The European Children’s Travelling Language Library (Eurolib) is a European Union funded education project. It is targeted at motivating children who have recently started to learn a foreign language to:

• Exposure them to the rich heritage of European languages and cultures
• Be motivated to learn languages
• Build a love of reading as the best form of autonomous lifelong learning
• Reinforce emerging literacy

Travelling libraries of the most beautifully illustrated children's books in six European languages (English, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Czech and Finnish) will travel from school to school across Europe. Each school keeps the library for a period and has to carry out a number of educational and collaborative activities before, during, and after the visit of the Library. Additionally, they place the results on the project website for use and viewing by other schools.

Activities include inter-comprehension, comprehension, creative expression, criticism, reflection, task-based learning, collaboration, and using languages within a social context.   Both on the project website and traveling with the library itself will be teacher diaries and teacher guides. Every school will be able to add a profile and message for the next schools in the library and the website as text and/or multimedia.

The target groups of students for the project are in their first year of learning a foreign language (in Europe this can start at age 6 in Italy) were the diversity and need to learn should be reinforced at a level that young students can appreciate by introducing learning materials that will engage children.

The 36 books of the library (6 in each language) were chosen according to set of criteria, especially a need to show the individual cultures that the books come from and that the books are heavily illustrated. This resulted in each country having at least one classic story of their culture like Don Quixote from Spain, a factual book like a Richard Scarry book in English, but the rest are fiction. Illustrated books were chosen as this will help children decode the story of a book in a language that they do not understand and will be the basis of some tasks.  

At the conclusion of the piloting, teachers have spoken about their overall experience and said (translated from Italian and Spanish):

‘It is a remarkable education initiative!  We need to be exposed to foreign languages! Our youth is going abroad for work more and more and it will be helpful for future citizens to have done many of these experiences at a young age, so they may feel familiar with other cultural environments’.

I never thought that my pupils could be so attracted by foreign languages. I will certainly do more activities based on the EuroLib concepts’

 ‘I am very surprised that the children were so attentive for so long. I have also seen some of my little students who usually have behavioural problems enjoying and participating as the others. 

About individual activities:

About the story-telling activity “For me, surprisingly, this was perhaps one of the top five activities. All the groups were assigned the same ten words but they produced four completely different and imaginative stories. Well done”.

About matching cultural items with the country of origin, “It was a very popular activity. Easy enough but challenging for children to play. Everybody enjoyed it a lot.” 

The project closes in November 2011 but we are now looking to expand Eurolib in to many more countries to enable the continuation and enlargement of the project. Interested organizations, schools, teachers, even parents can contact the project to express their interest in bringing the Eurolib to your district.

Educomics http://www.educomics.org/  is a European Union Comenius education project under the LifeLong Learning Program.  It is building sets of resource materials for teachers based on research and piloting in EU schools, so that teachers will have clear examples and guides to use digital comics in their teaching practice.

Digital comics in the classroom have been clearly seen to enhance learning to engage and motivate students. For teachers it allows them to use, a simple, technology in a practical and effective way.

Invitation
I would like to invite you to take part in our project by also using digital comics. You can use a simple to use software application called ComicLab which has been used by students and teachers for making digital comics in classrooms. You can find ComicLab at: http://webcomicbookcreator.com. The ComicLab application comes with a full instruction book and 30day fully functional, trial version.

You can find free, open access, resources and lesson plans about the educational use of comics on the project website: http://www.educomics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=64

I would be very grateful if you could tell me about your use with your students. You can write back with your own comments or use the template downloadable from the website http://www.educomics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55

By trying comics you can add to our knowledge of how digital comics can be used as effective, motivational tools in the classroom and add to the resources we will make available to teachers.

If you would like further information please write to us.

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ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0  (ARGuing) is a European Union education project.

The project has created the first use of an Alternate Reality Game for motivating secondary school students to learn languages. The project has also learnt how an ARG can be adapted to almost any area of education.

The game that was created was called ' The Tower of Babel' and included a story designed to engage the target student group. The students had to save the planet by completing specific quests, collaboratively and internationally. The project has been a huge success with over 400 teachers and students from 17 countries playing the game ' The Tower of Babel'. In the final pilot over 9,000 quests were answered and 800 files uploaded.

The project has created a number of resources that are available online, these include:

1. A re-usable game platform (on a Moodle platform) that includes multiple languages http://ictthatworks.net:8080/moodle/ - you can view inside the platform by sending an email to me. Please place in the subject line of the email – TofB platform
2. A project website with additional information http://www.arg-education.eu . On the website are papers to download including:

1. A methodology to make and use Alternate Reality Games in education
2. A set of case studies of other ARGs and serious games with empirical evidence of results
3. A set of use case scenarios that show examples of how ARGs could be used for other subjects or cross-subjects
4. An online teacher training course to enable educators to use the ARG the project produced
5. Summaries of papers on the pedagogy, evaluation and the technology employed. (full papers are available in the conference proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning http://academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2009/ecgbl09-proceedings.htm )

The project team are also offering consultancy services to other educators interested in using ARGs in education.