We Won!

We won the Digitalization Award of Schleswig-Holstein in the category „Digital Learning“.

We applied for the award with our project www.bilingual-picturebooks.org – the Flaming Fox. On Wednesday, 9th of September, Philipp Albrecht (Minister for Digitalization, Environment, Nature and Energy Transiton) handed us the Award during a very lovely event in Kiel. We are so very happy and thankful. Special thanks to the jury and the ministry.

Digitalization and reading promotion belong together. We noticed that the combination of reading promotion, bilingual picturebook workshops with children and teenagers AND digitalization is surprising to many people. But it isn’t for us. On the contrary: We are convinced that promotion of reading and digitalization are inseperably linked.

Not only are reading skills essential for digital participation of people, we also need to reach those people who don’t grow up with a family bookshelf. These families, children and teenagers start their own reading career on tablets and smart phones.

Our project „1001 Languages – bilingual-picturebooks.org“ shows them a very simple way to books. Everyone can visit the website and download his or her individual bilingual picturebook for free.

The project offers even more: Children and teenagers write and illustrate the books on the website on their own. While doing this they learn how to tell a story, they learn about the diversity of languages and cultures and they learn something about how to use analog and digital techniques creatively.

This video shows how the results of such learning processes may look like. We received this film on the occasion of the award ceremony and it gives a wonderful insight into the process of creating our bilingual picture books.

Thanks to:

…all the adult readers who engaged in digital adventures that are unfamiliar for them to get children and teenagers enthusiastic about reading.

…all the children and teenagers and their creative ideas that brought our website to life.

…everybody in the team of the bookpirates whose commitment helped realizing an idea like this.

…all the supporters of the project. In the beginning they only had a piece of paper with the idea on it.  After that a first workshop took place. After that the website was published. After that we got the first translations. They helped us all the way through and helped us to make the project what it is today.

Our plans for the future:

Our project „1001 languages – bilingual-picturebooks.org“ lives on diversity: different groups who create the books to offer them to the users of the website. This is how – with the help of digital methods – a great community project grows. In its centre: stories, creative writing, reading and cultural diversity. We want to offer more workshops and coachings in Schleswig-Holstein to lead schools, libraries and youth centres to their own 1001-language-picturebooks. The price will help us to reach this goal.