Author Archives: jeroen

Open call for proposals EAC/S05/2013 – Establishment of a European Policy Network of National Literacy Organisations

  By jeroen | 8 May 2013 - 23:23 | ,
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Deadline: 29th of August 2013; 12:00
More information you can find on the European Commission website. Most of the following text comes from this EU page.

The High Level Group (HLG) of experts in the field of literacy published its final report in September 2012. Renate Valtin and Greg Brooks, members of IDEC and FELA are members of this group. More information you find here.

In November 2012 the Education ministers adopted Council Conclusions on Literacy. They endorse the main messages from the HLG Literacy report and invite the Commission to establish a European network of literacy organisations.
The European Commission wants to support the establishment of one European policy network to raise awareness, gather and analyse policy information, exchange policy approaches, good practice and promising campaigns and initiatives to promote literacy in light of the Education and Training framework (ET2020) benchmark that the share of low-achieving 15-years olds in reading should be less than 15 % by 2020.
The objectives of this network are to:

  • develop country specific knowledge;
  • facilitate the exchange of good practice;
  • implement awareness-raising initiatives;
  • cooperate with other institutions and organisations working in the field of literacy both at national and EU level to promote effective literacy policies.

Update 07/05/13 : European Conference on Reading 2013

  By jeroen | 7 May 2013 - 20:20 |
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The 18th European Conference on Reading! Jönköping, Sweden, August 6-9, 2013

Go for more information on the European Conference on Reading 2013 to the Conference Page

  1. Update 07/05/13 concerns Travel to Jönköping
  2. The first preliminary programme will be on SCIRA’s website soon
  3. Update (22/03/13) concerns registration fee
  4. You can download the Program outline European Conference on Reading 2013 here or on the conference page.

We keep you informed.

Call for Papers for the 37th Annual International Reading Association of Ireland (RAI) Conference

  By jeroen | 15 April 2013 - 22:35 |
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The theme of this year’s conference is  Language, Literacy and Literature: Re-imagining Teaching and Learning.
The 37th RAI Annual International Conference takes place in the Marino Institute of Education, Dublin from September 26th -28th 2013.
This year’s keynote speakers are Catherine Snow, Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Robert Dunbar, Children’s book critic and Former Head of English in CICE.
For more information download the Call for papers RAI conference 2013

Dropbox folder for IDEC

  By jeroen | 15 January 2013 - 17:14 |
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We decided in our Glasgow meeting to use Dropbox to share documents. For that I made a Dropbox folder for IDEC. I will invite you to share this folder. So look in you email box for this invitation. If you didn’t get one today, please contact me.
To share documents, using Dropbox, you have to download Dropbox, and then you will have a dropbox folder on your computer. This folder will synchronize with the online Dropbox folder automatically  so you will be in sync all the time. It will become an ordinary folder on your harddrive, which you can use. If you use the link below, it will be quite easy to do this. Here you can find the Help files for Dropbox. But, If you need more help, let me know.

If you don’t have a Dropbox already please use this link http://db.tt/I9XnHlo to download Dropbox or the link in the menu at the right of this IDEC website. Please don’t do it another way. If you do it like this I get some extra space in my Dropbox, and I use my own private Dropbox space to do this for IDEC. So please help me this way, otherwise I will get out of space and IDEC too.

The chair will decide which documents will be in that folder. So please ask him or her before putting texts in this folder. Until further notice you will only read the documents in that folder. So don’t put any new documents in that folder without consulting the chair of IDEC.
A small step for you, but a huge step for the digital life of IDEC ;-)

Join INNOVATE13 conference Sao Paulo, January 19-21, 2013

  By jeroen | 3 January 2013 - 11:13 |
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Take a look at INNOVATE13. Designed to capture the collective learning of Innovate 2013. Grow your ideas here. The physical conference will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil this month (January 19-21, 2013)  While there will be educators physically traveling to Sao Paulo, you can attend virtually. I will be there and I hope to meet a lot of you too.

Virtual Participants: No travel costs are involved, NO registration fees are required. Make a commitment to

  • mark your calendar to be able to participate. January 19-21, 2013
  • find a dedicated “conference attendance” time. Use that time to read through the Twitter stream/hashtag, Ning activities generated through the conference, resources being shared.
  • ACTIVELY participate versus PASSIVELY consuming information. Contribute resources, your own perspective, thoughts and experience.
  • make strategic connections with physical attendees. (more…)

Help to enrich the report of the EU High Level Group of Experts on Literacy

  By jeroen | 10 December 2012 - 11:47 | ,
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Renate valtin asked us to help.
Dear IDEC-members, dear friends and colleagues. In the meantime you all have received the Report of the High Level Group of Experts, established by the EU-commission, were Greg and Renate were members. Here is again the link to this document.  http://ec.europa.eu/education/literacy/index_en.htm  You will notice that in the report there are some projects and best-practice-examples of different nations. In the document three broad categories are differentiated: (1) creating a literate environment, (2)  quality of education and (3) participation and inclusion. Each of these categories has only a limited number of practical examples and could be enriched by more examples.
Because of the scope of the report only a few examples have been included. I think it is a good idea to collect and document more projects and positive examples. In agreement with Meeli and people from the European Commission in Brussels I would like to ask you to help me in enriching this report by sending me descriptions of projects carried out in your country. This information should comprise: the name of the project, the reference (best a link to a website) and a short description of the procedures and outcomes.  These are two examples in the report:

In the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein, “Reading Empowers” (Lesen macht stark) targeted some of the weakest performing 210 secondary schools in the Land, reaching 40.000 students between 2006 and 2010. The intervention was based on additional individual reading support underpinned by a school-wide reading development strategy and teacher training in early identification of reading difficulties across subjects. An evaluation of the project using comparison groups shows the programme helped many low achieving schools catch up, but for those schools that didn’t improve more effort is needed. Reference: IQSH Institut für Qualitätsentwicklung an Schulen Schleswig-Holstein (2010). Niemanden zurücklassen – Lesen macht stark und Mathe macht stark: Ergebnisse der wissenschaftlichen Begleitung 2010 http://www.nzl.lernnetz.de/lesen/docs/NZL-Bericht_LMS_MMS_2010_web.pdf

In Portugal “The Book Time” programme is designed to stimulate children’s and adolescents’ interest in books, introducing reading, games and other recreational/educational activities with books into classroom activities. The programme promotes children’s and adolescents’ meetings with authors and illustrators, book fairs, competitions and recreational activities based on books. It provides technical orientation on reading promotion and a budget for school libraries to purchase different types of book to be used in classroom reading activities and promote independent contact with books.
Reference: http://www.euread.com/projects/details/book_time/

Please send Renate (renate.valtin AT t-online.de) examples from your country. And please indicate in which chapter your example belongs (the chapters are numbered).  I would be very grateful if you could send your information in the next 6 weeks, so that there is time enough to put all the information together before our Glasgow meeting (and I am sure Greg will help us all in polishing the language, if needed). Hopefully there is some time in Glasgow to discuss the outcome.

Lithuanian Association for Reading and Cultural Literacy

  By jeroen | 4 October 2012 - 14:55 |
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We are happy to inform that Lithuanian Association for Reading and Cultural Literacy is affiliated to IRA. Congratulations and best wishes to the association and thanks to all who were involved into the process.
Rūta Elijošaitytė and Rūta Kačkutė where the main engines. Global Affairs and Pehr Olof Rönnholm provided instrumental guidance. Special thanks to Amy Kuchner for constant and efficient support.
We are looking for a success of Lithuanian Association for Reading and Cultural Literacy  in IRA and IDEC family.
We are looking for more groups in European countries following Lithuanian example in establishing and affiliation process.