Dear friends, like I mention in my previous post here http://bit.ly/collaborationincop2smile I am honored to be in SMILE Project digital publication because I had the opportunity to be selected Leader in community of practices 2 (Using Social Media in schools, whole school approach) organized in SMILE Project obtained through a Facebook Awards Digital Citizenship Research Grant managed by European Schoolnet ( the network of 30 European Ministries of Education, based in Brussels. As a not-for-profit organisation, EUN aim to bring innovation in teaching and learning to our key stakeholders: Ministries of Education, schools, teachers, researchers, and industry partners ) and for this reason they develop many projectS http://www.eun.org/about/projects/ .Ollie Bray, our brilliant trainer from Intel Teach Essentials training course in Prague http://bitly.com/prgessentials invite all participants to join also Social Media in Learning and Education Project managed by EUN . Janice Richardson, manager of the project said last year when the project start ,, SMILE aims to investigate these issues and, through, an online learning course and mentoring techniques, not only encourage the take-up of social media in schools but also to map best practice in order to foster the exchange of ideas and experience” You can download official Smile Project handbook free from here and after you read the publication leave your feed-back, and add a comment to this blog post . smile handbook
The main purpose of this SMILE digital publication ‘Challenges and opportunities for schools and teachers in a digital word - Lessons learned from the 2012 SMILE action research project’ is to provide guidelines and examples to teachers on how to adopt social media in a school environment. “We believe that the SMILE report truly provides manageable steps on how to exploit the potential of these tools for the benefit of learners, both at classroom and institutional levels, in a pedagogically sound manner,” says Janice Richardson, Senior Advisor at European Schoolnet. The report also advocates a response to the important issue of online safety that seeks to move beyond a ‘lock and block’ mentality, to a mindset that prefers to use education itself to give young people (and teachers) the skills, the knowledge and the insight needed to be able to use the bewildering variety of tools on offer in ways that minimise risk.
“Nothing is more important to Facebook than the safety of the people that use our site. We think that online safety is a responsibility shared amongst parents, teachers, teens, policy makers and companies like Facebook. Because today’s kids are growing up in a new and different world, we believe that working with partners like these researchers is critical to learning more about ways that we can continue to improve our product. We strive to be as innovative when it comes to safety as we are in every other part of our business, and the Digital Citizenship Research Grants program is just one small part of our overall safety program. We will continue to create new safety programs to emphasise our ongoing commitment,” says Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, speaking of the research grants. This project has 3 parts :1. An online learning laboratory for 100 teachers from the 30 member states of EUN partnership to investigate and embrace the educational opportunities social media offers and for this reason Ollie Bray, our trainer introduce all of us in the beautiful world of social media related to SMILE Community of Practices, presenting the 1st part of the project in 6 units . For each unit, he give us introductory video to view, along with a written commentary and additional sources of information. We have also a list of links to explore and reflect on, and examples of interesting practice taken from both the education sector and beyond. At the end of each unit we made a series of tasks to help us deepen understanding, and gain practical experience of many of the issues discussed,more here Social Media in Learning and Education (SMILE) - Video 2 of 6 Using social media in schools - whole school approach. from Ollie Bray on Vimeo.Still the begining I must told you that I like verry much this project and for this reason I was involved in the discussions in 1st part of the project on the Elearning Platform managed by EUN http://leedu.eun.org/web/smile/home and for my research https://lucianecurator.contently.com/ I was accepted to be COP2 leader in part 2 of the project .
2.Research with the 100 learning laboratory participants to highlight trends and best practices for how social media is being used and can be used in classrooms;The SMILE ‘learning laboratory’ was organised around a number of Communities of Practice that allowed more than 100 teachers from across Europe and beyond to study some critical aspects of the use of social media in learning and education:· Social media - what is it?
· Social media - school policies
· Social media - pedagogical principles
· Social media - professional development (CPD)
· Social media - internet safety and responsible use
· Social media - challenges to adoption In XXI Century Education, the use of new online technologies ( social media and web 2.0 startup tools and apps ) aren't regarded like a avantgardist movement, but unfortunatelly although we have many free edtools most of the teachers still don't know or don't want to know how to integrate new online technologies into the classroom although in all the schools we have now computers connected to Internet . For this reason I accepted to be COP2 leader - Using Social Media in schools, whole-school approach . I had the opportunity to have Elena Radaelli from Italy my deputy leader who said after the project finished :
"The reason that led me to attend the on line splendid course SMILE was related to my professional and personal necessity to see if social media such as Facebook, that normally occupy a relevant part of my pupils' daily life outside school, could actually enter school and become an interesting didactical tool. I decided to start with an ad hoc Facebook group focused on our Comenius project to share ideas, jokes, and pictures to enrich the project. [..] I was amazed how fast and precise they were to react and do their homework. During all my teaching years, I had never seen such a prolific, lovely and creative production of assignments, nice jokes, provocations in plain English! So without even knowing it, they started using their first foreign language as a real communicative tool. They were totally involved in the learning process since they didn't perceive it as a burden but as part of their daily life."
3.Broad dissemination of results of the research through EUN’s interactive portals for teachers as well as through European and international meetings and conferences. 
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