National Dissmination Event in Sofia
Presentation_ENEVA_11SEPT2009.ppt
ANNUAL LEAVE!
Dear partners and end-users,
We would like to let you know that from 15 July 2009 till 20 August 2009 the project team of Marie Curie Association is goind to be in Annual leave.
Have a nice summer!
The MCA team
Marie Curie Association held its traditional seminar on 22nd May 2009 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Marie Curie Association held its traditional seminar on 22nd May 2009 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. This time the seminar was devoted to the European Projects in Support of People with Disabilities and Disadvantaged People. It was visited by 70 participants among which there were people with disabilities, professionals working in the field of social services and training, representatives of local authorities and non-governmental organizations. During the event, the results of 5 international projects, partially funded by the Lifelong Learning Program, were presented. Among them were the current initiatives of the association aimed at training and supporting people with disabilities and professionals working with them. Of great interest were the two demonstrated interactive portals offering training courses and other information materials specifically designed for disadvantaged people. Information there is free and accessible for users after registration. If you have further interest you can visit www.eaccess2learn.eu and www.enevaproject.eu
Another project which caused the interest of visitors was the so called ESTEEM. Dora Bratanova and Petya Grudeva of Marie Curie Association told about the held within the framework of the project trainings in Bulgaria in the following modules: Social Work, Study Skills and Mentoring Support. 40 low-qualified practitioners working in social institutions as personal/social assistants of people with disabilities were included in those trainings. After the presentation, the trainees of the group from the town of Plovdiv shared their impressions of what they have learned. One of the participants declared that thanks to the provided trainings she has learned to be more open and freely to share her difficulties in taking care for a person with disability. She has learned very useful decisions and she has acquired new skills in the field of social work. Another mother of a child with disability now is distinguishing her role of a mother and a personal assistant who professionally supports her client with disability.
Silviya Vaysilova presented the project Key Competences Facing Lifelong Learning and its first product – a survey showing the national strategies and programmes for the lifelong learning in each country-partner in the project. The other products are in development process and they can be found in the web page of the project (www.keycompetencekit.eu) on a later stage.
For those interested in the production of technical assistance devices was intended the presentation of the project Education Platform for People with Physical Disabilities. It offers modules for distance learning, targeted at individuals with an interest in the production of wheelchairs and other aids. More information about this project you can learn by visiting its website: www.epdp.eu
Outside the European project as a guest lecturer at the seminar took part Ms. Teodora Sindzhirlieva - Regional Representative of the Agency for Persons with Disabilities. She introduced the audience with the current programmes of the agency established both to assist people with disabilities and to finance the jobs available to them.
In the concluding discussion the team of Marie Curie Association stressed the principal difference between the objectives of European and national programmes. If national programmes are designed to solve everyday problems of people with disabilities and give them access to health and social services, the European projects aim to act in the long term. They develop innovative solutions and products, seeking to permanently increase the quality of life of people with disabilities.
Some participants with disabilities also shared their experiences in seeking a job position and so the forum has become a place to exchange ideas and solutions. Plovdiv media actively publicized the seminar and the Eurocom and Channel Plovdiv televisions broadcasted some interviews in their evening informational programmes. Photographs and presentations from the seminar can be found on the website of Marie Curie Association – www.marie-curie-bg.org
OASIS 1st International Conference will take place on November 4-5, 2009 in Florence, Italy
We are pleased to inform you that the OASIS 1st International Conference will take place on November 4-5, 2009 in Florence, Italy. It will provide a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange ideas in the field of Independent Living and Autonomous Mobility for elderly .
How to support holistically the independent living and mobility of the elderly across Europe? How to connect services for the elderly in an one-stop-shop fashion and interrelate/ integrate them? What are the elderly and their families/ carers primary needs, concerns and expectations from the technologies and services arising? These, and much more, are to be presented in Florence, in the OASIS 1st International Conference.
OASIS is a Large Scale Integrating Project – partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT 215754) - with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of older people and their enhanced Quality of Life ( please visit our web site www.oasis-project.eu)
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ACCESSIBLE 1st newsletter available
The triggering idea behind ACCESSIBLE is to contribute for better accessibility for all citizens, to increase the use of standards, and to develop an assessment simulation environment (including a suite of accessibility analysing tools as well as developer-aid tools) to assess efficiently, easily and rapidly the accessibility and viability of software applications for all user groups.
ACCESSIBLE will exploit the technologies behind the recent expansion of accessibility tools and standardisation methodologies, in order to provide an integrated simulation assessment environment for supporting the production of accessible software applications mobile or not.
This will enable large organisations, SMEs or individuals (developers, designers, etc.) to produce software products of superior accessibility and quality, accompanied with appropriate measures and proposals for best practice. The proposed system will be demonstrated in the four pilots of ACCESSIBLE for the assessment of: a) Mobile applications (including JavaFX Scripts), b) Web applications, c) Web services (mainly focusing on infomobility services), and d) description languages (e.g. UML, SDL, etc.).
MCA is partner in this project.
The first newsletter is now available.
Athens Gerontology conference 2010
MCA will be presenting OASIS at the Gerontology conference that will be held on 4-6 February 2010 in Athens, Greece at the Hotel Grande Bretagne.
The Projects of Marie Curie Association presented during the International Spring Fair
From 12th to 17th May in the fair town of Plovdiv the Spring International Plovdiv Fair is being held. Marie Curie Association presents its projects in Pavilion 6. In the Zone for Business Consultations visitors can see and receive promotional materials describing the international projects of Marie Curie Association in the field of the vocational training and human resources development. Some of the first visitors of the stand were the Minister of Economics - Mr. Petar Dimitrov and the Director of the Fair – Mr. Georgi Gergov. Pictures from our meeting with them you can see in the Gallery. If you are interested come and visit Pavilion 6, Stand 6A7.
We are waiting for you!
The Mentoring Programme in Bulgaria ended successfully
The Mentoring Programme in Bulgaria started on 1st October 2008 and ended on 31st March 2009. 12 mentoring couples who worked together on the preliminary defined tasks in their action plans took part in it. The fields in which the participants were mentored were preliminary defined by themselves. One of the couples worked on acquiring of woodcarving skills and others were mentored in the field of public administration. Some of them preferred to be trained in working with children and people with disabilities. There were also mentees who were trained in working with specialized programmes in the field of accountancy and staff management.
At the end of March 2009 the mentoring programme in Bulgaria ended successfully for 11 from 12 couples. Unfortunately, three months before the end of the programme one of the mentees stopped attending the mentoring meetings due to severe health problems. Although the team working on the project hoped that she would recover soon, she couldn’t finish her participation in the programme. However, the other 11 couples implemented the preliminarily defined tasks and at the end of March they carried out their final meetings. There mentors and mentees shared their impressions and summarized what they have learned during the process. In their opinion the mentoring helped and enriched both parties. During these 6 months they mutually taught each other. Mentees developed their professional skills and improved some of their attributes. According to the participants’ opinion the period of 6 months is only enough for setting the effective beginning of a vocational training. After the end of projects like this one it is necessary the state or NGOs to find ways to continue implementing the mentoring schemes in order to support more disadvantaged people.
The positive effect of the mentoring in Bulgaria was heard not only in mentors and mentees’ words but in concrete facts – before the end of the programme three of the mentees started working in their preferred field. They say that the mentoring became the main reason for them to feel more confident and to look for opportunities for professional realization.
You will find concrete examples for mentoring couples’ work and for their thorough opinion in specially prepared materials called Case Studies. Soon they will be published on the project website. Soon you will also find news and pictures from the certification event for the mentors and the mentees in Bulgaria.
MCA at Research Connection 2009
MCA is one of the exhibitioners at Research Connection 2009 conference and exhibition which will take place in Prague from 7 to 8 May 2009 under the Czech Presidency of the European Union. MCA will present its involved projects, both under the Life Long learning and FP7 programme at stand 37. We will gladly welcome you there!
More information can be found at the event website.
Study Skills Training in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
The ESTEEM training programme is organised to cover two main topics which are: Social skills and Study skills.
The study skills training in the town of Plovdiv, Bulgaria took place on the 20th of March 2009.
The main goal of the training was to provide the trainees with strategies and techniques to gain and improve their knowledge and skills even after the end of the project itself. Thus the participants were given the means to continue to benefit and make use of the training programme even after the end of ESTEEM.
The six socal workers/ assistants had the opportunity to get information about the different methods for increasing their professional competence which are intervision, supervision, thematic discussions, text reading, workshops, etc.
They could practically test the different methods and discuss with the trainers different ways to improve their study skills.
The methods they particularly found useful were the thematic discussions and the multidisciplinary laboratories:
“I would like, if possible, to take part in a multidisciplinary science research laboratory.”
“I would like to use in my practice the method of thematic discussion.”
The participants were also presented different techniques of learning from the practice such as the model of reflective practice. Using this model, they had to think of examples from their experience and evaluate how they applied this model and if they didn’t, how they could use it in the future in their work.
Regarding the reflective practice model, one of them shared the following:
“I was really impressed by the mechanism to reflect over a situation, then to analyze it and plan ways to improve the situation (the Kolb Learning Cycle). I would like to use the method of self-reflection in the future.”
The trainers introduced to the trainees the idea of the learning styles and why it is useful for everyone to know his/ her individual learning style.
At the end of the training all of the participants filled in a test and could identify for themselves their own learning style.
All of them shared that they learned many useful things.
As one of the women said:
“What I learned will be useful for me in the way I bring up my child and it will be useful for my success in life as a whole.”
As a whole, according to the participants, the module helped them a lot and they shared their willingness and readiness to use the learned things in their practice.
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