THREE_Activities and online projects for groups

Project management, sharing tools, repository material, restricted access, Web contacts to the project
Teachers, students and other users

Also this year I took the herd of fifth graders, section F, to Officina Emilia, as we did last year with the old class. With Professor Binora I was glad to make the effort of taking the class out, including the coach trip and the football-type chanting. I did it because I know that during a visit to Museolaboratorio the kids are involved in the activities. Some even enjoy themselves. Moreover, also with this class we want to do a research project that will occupy them and that will keep them involved for a few afternoons. The project worked well last year, we put together a document and some students produced a piece with pictures and movies. At their final exams, they used the work that was done then, and were able to connect it to some key parts of the curricula of several subjects.
In collaboration with the staff of Officina Emilia, who has involved us in the preparation of the visits, we chose the theme: immigration and the integration of foreign workers in the mechanical workshops of Modena. With the kids we then we designed a rough outline of how we would do the work: interviews, collection of statistical data, reading materials, movies to watch, and even some lessons in geography and economics with the involvement of employees of Officina Emilia who came to the school.

Then, using the webpages reserved for teachers, we set up a "project". This is an area that the homm?s website reserves for every group that wants to launch new ideas and activities. Having a "project" means that you have web tools for collaboration and communication, such as a wiki for collaborative management in the form of collaborative hypertext of the project ideas and information, a blog where the group that manages the project publishes news relating to the work, an area for sharing texts and multi-media materials (videos, images, audio).

Those of us teachers who open a project are responsible for the content that is published. The authors, the individual students, are each responsible for their activities on the website, and this trains them to use wisely the information that they make available on line, respecting others and valuing the contributions of individuals and of the whole group that developed them. Among the students, a group of 4 or 5 immediately wrote the outline of our workplan on the wiki: a wiki allows you to easily write a network of web pages and the kids learned how to use it in an instant. With the others, we divided the tasks and we started working.

Upon advice of the staff of Museolaboratorio we identified and contacted some companies to conduct interviews with workers and entrepreneurs, and we also collected data on these companies, taking advantage of the grid prepared by the staff of OE. Interviews with workers were held in the afternoon, after their shifts, and the students prepared for them by consulting the interview outlines that staff at Museolaboratorio use when interviewing their informers. Some students did the interviews while others took notes and recorded the speech. The student were really good at editing movies and putting them in the project site. The transcripts of the interviews were then corrected by us teachers, and discussed along with other materials about the companies that hired the immigrant employees.

We were about halfway through the work that we had proposed to do, when we were contacted through the blog by the "OneWorld-OneWork" association, who had read about our project on the homm website. These very competent people are dedicated to the mission of their organization which is to promote sustainable development, social justice and human rights. They form a network of around 1,500 organizations worldwide and they asked to cooperate in our project which they had found through the blog and the project area of the homm website. Here we have indexed our activities also in English (and Spanish) so we can enter into other search engines while leaving most of our text in Italian, but keywords and abstracts of the projects are available in other languages.

In addition to providing excerpts from their audiovisual works, which they loaded directly into the project repository (but only after we had approved them as participants), we were then allowed to have a series of meetings organized in the form of video conferences via Skype with two colleges: one in Cairo and one in Budapest. With the kids and with the help of the English teacher, we developed a questionnaire for a comparative survey on the three training models: their two, and ours. Naturally also this item has ended up among the materials of the project in the homm website.

Finally we used the "pages for authors" of the homm website to connect our materials to the other "open" interactive activities, in fact some of the interactive activities available from the exhibition or from home, are made so as to allow the insertion of material from the projects. For example: in the repository we had a video on the interviews, we decided to designate it as a shared object: it is now possibile to choose this option from the page describing the video. We then had to fill in some data cataloging the item. These were additional data, since for each media object loaded, even in the repository, you must already provide the basic information. In fact, also these project materials, if the declared "public", already appear in the "Gallery" section of the site and users can browse them. Returning to the example: after completing the additional information, the system showed us a list of all "open activities", we selected the "web of stories" because that was where we wanted to put our interview. At this point we had to select from the list of nodes in the network a group of "related nodes" and then the interview appeared in the "network of stories" available both at the exhibition and on the website.

With prof. Binora we are preparing an evaluation of educational activities: we will put it in the reserved area of our work tools. We plan to modify last year's evaluation outline, which we recovered from our online documents, adding information about this year's class. This year's class is more diverse and we expect pleasant surprises from teamwork. The assessment is made both on the quality of materials that students produce and on the effectiveness of their teamwork and individual work. For the evaluation of group work we had some tips from the staff of OE and we have slightly changed our observation grid.

Our collected data and the assessment that we made is placed (though without reference to the names of students) in a database that collects all the experiences related to Museolaboratorio. We also completed an evaluation grid measuring our involvement as teachers: in fact we have also learned something about how you can work on cross-cutting themes without losing too much time and obtaining some success. Above all, we can use year after year the materials for students of previous years and also those of other class groups. This is a good way to better exploit the work of all the people involved.