Using portals to open horizons (original) (raw)
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Information and Communication Technologies foster communication between teachers and students. In this context, each educator shall be asked to contribute to the creation of multimedia content and the development of learning communities. In this paper, we intend to present a virtual learning platform, called 2ndschool.eu, in which teachers and students built a learning path based on the global society. By interacting with netizens from different parts of Europe, students were able to develop their own critical cultural awareness, co-create knowledge and rebuild their own values and believes. This platform includes different Web 2.0 tools, namely chat, discussion forums, e-mail messaging, podcasting, videocasting and slidesharing. The main product of this project is the creation of critical analyses of present-day topics of national or international news by the different international teams. With this eTwinning project, which was awarded the European Quality Label, teachers were able to develop a teaching-learning process based on the introduction of the 5 Cs: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities (cf. Philips & Draper, 1999). In this way, having a critical pedagogy into account, the learning process could be seen as a liberatory activity, in which students became aware of their own ability to contribute to an effective change in the society they make part of. Moreover, by developing a dialogical interaction, the different students were able to create a mental awareness of one point of view and its opposite, which resulted in the accomplishment of the Freire " s cycle of action-reflection-new action. This implies that these pronétaires were capable of developing a techno-democracy (Levy, 1999), in which each one of them had the opportunity to make himself/ herself heard. Since the beginning of the European Union which is constituted by diverse countries with their own culture, politics, society and language, that language learning policies have been a priority in the agendas of diverse summits or congresses. This was the case of the Lisbon meeting in March 2000, in which clear objectives were presented: increasing the quality and effectiveness of education in the EU; facilitating the access of all to education; opening up education to the wider world. As we know, our world can be " characterized by rapid change, increasing globalization and growing complexity in terms of economic and socio-cultural relations. The speed of these changes is reflected in the context within which any reflection on the future objectives of the education and training systems must be placed. (…) " [10]. In fact, computers are becoming more widely available at work and at home, which contributes to the fact that education must be rebuilt. Moreover, the development use of Information and Communication Technologies is important to ensure a change in the way schools and other learning centers work, including the increasing importance in open learning environments and virtual teaching to overcome cultural and social barriers. Equipping schools and training centers with multimedia resources and high quality educational software and high speed connections offering interactive possibilities on Internet become a priority. At the same time teachers should be trained in the use of Internet and its multimedia
Research-publishing.net, 2016
I ntercultural telecollaboration allows for a radical change in language education. New technologies enable learners of different languages and cultures to practice their intercultural skills. Teachers no longer need to design 'fake' role-plays to develop interaction in the target language. Above all, teachers have the possibility to address the cultural and intercultural dimensions of language education. This paper presents the multifaceted dimensions of a telecollaboration project in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) with university students in science from UPMC, Sorbonne-Universities, Paris and university students in education from University of Valladolid, opening further questions on the exploration of intercultural telecollaboration in higher education.
During my presentation I will be discussing the project that I worked on over the past two years in my Intermediate Italian classes (third and fourth semesters). I will begin by explaining how students in the third semester used Facebook to create famous and secret Italian identities in order to learn more about the cultural features of Italy and Italians; features that would be impossible to learn if one were studying the usual textbooks. The same semester I also set up Skype exchanges between my students of Italian and students in Italy. The purpose was for students to practice and share the language and culture they were learning. The following semester I asked students to work on a blog and an e-Portfolio that would later become a way for me to assess their learning; it was also a means of self-assessment in which students collected the "experiences" they had been accumulating over the entire semester of Italian. At the same time, during that semester I also asked them to work in groups and to use video-editing to create a movie in which they would present a novel that I had assigned them. Over the course of the year students were offered, through these technology projects, a new experience on language learning in and outside the classroom. The peer-to-peer active learning process was creative and more entertaining than other activities because it was more related to real and contemporary Italy. I first want to present the Facebook project in which students selected a secret Italian identity and posted video, articles, music and comments on their page and on the page of the other "Italians" of their network. I will show how this made students more enthusiastic and created interested among them. I will also include a discussion of how I managed the project during the semester and how I set about assessing it. Next I turn to some of the Skype exchanges that students had with their Italian partners as well as the written reflections they wrote in Italian about how they employed the guided culture topics they talked about during the exchanges. Third I will say something about how student blogs and e-Portfolio allowed the students to gain a picture of what they were learning during the semester, while creating connections to other students and the teacher outside the classroom. It was an imaginative way for them to assemble the experiences they had on Facebook and Skype to learn to think critically and to reflect more on what precisely they were learning. I continue my discussion with the last project, the video-editing, in which students were required to work in small groups to construct their own interpretation of an Italian novel. After reading five Italian books and watching five movies Italian films adapted from the story they had read, I asked students to read a novel from Pirandello and to put together a video that represented the novel as well as their interpretation of it. I end by discussing the implications of intensive use of technology in a language class. I ask what worked well and what ought to be changed in order to gain a better response from students. Is this generation of students really a digitally native one? Student feedback will be presented so as to offer a more comprehensive sense of the technology project in the language classroom.