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Re: [school-discuss] What Works In Education



Dear colleagues,
I refer to the article quoted below when confirming the fact that teachers
in my country, Finland, have been as incompetent in use of ICT as their
colleagues elwewhere. My own main interest is promoting the use of ICT and
project methods in education. I started my project activities in 1994
together with colleagues in Australia, Brazil and Japan. "Sharing knowledge
means caring", is the ideology behind my efforts :-).
Teachers in my country are told to use collaborative methos of learning, but
as they were educated to be individualistic and to stay in the box of their
encyclopedic teaching subject, there is very little spontaneous interest in
cooperation. Besides, people in this country are most  introversive by
character. Even many teachers are afraid of having contacts with foreigners,
in languages they don't know well enough :-(.
In addition to psychological barriers there is this false direction of
educational ICT, which to me means working with ready-made educational
contents of publishers only. It does not give much to our children who
should learn to know how to become "subjects" and not "objects" in the
Internet, how to be authors and not only receivers etc.
Thanks to my collaboration with COMPACT, the Comenius 3 network, I learned
to know something that has contributed a lot to my needs as a project maker
and as a promoter of the project method in the net. It's the eJournal, a new
innovative virtual learning environment where kids take the leading role as
authors, editors and chief editors, and it all happens in front of your eyes
before you can actually catch what is going on :-)! If you want to see how
it works just surf to http://ejournal.eduprojects.net/daf2/  and click on
Ilpos Folder to see an example. These texts were done in one lesson (45
min), in a foreign language (German) they have learned for 2 years now.
(Some girls were reluctant to show their faces in the Internet, so their
images are lacking.)
I have got some experience about other big international VLEs before. I
don't mention their names not to discourage the producers ;-).
My first course for use of eJournal only took place at the end of November
2002. So, this is all just starting, so there is not much content yet. We
start a WebQuest-kind of project with Thomas Peters, my Dutch colleague, at
the beginning of the new year. Please don't use your old Netscape, as it
does not show the pages all right, but change it into Mozilla in
http://www.mozilla.org/release . Mozilla understands the newest stylesheets
used in eJournal. This VLE was made for LAMP environment, the code is PHP.
It exists in XML format coded in UTF-8. The interface can be translated in a
new language on the fly, there are about 700 rows text in the database which
means a couple of hours work for a person who turns it from English into his
or her own language. More examples of eJournal can be found in
http://ejournal.eduprojects.net , click on Browsing.
It's possible that COMPACT allows you free of eJournal if your teacher
community is willing to collaborate with this Comenius 3 network. Please
feel free to contact Pentti.Pirhonen@jamsa.fi if you are interested.
eJournal is a light version of Impressio, the CMS, which can also be given
by COMPACT to educational communities for free if they want to maintain
their websites in an innovative and effective way :-).
Frankly, I think eJournal is a "killer application" for project work. If you
know a better one, please let me know that I don't put my moneu on trash
;-).To convince you I offer you all collaboration in my own eJournal, which
I bought to me, in http://click.educlick.biz . I would like to do long-term
collaboration with you for promotion of project methods, so just send me
your name and your email and I'll give you the user right and the password.
This educational collaboration with me is free, experimental and does not
include any commitments.

Best regards,

:-)ilpo

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Sharing information
means caring ..."
          -------
Ilpo Halonen
language teacher, M.A.
http://www.educlick.biz
http://www.eduprojects.net
mail@ilpohalonen.com
gsm +358503460015
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





> Interesting Slashdot Article:
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/1454255
Despite record investment in computers in the USA and UK, recent studies
(not the ones funded by educational software companies) have shown a
significant drop in core subjects (Math, English) in schools that place
strong emphasis on Information Technology. Evidence also suggests that
whilst information technology has great potential in the classroom, teachers
have not yet found better use for computers than as a big library. Very few
schools have been able to use the new technology for cultural exchange, or
to build practical educational networks with other schools. Teachers do not
know whether computers should be seen as an exciting but peripheral
educational 'accessory', or if computers can actually be used to solve the
most pressing problems of literacy and numeracy - the sorts of things that
get kids through exams."
----- Original Message -----
From: "chip" <chip@force-elite.com>
To: <schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net>
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 10:55 PM
Subject: [school-discuss] Computers Not Working In Education


> Interesting Slashdot Article:
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/1454255