Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 6; November 03

EDU365.COM - A Primary and Secondary Catalan Internet Service Generalitat de Catalunya – Education Departament

Orland Cardona (ocardona@pie.xtec.es)
Language Coordinator for edu365

Short Summary

edu365.com is an Internet service for the students of Catalonia focused on non-adult learners. Its aims are to promote working with information and to give support during the period of schooling. It enhances the teachers' role by valuing human communication and flexibility of use above automatic content.

Overview

Many children type their name on a keyboard before learning how to write it with pen and paper. Playing with computers they learn numbers and the alphabet before they are taught at school. Youngsters in developed societies are often able to use the Internet to get any information they want, to pursue any objective they have. No matter what methods their teachers use, children's learning capabilities, attitudes and interests are deeply affected by information technologies because they become familiarised with the media and technology at a very early age.

Both teachers individually, and education systems as a whole, need to accept that computers and the Internet are already an important factor in the students' processes of acquiring, manipulating and creating information, of studying and learning, and of communicating with other people. If they don't act on a large scale and at an accelerating pace, schooling risks becoming a vicious circle of student dissatisfaction and loss of teacher credibility. It may well become, too, the embodiment of a wide-ranging social failure to take advantage of the learning opportunities brought about by the new systems and environments.

The edu365.com portal is an attempt to create a systemic response to this serious challenge. It was launched in 2001 as a result of an initiative of the Education Department in Catalonia and specifically developed to empower and support schoolchildren and their teachers through information, communication technologies (ICT) and the Internet throughout their time at school.

All Catalan primary, secondary, special needs and vocational school students (potentially 941,000 students, at present) are offered the services of the edu365 learning portal which features the following main components:

Personal digital desktop.

The edu365 learning environment provides workspace and personal file management (on the server!) for every student user, as well as an integrated set of productive tools for working with information: writing documents, edition of web pages, numeric calculations, algebra, calculus, symbolic manipulations, interactive graphing and even programming. This personal desktop also offers e-mail and communication tools, daily news, statistical databases, maps and geographical information, translation, a multilingual dictionary in five languages, and a variety of encyclopaedias, all of them with search facilities.

Curriculum content.

It consists mostly of interactive multimedia learning units for each subject and education level, usually oriented to fostering understanding of concepts through presentation, simulation, drill and practice, self-testing and project work. Instead of full courses, the curriculum section is largely made up of small units which can be assigned freely by teachers and worked on by students in school or at home. It aims to be attractive to young learners and understandable to parents.

Student learning agenda.

The system is set up to provide teachers and students with the cooperative management of individual agendas allowing them to keep track of their tasks and projects, classroom events (exams, group activities, etc.) and homework assignments. It may be used as a regular communication tool to inform families about school events and their children's assignments.

Ask a teacher.

By means of a webform any student can submit his or her learning difficulties to a team of consultant teachers and ask for individualized support on curriculum and learning matters. Service is provided 365 days of the year. Tailor-made customized replies are sent within 24 to 48 hours, depending on the question. The working criteria of the consultants is to help students, directing them to the appropriate materials, orienting their work and fostering independent learning.

Information for students and parents.

The education system is a complex and multi-faceted structure. In order to inform and guide the student and their parents, edu365 provides a searchable database on primary, secondary, special needs and vocational schools, systematises information about the curriculum and the structure of the education system, provides a FAQ about education and educational services, and offers tools for students' self-evaluation of interests and capabilities. Another team of consultants provides personalized information about all those issues, on request by e-mail.

Teachers personal repository.

The edu365 portal provides every teacher with facilities to create, manage, index and retrieve his/her own private digital repository of teaching instruments: lesson plans, exercises, notes, documents, readings, assignments, formulae, tests and exams, computer programs, URLs, databases, multimedia files, etc, irrespective of their format, volume and completeness. Every teacher has access to the database of his/her students and can easily assign activities and items from their personal repository to students.

The only tools needed to use the personal digital desktop and all those services of edu365 is a computer connected to the Internet and a browser.