Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Some of you may remember that in May I posted an order form for the EU Taccle project handbook on e-Learning – snappily entitled “Teachers Aids on Creating Content for Learning Environments.” Don’t be put off by the title – in my mind this is the best practical handbook I have seen yet about using Web @.0 and social software for teaching and learning. For those of you who did pre-order paper copies they should be with you shortly, although we may have to reduce some of the numbers on bulk orders. for those of you who did not order a copy – do not despair. the handbook is now available for free download from the Taccle site (although you will have to register on the site first). The handbook is available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian and German languages! It is also licensed under a Creative Commons licence and you are free to adapt and remix the materials if you so wish. If you need any more persuasion before rushing to download your copy, the following excerpt is from the foreword.

“Information and Communication Technologies are being increasingly used to create richer learning environments. In all sectors of education from primary schools to adult education, in schools for pupils with special education needs and in colleges and universities, technologies are being used across the curriculum to enhance students’ experiences.

However, technology is not enough. The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realised in a way that stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and
can also be freely exchanged with others.

The European Commission Comenius programme funded Taccle project  aims through  training teachers to create e-learning materials and raising their awareness of e-learning in general, to help establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work.

This handbook has been produced by the Taccle project partners in five different European countries. It has been written by teachers for teachers and caters for those with only basic computer skills and limited technical support.

The handbook is geared to the needs of the classroom teacher but teacher trainers, ICT support staff and resource centre staff may find it useful too! It provides both practical support for
teachers who want a ‘hands on experience and also help and information for teachers who just want to find out about e-learning.

The handbook is designed to provide practical support for teachers to:

• create content for electronic learning environments in the context of an e-learning course
• identify and decide which ICT tools and content are most useful for particular purposes.
• create learning objects taking into account information design, web standards, usability criteria and reusability (text, images, animations, audio, video) and which enable active, interactive and cooperative learning processes.
• use learning environments effectively in order enhance quality and create resources to help them do so.
• share the developed content with their peers using existing repositories.

If you do not understand some of these terms do not worry. The handbook provides friendly step by step guidance about how to do it and explains the different terms along the way.

Of course it might seem a little strange and old fashioned producing a printed handbook about the use of new technologies. But, as Jenny Hughes says in her introduction to the handbook, we felt that the very teachers for whom this book is written are probably the group least likely to use or feel confident about using web-based materials. A book is comfortable and familiar and that is exactly how we would like teachers to feel about e-learning.

Technologies are changing very fast. When we originally applied for a grant from the European Commission, we anticipated the main focus of the handbook would be the use of Learning Management Systems – systems that help to organize  and administer learning programs for students and store and organize learning materials. At the time, this seemed to be the most important technology for creating and managing content. But since then , we have seen an explosion in the use of social networking applications like blogs and wikis, as part of what has been called Web 2.0. These are tools which make it very easy for people to create and publish their own content in different forms – text, pictures, audio and video.

These technologies make it easy not just for teachers, but for students to produce materials themselves and are increasingly being used in the classroom mixing traditional teaching methods with some e-learning methods in what is called Blended Learning.

Therefore, we have shifted the main focus of the handbook to provide a hands on guide to the use of such tools in the classroom.”

Last Wednesday I was honoured to speak (via skype) at the launch of the New Media School in Bucharest. The launch took place in the Modern Art Museum who are a partner in the project. The New Media School is a fascinating initiative by the students union to promote social and collaborative learning. For me the most encouraging thing is how they plan to use social media for teaching and learning. Anyway, whilst we were waiting for the start of the meeting, I made a short interview with Gabi Solomon and Vlas Atansui who have been two of the prime movers behind the project. Congratulations to them and everyone else associated with this project. Below is a text Gabi sent me about the project.

New Media School

What?

The New Media School project is an initiative to support a community of practice of young students, responsible with communication in their organizations. The members of the community will be chosen for their interest and passion for web 2.0 and communication, and for the willingness to develop their skills in this regard. Their learning experiences, as far as the project is concerned, start with the real-life challenges they encounter while trying to develop communication and dialogue within and outside the organization, and ends with the changes they manage to implement while interacting with the New Media School community. Along the way, the project will facilitate a learning environment both on-line and offline, making use of a variety of tools like: wikis, a google group, googledocs, a social platform, twitter.

The project aims to empower 30 students who study in Bucharest to create multimedia content about their projects and their organizations and to promote it using new media tools in experimental/inovative ways. Our assumption is that today’s literacy goes beyond being able to read and write. Nowadays it’s all about being able to effectively communicate your ideas by crafting powerful messages using text, sound, music, image and graphics and then promoting your message using web2.0 platforms. We are also interested in better engaging students in the conversation about education by helping them to deliver high impact messages about the way they are learning and the learning opportunities that they value.

How?

For the next month we planned three meetings:

• the launching meeting (where we will have a discussion about the project and a “get-to-know” session for the members)

• a Web 2.0 workshop (where we will explain the tools we want to use and what you can achieve by using them)

• a video workshop (where we will have an expert on social campaigns talking about the concept of a video, how you film, how you cut a short movie)

Working in small teams over the course of the project, the participants will develop the skills needed for shooting, editing and publishing video clips related to their projects, their organization, education, non-formal and informal learning. In addition to the hands-on approach the participants will explore, together with trainers and guests (bloggers, communication experts, video editors and directors) new practical ways of delivering their mesages to other young people and to the world. They will be encouraged to link up with other educational initiatives – which include anything, from campaigns, conferences, trainings, other youth projects etc. – and use their new media skills to promote these types of non-formal education. The content produced will be also published on the project website and promoted on-line through the use of social media and established on-line publications.

The project is both a learning experiment in the innovative use of digital technologies as a form of self-expression, as well as a contribution to the creation of a free online resource of content generated by the learners themselves.

Which methods we plan to use?

Sharing Meetings

We believe that the motivation for learning comes firstly from our real needs and desires. During these meetings, the members will share their experiences and the challenges they’ve met in the organizations, looking up new ways of solving them and integrating their individual experiences in a broader context.

Training

The community will also grow with the help of experts who have a lot of knowledge about this domain and are willing to share it with us. We will invite trainers to facilitate the process of learning and by doing this we will add value to the process of sharing and collaborative learning.

Collaborative workshops

Sometimes we can learn something only by doing. The workshops we plan are learning events, where we learn by experimenting together communication techniques, where we develop challenges and we obtain unexpected results.

Social experiences

We learn best from and with our friends. We will include in the New Media School experience Time for knowing each other, for relaxing and having fun together. We like watching movies, seeing a theater play, cooking together or playing sports.

Access to mentoring and coaching experiences

Each and everyone of us enjoys meeting special persons, who are able to inspire and guide us, who help us find our own path and answer our questions. We invite those people to join our community and help us in the process of learning.

Learning log

Learning is something that we experience all the time, not only in the classroom or in training workshops. Sometimes we have no time to process the lessons learned from our experiences and that leaves room for forgetting. We will encourage the use of a learning log or of an individual portfolio for all our members. For example, they can use a blog where they would write about their experiences, they would reflect upon them, so they would enhance the learning process and they will have the record of their achievements

Blended learning

Usually, the answers that we find during our meetings spark new other questions. Because of that we will keep these ideas and questions alive after the meetings, on an online platform made of many social and collaborative tools.

We have been writing a lot about ideas on how mobile devices, and particularly phones might be used to support learning. But most of this work has been from a somewhat theoretical angle. Now Jenny Hughes has written a great guest blog on the practical work she has been doing on the use of mobiles in schools.

“I’ve been working with (primary and secondary teachers) on e-learning in the classroom – particularly the use of web 2.0 applications – as the roll out and dissemination of the TACCLE project. Part of this has been looking at the use of mobile phones as learning tools in schools.

There seems to be a lot of debate around the technology, the theoretical perspectives, the social dimension and so on but just at the moment the ‘doing’ is engaging me far more than the research. And as I’m always the first to complain about the practitioner – researcher divide, I thought maybe we should contribute by sharing some stuff we are experimenting with in the classroom.

What follows is some of the output from teachers. Firstly there has been a debate around the feasibility of using mobile telephones in schools; teachers from schools that have banned them outright, teachers from schools where they are allowed and teachers who are actually using them for learning generated a list of For-and-Against arguments. Secondly, there are some practical suggestions for using mobile devices (mainly phones), tried and tested and either contributed by teachers or trialed on the TACCLE course.

Arguments against allowing mobile phones in schools – for learning or social purposes

• Loss and theft and potential bullying
• Distraction and interruption
• Taking photos of tests and instantly passing them on to other pupils
• Texting answers of tests to other students
• Taking photos of pupils in changing rooms, toilets
• Spreading rumours fast
• Sex texting and cyber-bullying
• Non-filtered web access that can be used to spread content that some parents do not want their children exposed to.
• Recording teachers and pupils in the classroom – can be detrimental to teacher and student reputation and proper consent to publish not asked for or given. Even bigger problem with younger children vis a vis Child Protection issues
• Privacy issues with teachers having personal phone numbers of pupils and vice versa.

About using phones as learning tools –

• Have and have not situation – some pupils will not have them, some will not. Some will support less applications than others – need to work at level of common denominator.
• Cost implications for pupils and their parents – not just the cost of the hardware but the cost of use. Many pupils on ‘Pay-as-you-go’.

Arguments in favour of allowing them and using them for learning

(We excluded I-Phones, Blackberries etc as teachers in this area said most pupils do not have them) -

• Is cost effective for schools
• Reduces the need for all students to have access to computers in classroom
• Need less equipment like digital cameras, camcorders, mics etc
• If pupils are going to have them in schools anyway, irrespective of whether it is officially allowed, they may as well be exploited for learning. Overcomes some of the problems of ‘distraction’ etc.
• Uses cheap and familiar technology
• They are a good vehicle for teaching about ‘use-and-abuse’ issues such as digital identities, protocols, bullying, net safety etc
• Can be used as data collection and recording devices – audio, pics and video – for recording experiments, field work, voice memos etc
• Can be used as creative tool – making podcasts, picture blogs, twittering etc
• Can use the phone itself as learning aid – creating ringtones, wallpaper etc (more on this later)
• Pupils can ask questions of the teacher they may be too embarrassed to ask publicly.
• Encourages engagement e.g SMS polling can ensure every pupils  voice is heard.
• SMS polling (e.g using Wiffiti or PollEverywhere) can be used for formative assessment
• Can be used for collaborative learning and communication (see below)
• Pupils are encouraged to use general reference books so why not phones – as dictionary, spell checker, thesaurus, encyclopaedia etc
• As specific research tool via web access

Practical ideas for using phones for learning that teachers tried out

(NB these are ideas generated by teachers working in a formal learning environment. We are aware of the huge potential of mobile devices for informal learning but this was not in our brief!)

Firstly, a few ideas about using the phone itself – rather than using it as a communication device.

• Pupils can customize the wallpaper on their phones using something like pix2fone or pixdrop.
• Either the teacher can ask them to take a picture with their phone around a particular theme or can send everyone in the class a picture she wants them to study / talk about to use as wall paper. This could be a photograph or a key message or reminder of some learning point.
• Pupils can create ring tones using e.g  phonezoo. They create the ‘tone’ in Audacity, Garageband etc and export to phonezoo which then sends it back to mobile phone where it is saved as a ringtone.

We tried making up jingles for a particular topic, key dates for a history test, a poem to be learned for a literature test, a foreign language phrase and lists of chemical elements in a particular group in the Periodic Table!

Some more general applications:

• Use sites like gabcast or evoca to make ‘instant’ podcasts straight from a mobile that can be accessed from a mobile (and you only have to be over 13 to use them) without having to use podcasting software. We did a geography quiz on local landmarks and geographical features “From where I’m standing I can see….where am I?”
• Setting up audio tours e.g one group is working on a guide to places of interest in their town where at each point of interest there is a notice “to hear the story ring this number”
• Using their phones to access podcasts. Some mobile phones can already subscribe to podcasts and a fair few can listen to streaming MP3s from the Internet. Even if these features are missing, pretty much every mobile phone you can buy nowadays can be hooked up to a computer and have MP3s sent to it to listen to on the go.
• creating mini-documentaries using the camera in their phone. We did ‘food preparation hygiene’
• recording field trips – using photos or voice or texting back observations to other pupils.  We did a nature walk where leaves / flowers / trees were observed by one group and identified by another group back in the classroom. We experimented by sending text only descriptions, pictures or voice calls and combinations of those to see which was the most effective. (Also posting back pictures to their blog / wiki whilst they are actually on the walk.)
• be in different places working on the same project and be talking via instant-messaging.  Our example was a history  ‘Treasure Hunt’ where groups were competing to find objects and information. The groups split up and group members updated each other on progress using mobile phones.
• recording science experiments and including the pictures /video with their written reports.
• Using twitter. History teachers chose a period in history (was the second world war) and had groups of evacuees, host families, parents of evacuees back in bombed cities sending messages to each other about their feelings.
• Use twiddeo to upload video made on mobile phone to twitter.
• Make a tee-shirt using Reactee on twitter that you can wear in the classroom. Ours was a line to ring to get homework assignments and deadlines.
• Photoblogging using telephones. (Blogger is particularly good for phones). We did local landmarks and geographical features. Also a vocabulary exercise where each person was given a word to illustrate with three photographs by the end of the day. (If you are going to use blogs use one that is mobile-friendly – like WordPress where you can get a plug-in called WP-Mobile so that students can access them from their mobiles)
• Making slideshows for mobile phones You can make slideshows for mobile phones. It’s easy but you need a few basic techniques (which we can share if people are really interested.)  We made ‘revision’ slideshows which each teacher could produce for their subject area to be viewed on mobile phones.
• Brainstorming using wiffiti. We found wiffiti is a wonderful way of getting pupils to create a communal, real time visual brainstorm, on a screen, from their cell phones.
• Accessing Voicethread. You can use mobile phones to comment on Voicethread, which is a ‘digital conversation’ application. (We used some pictures of geometrical patterns and shapes and asked people to comment using mobile phones on where they could see those shapes and patterns in their townscape or in nature.)
• Making simple Stop Motion animations. Take lots of photos on a mounted mobile phone e.g of a Plasticene model or bendy toy then import them into a slideshow presentation and set the show to change slides on the fastest (e.g 1 second) autochange. We did pictures of a the notes of a simple tune drawn with felt pen on an A1 sheet then ‘moved’ an arrow to each note in turn so that the pupils could see which note was being sung.
• To save the cost of texting, use freebiesms on your computer
• For those students with Bluetooth, a natural progression from students e-mailing homework or assignments might be to get them to send it by phone to your laptop at the beginning of a lesson.

Plans for future events

• Experimenting with QR codes into which you can embed text, url, phone numbers and sms. (Camera phones can have software freely installed on them to recognise these codes and decipher them into meaningful text/links/images. This could be useful for homework or for embedding a ‘live’ link on a paper-based worksheet.)
• Experimenting with 12seconds.tv for asynchronous debates, for synthesising work, commenting on Voicethread, making composite class documentaries, as a reflection tool for e-portfolios, as an ideas box, exemplifying good practice
• Thinking about how we are going to use Google Wave

Thanks Mr Belshaw http://teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk for these great ideas – he should be on everyone’s RSS together with his blog http://dougbelshaw.com/blog .”

The main aim of the TACCLE project was to help teachers improve their use of technology for e-learning, and to do this they created a handbook. In addition they provided courses to guide teachers in technological programmes that although simple once understood can be very difficult initially. The launch for the handbook was held in Ghent, Belgium along with a day of workshops, which around 200 teachers and trainee teachers attended. Here is some feedback from the day.

Video and blog post by Jo Turner-Attwell.

Yesterday I spoke at the Taccle project final confernce on the theme of the Future of e-learning. It is a big subject to deal with in twenty minutes and I hope that it at least was coherent. The audience were some 150 teachers – most from Belgium. My main themes were the need to develop open education and break down traditional subject barriers and institutional barriers to access to education plus the need to build on the new pedagogic approaches ot learning that social media and new technologies offer us.

There was time for a few questions and they were hard.

The first (one that I am frequently asked) was about motivation. Did I have any proof that such new approaches would motivate those students who are presently alienated by the schooling system. The answer is that I do not have any proof. We have ‘micro-examples’ of how technology and different pedagogies can inspire students who previously have not engaged with traditional tecahing and learning processes. But not on any large scale. A follow up question was as to whether any governmental, regional or even local districts have implemented my ideas. Again the answer I guess is no. We do not have large scale implementations of open education at present.

And the third question, in a slightly different vein, was if I am right about the future what are we going to do with school buildings – mostly designed for the ‘factory model; of tecahing. And that also is a herd question – although I do think the many examples of factory buildings converted for use as enterprise centres or design centres offers a vision of what could be done, given sufficient money.

The workshop mainly focused on the use of social software for learning, and coincided with the release of the excellent Taccle project handbook on the subject (will post link to PDF version in next couple of days). Many of the teachers had little – if any – experience in using technology for teaching and learning – but were keen to learn more. However, I wonder if we need to refine our approaches to training teachers. Whilst these events are useful, the common response is: “Yes I can see how good this approach is but how could I use it in my subject area.” Teachers tend to relate to other subject teachers as their community of practice. And it may be time that we moved beyond the more general how ot use a computer in tecahing ‘conciousness raising’ to looking precisely at how to use technology within different subject areas (yes – I know this runs at odds with my appeal to break down subject barriers). Of course the problem is that the research community knows little about this and they still tend to run many of the events. We now have a critical mass of teachers who are tech savvy and they should be taking the lead in such things.

This also goes for projects. I am afraid to say that too many of the European funded projects seeking to introduce technology for learning are failing just because the project partners have little expereince in teaching themselves.

An interesting event and thanks to all who helped organise it.

Yesterday afternoon I blogged about our forthcoming handbook about the use of Web 2.0 and social software in the classroom. The handbook is being produced by the EU Taccle project. I asked people to email me if they were interested in receiving free copies. Little did I anticipate the response. When I returned from a quick trip to the shops I already had received some 15 emails. Panic!

I produced a very quick Google form (whatever you think about Google, their forms application is awesome, embedded it in a WordPress page on this site and edited the blog to point to the form.

By now, some 75 people have requested copies of the book from about 15 countries. If nothing else, Web 2.0 and social software make dissemination easy. On the form I asked if anyone was interested in translating the handbook into other languages, given that it is to be published under a Creative Commons liscence. And to date I have had expressions of interest in translating the handbook into Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese, Arabic, Welsh and Catalan. Many thanks to you all – it just shows the power of Social software and Creative Commons working together.

Over the last eight months Pontydysgu (well mainly Jenny Hughes) has been working on editing a handbook for teachers on the use of social software and web 2.0 in the classroom. The handbook, produced by the European Commission Comenius programme funded Taccle project will be published in June in English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and, we hope, Greek.

It will be available free for download on the internet and as a 150 page printed handbook. If you would like to pre-order copies, please fill in the order form here, telling me the number of copies you would like and the language version. The following text, taken from the draft of the preface, tells more about the purpose and content of the handbook.

“Information and Communication Technologies are being increasingly used to create richer learning environments. In all sectors of education from primary schools to adult education, in schools for pupils with special education needs and in colleges and universities, technologies are being used across the curriculum to enhance students’ experiences.

However, technology is not enough. The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realised in a way that stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and
can also be freely exchanged with others.

The European Commission Comenius programme funded Taccle project  aims through  training teachers to create e-learning materials and raising their awareness of e-learning in general, to help establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work.

This handbook has been produced by the Taccle project partners in five different European countries. It has been written by teachers for teachers and caters for those with only basic computer skills and limited technical support.

The handbook is geared to the needs of the classroom teacher but teacher trainers, ICT support staff and resource centre staff may find it useful too! It provides both practical support for
teachers who want a ‘hands on experience and also help and information for teachers who just want to find out about e-learning.

The handbook is designed to provide practical support for teachers to:

• create content for electronic learning environments in the context of an e-learning course
• identify and decide which ICT tools and content are most useful for particular purposes.
• create learning objects taking into account information design, web standards, usability criteria and reusability (text, images, animations, audio, video) and which enable active, interactive and cooperative learning processes.
• use learning environments effectively in order enhance quality and create resources to help them do so.
• share the developed content with their peers using existing repositories.

If you do not understand some of these terms do not worry. The handbook provides friendly step by step guidance about how to do it and explains the different terms along the way.

Of course it might seem a little strange and old fashioned producing a printed handbook about the use of new technologies. But, as Jenny Hughes says in her introduction to the handbook, we felt that the very teachers for whom this book is written are probably the group least likely to use or feel confident about using web-based materials. A book is comfortable and familiar and that is exactly how we would like teachers to feel about e-learning.

Technologies are changing very fast. When we originally applied for a grant from the European Commission, we anticipated the main focus of the handbook would be the use of Learning Management Systems – systems that help to organize  and administer learning programs for students and store and organize learning materials. At the time, this seemed to be the most important technology for creating and managing content. But since then , we have seen an explosion in the use of social networking applications like blogs and wikis, as part of what has been called Web 2.0. These are tools which make it very easy for people to create and publish their own content in different forms – text, pictures, audio and video.

These technologies make it easy not just for teachers, but for students to produce materials themselves and are increasingly being used in the classroom mixing traditional teaching methods with some e-learning methods in what is called Blended Learning.

Therefore, we have shifted the main focus of the handbook to provide a hands on guide to the use of such tools in the classroom.”

Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”

Those of you looking at our project page might have noticed a project called Taccle. Taccle stands for Teachers’ Aids on creating Content for Learning Environments. We would like to ask you to help with the project by filling in a short web based questionnaire. There are links to different language versions of the questionnaire at the bottom of this post. But, first you may want to know a bit more about Taccle (or if you wish – just scroll to the links at the bottom).

What is TACCLE?

The Taccle project helps teachers to develop their own e-learning materials.

It provides :

• step by step guidance in teacher friendly ‘how-to-do-it’ handbook
• practical training to develop skills you can use in your own classrooms
• a web site packed with information

Who is it for?

The Taccle project is designed by teachers for teachers and caters for those with only basic computer skills and limited technical support.

The handbook and the training are geared to the needs of the classroom teacher but teacher trainers, ICT support staff and resource centre staff my find them useful too!

It provides both practical support for teachers who want a ‘hands on experience’ and also help and information for teachers who just want to find out about e-learning.

Why TACCLE ?

Information and Communication Technologies are being increasingly used to create richer learning environments.

In all sectors of education from primary schools to adult education, in schools for pupils with special education needs and in colleges and universities, technologies are being used across the curriculum to enhance students’ experiences.

However, technology is not enough. The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realised in a way that stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and can also be freely exchanged with others. This is the aim of the TACCLE project.

What exactly will TACCLE do?

• Train teachers to create content for electronic learning environments in the context of an e-learning course
• Enable teachers to identify and decide which ICT tools and content are most useful for particular purposes.
• Teach teachers how to create learning objects taking into account information design, web standards, usability criteria and reusability (text, images, animations, audio, video) and which enable active, interactive and cooperative learning processes.
• Enhance the quality of e-learning environments in education by training teachers how to use them effectively and by creating resources to help them do so.
• Stimulate new approaches in teacher training related to the concept of lifelong learning, knowledge sharing and peer learning.
• Encourage teachers to share the developed content with their using existing repositories.

The first step in our work is undertaking a survey of teacher training needs for creating e-learning materials. We would be very grateful if you could assist in our work by filling in the survey. It will take about five minutes to complete.

1. English Language Version

2. Dutch Langauge Version

3. Spanish Language Version

4. German Language Version

5. Italian Language Version

Please visit the Taccle website. the handbook is being created on a wiki. If you are inetrested in contributingplease email me.