Organiser:
Alessandra Talamo – University of Rome “La Sapienza”

Participants:
Alessandra Talamo – University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Henk Sligte – University of Amsterdam
Maria Beatrice Ligorio – University of Salerno

10.00-10.20: Henk Sligte and Alessandra Talamo The European Schools Project (ESP)

10.20-10.40 ESP successful experiences: a demonstration

10.40-11.00: M. Beatrice Ligorio Virtual Worlds for networked cooperation.

11.00-11.20 On-line Demonstration of on-line connected schools

11.20-11.30 Discussion

Schools in the net:
International Bridges for Collaborative Learning and Teaching

The workshop “International Bridges For Collaborative Learning And Teaching” is meant to be a demonstrative session of the added value of the use of the Internet to connect schools with the purpose of making teaching and learning together possible. First of all the bridges between schools must be built, and then they have to be used to walk them together, even if learners and teachers are often distant. Distance becomes a state-of-mind. The whole workshop has been planned as an interactive session where speakers will show different practical examples for a didactic use of Computer Mediated Communications in school.

1. Building up the bridges.
Henk Sligte and Alessandra Talamo: The European Schools Project (ESP)

The European Schools Project (ESP) is an example of a network aimed at creating an international community involving teachers, researchers and students. The main goal of the ESP activities is that of innovating schoolwork and popularizing educational practices based on cooperation between and within classes. The aim is the didactic use of the Internet for the development of teaching and learning. Henk Sligte, the ESP co-founder, will show the basic ideas on collaborative teaching in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. In the world of education new pedagogic, didactic and educational concepts and ideas for using Information and Communication Technologies are necessary. One of these concepts is the teleproject in which Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is used to meaningfully improve education. Hundreds of these projects have taken place over the past years on a variety of conversation topics and using many languages. ESP invites teachers of all participating countries to meet each other, design and plan specific projects.

The participation to a learning community via the ESP offers concrete support to teachers and students in terms of:

• A useful and meaningful usage of communication for learning

• A meaningful usage of different foreign languages in a real interactive context.

• The coordination of teachers’ activities in relation to the didactic practices inside the classes and the contents which are gradually developed by teachers

Alessandra Talamo will show the Italian ESP-website and explain how Italian schools can join ESP projects or make some new experiences work.

The metaphor of a bridge leads to the meeting. Here one of the most innovative uses of ICT for classes meeting each other directly will be shown: the virtual worlds. Why should teachers use such an environment for education? What is the added value of virtual reality for collaborative teaching and learning? In a virtual environment students can collaborate at distance in real time by learning and building new knowledge, they will improve their sense of belonging to a broader community, and they can increase their communication skills and their ability to use the new technology in an educational way. Teachers can acquire new competences such as monitoring interactions in a virtual environment, empowering their students as consequences of introducing new technology, and supporting the learning process that is more self-regulated by the students themselves.

The project here presented is called Euroland and uses the Active Worlds (AW) technology. AW is a virtual desktop user-oriented reality software. Asynchronous communication tools have been integrated with online connections to allow also offline meetings.

In this project, the virtual environment is used as a place for building cross-disciplinary spaces (Art, Music, Food, and a Travel Agency) planned in the classroom and discussed with the entire community. These are online educational multimedia spaces containing music, sounds, pictures, texts, links to web sites.

The session will offer a concrete example of the didactic value of this kind of tools for enhancing learning and teaching. A real-time online connection with teachers and students will be offered to show the practicability of virtual environments as a collaborative tool.