Organic-Balkanet.eu

The 5th (and last) project meeting of the Organic.Balkanet project will take place from 16 to 18/11/2011 in Bucharest, Romania. During this project meeting, the partners will discuss the progress of the project and will ensure that all aspects of the project are prepared and delivered on time, only a few weeks before the official end of the project.

The meeting will be collocated on 17/11/2011 with a European Workshop on "Training Challenges for the Agricultural Professionals: The Organic.Balkanet Experience", organized by the project. The Workshop will include presentations paper presentations and discussions, along with a session dedicated to the ICT tools used by the project.

Both events will be hosted at the premises of the University of Agronomic Sciences & Veterinary Medicine Bucharest.

The Green Ideas: Green Education for Green Innovation event will bring together people and institutions that are interested into agricultural, biodiversity and rural education, so that collaboration opportunities may be explored and exploited. The overall aim is to take advantage of the collective experience, good practices and software tools that various stakeholders and initiatives around the world apply in order to make relevant educational content available online, so that a Green Learning Network is conceived, set up and launched. This network will be expanding the scope and coverage of the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force (AgLR-TF) within the strategic alliance for Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD).

Organic.Balkanet is one of the sponsoring projects that will actively support and participate in the event, by contributing the experience gained by the project so far. Members of the GRNET team will represent the Organic.Balkanet in the Green Ideas 2011 and actively participate in the corresponding sessions.

The Organic.Balkanet project will actively support and participate in the "Joint School on IT-Enhanced Organic & Sustainable Education for Teacher, Trainers and Agriculture Professionals" that will take place in Mesta village, Chios island, Greece between October 5-11, 2011.

More specifically, the project coordinator Prof. G.V. Roman will present topics on OA, as they have been identified and described in the Organic.Balkanet project, while Lecturer Ms. Maria Toader will present the case study of the Organic.Balkanet project. In addition, Ass. Prof. S. Sanchez Alonso will present the Organic.Balkanet Web portal and the GRNET team (Dr. V. Protonotarios and Mr. Ch. Thanopoulos) will present the concept of training scenarios & pedagogical aspects (such as Participative Techniques) and their implementation in the training course.

The training addresses all teachers, trainers and professionals interested in the field of Environmental & Ecological Education, aiming to provide a better understanding of the current advances related to Organic Farming, Sustainable Education, Blended Learning and Modern ICT tools. During the event, the participants will also have the opportunity to attend the GREEN FEST, an international event on environmental issues and establish a dialogue with fellow teachers and professionals.

 The official training school of the Organic.Balkanet project, titled "Training for Trainers in Organic Farming" will take place in Maribor, Slovenia from June 27th to July 1st, 2011. It will be hosted at the premised of University of Maribor and will be collocated with the 4th project meeting of the Organic.Balkanet project.

The training will include topics on Pedagogy, Implementation of ICT tools in the training context as well as on Organic Agriculture topics, as they were identified during the surveys of the project. During the training, the Organic.Balkanet MOLE platform will be used for creating, storing and delivering courses online.