the RIGHTS pilot course delivered in two parts:

E-learning course for teachers, focusing on Global Citizenship Education video and book trailer production as tools for using Digital Storytelling in Education.

Face-to-face seminars where teachers and students produce book trailers together using Digital Storytelling.

Moreover, on October 21 the consortium organized and participated in the workshop "Synergies: Digital Storytelling, Global Citizenship and Online Education" where RIGHTS partners and external experts presented their experience in the three project related fields.

Rights Partners will meet again in Sintra in March 2012 hosted by the project partner Asociacao de Professores de Sintra.

In Sintra the partners will also participate in a workshop on Digital Storytelling from the 28th to the 30th March. The workshop will be organised and managed by Joe Lambert, CEO at the Centre for Digital Storytelling that is an international non-profit training, project development, and research organization that assists youth and adults around the world in using digital media tools to craft and record meaningful stories from their lives and share these stories in ways that enable learning, build community, and inspire justice. All workshop arrangement will be supported by Media Shots.

Spotlight

RIGHTS project team is currently conducting research in all seven partner countries (Italy, Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey) with teachers and students to understand current experience and expectations around Global citizenship education and digital storytelling. The research phase is coordinated by one of the Italian partners in RIGHTS, C.I.E.S..

The research is made up of two parts: a desk research based on literature and an in-field research that will also use social networks for collecting information and feedback on the knowledge of GCE related topics and on the use of the digital storytelling approach.

The resulting report from this research will be shared with all participants, and will be used to inform the next phases of the RIGHTS project, which will deliver a training course to teachers in the use of digital storytelling in education and on GCE topics, which participating teachers will then put into practice in their classrooms.

News and upcoming events

One of the external experts that are working in RIGHTS is Media Shots a Portuguese organization founded by three women - Helena Lopes, Ines Rodrigues and Ana Boa-Ventura - that offers services in digital storytelling and social media. As the Media Shots team pointed out Media Shots has developed a new training program, the results of which will be shared with the RIGHTS partners. A prestigious oil company contacted MS with a request for the design and conduction of corporate training: the idea was to help them develop their vision of replacing a reactive scenario of social media use by their clients, with a proactive one. The company considers storytelling pivotal to this endeavour.

As a result, Media Shots started this corporate training on February 8. To the total of in-class 25 hours distributed along several weeks, Media Shots set In place a flexible time period to allow one-on-one coaching. Media Shots is excited with this experience and believes that in a Europe in deep financial crisis, the educational, non profit and corporate sectors must increase their dialogue – and this should include the use, across those fields, of methodologies for community empowerment: in the case in point, storytelling. Helping young and senior executives to use DST as a way to re-energize staff and change public image will surely teach us lessons that will be valuable to share with the RIGHTS partners.

Media Shots will participate in the ‘Relato Digital Storytelling”, an international conference on DST held by the University of Valencia from March 21 to 23. On that occasion Media Shots will present the paper “Stories in the corporate world: Re-energizing staff, refreshing public image” with an overview of one of our first DST training “incursions” in the corporate world. The conference is organized by the Inter-university Institute for Applied Modern Languages of the Comunitat Valenciana (IULMA) & the Department de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València. Conference website: http://www.uv.es/digitalstory/

Furthermore in November 2011, Ana Boa-Ventura (Media Shots, Portugal) participated in a think-tank in Strasbourg on media literacy and human rights. The group will have the important task of drafting a declaration on that topic. Prior to the thinktank, and in the social platform that assisted the discussion, Ana described RIGHTS as a practice example that should deserve attention from the group. In Strasbourg, Gabriel Nissim (former Chair of the Council of Europe Human Rights Committee) identified RIGHTS as a practice example in the area of media literacy & human rights. The relationship with the declaration lies in the fact that acceptance is pivotal in any formulation of global citizenship. As a result, RIGHTS may become a part of the declaration as a practice example.

Digital Storytelling workshop – to be held from 27th – 30th March 2012 in Sintra, Portugal. Organised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (with the support of Media Shots)

RIGHTS partnership