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European Virtual Observatory Schools

The European Virtual Observatory (VO) initiative organises regular VO schools since 2008. The goals are twofold: i) to expose early-career European astronomers to the variety of currently available VO tools and services so that they can use them efficiently for their own research and; ii) to gather their feedback on the VO tools and services and the school itself. During the schools, VO experts guide participants on the usage of the tools through a series of predefined real science cases, an activity that took most of the allocated time. Participants also have the opportunity to develop their own science cases under the guidance of VO tutors. These schools have demonstrated to be very useful for students, since they declare to regularly use the VO tools in their research afterwards, and for us, since we have first hand information about the user needs. Here, we introduce our VO schools, the approach we follow, and present the training materials that we have developed along the years.