There’s a Nano-eTwinning toolkit available from NanoYou (Nano Youth) for teachers. It’s aimed at children 11 to 14 years of age. From the May 23, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

A new eTwinning toolkit has been produced in the context of NANOYOU to offer schools creative ideas to explore and learn about nanotechnologies. The toolkit provides guidelines to organise a class programme as well as pedagogical objectives, follow up suggestions and evaluation ideas.

eTwinning is a community for schools in Europe that gives teachers the opportunity and tools to join online collaborative projects, to get involved in educational networking and to participate in professional development activities.The eTwinning Portal -developed by European Schoolnet- is available in 24 languages and offers, among others, partner-finding tools, social networking facilities and online working platforms for teachers and pupils to collaborate online.

In looking at the toolkit, I was most interested in the process. For example, here’s item five,

5) Role Play on ELSA:
– Select a dilemma on ethical, legal and social aspects of Nanotechnology from the 10 NANOYOU role plays directly connected with one of the applications of Nanotechnology.
– Each stakeholder is represented by a team composed of pupils of the partner schools. Each team should be about 6 persons. Pupils are given enough time to communicate and share information, opinions and strategies to be able to effectively sustain the point of view of the stakeholder they have been assigned.
– The discussion among stakeholder takes place, either using the forum in the TwinSpace, in an asynchronous manner or during a synchronous event (e.g. a TwinSpace chat, a Skype session or a videoconference). At the end of the discussion, a solution to the dilemma, or at least a possible concrete path to reach it, should be proposed. Pupils may also be asked to write newspaper articles, which summarise their different points of view and the compromise reached (if there is one).
– The results are made public and visible on the TwinSpace, and on schools websites.

I wonder how they will measure success for this project. It is possible to rate the toolkit although no one has done so yet (presumably there just hasn’t been enough time).

I have previously mentioned the NanoYou programme in a May 3, 2010 posting.