2014-11-05
Essential knowledge of the single currency of the euro area will reach schoolchildren — the future users of the euro — through the electronic gradebooks that they use, which have replaced traditional gradebooks and paper gradebooks in many schools of the country.
“The young generation is particularly receptive to new technologies that provide possibilities for receiving information quickly and in the easiest way. Thus, the knowledge that will reach schoolchildren through electronic gradebooks will help them answer the questions that are already arising: ‘What do the euro banknotes look like? What euro coins will we use? How will the goods and pocket money change in terms of numbers?’ Nobody will write a grade for this knowledge, but without it — no one can make a single step”, asserts the Chairman of the Board of the Bank of Lithuania, Vitas Vasiliauskas.
For the country’s schoolchildren and their parents and teachers, the possibility to receive information about the single currency is ensured through the electronic learning networks Mano dienynas and TAMO which are involved in the euro information campaign on a non-commercial basis at the initiative of the Bank of Lithuania and the Ministry of Education and Science.
Currently there are nearly 400 thousand schoolchildren at Lithuanian schools. More than 85 per cent of them, their parents and teachers use the services of one of these electronic gradebooks.
“Formerly a novelty, electronic gradebooks are now as common as the euro will soon be. We hope that relevent information about the new currency, most rapidly and widely disseminated through electronic gradebooks, will be valuable and interesting to schoolchildren,” says Genoveita Krasauskienė, vice-minister of education and science.
Users who have joined electronic gradebooks, up until the euro adoption, will be able to get acquainted with euro banknotes and coins, the litas and euro exchange rate, will be invited to attend the Euro Exhibition at the National Museum Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania in Vilnius free of charge, and take an active part in a competition of photographs from the Euro Exhibition as well as other events related to the euro adoption.
Mothers and fathers will be invited to sign or at least discuss the memorandum of mutual understanding on pocket money between parents and children.
For teachers who have joined electronic gradebooks, the Bank of Lithuania will offer the option of downloading electronic exercise notebooks and lectures “Get to know euros and learn to calculate them”, dedicated to schoolchildren in different grades. They have been prepared by the Money Museum of the Bank of Lithuania and are used in the educational euro programme.
The euro will be introduced in Lithuania on 1 January 2015.