Remember the time when you had a teacher in front of a blackboard endlessly
talking, sometimes in a rambling way to students? Those days are gone. This project
is a proof of that and aims at palliating students’ boredom.
Interactive Teaching Materials across Culture and Technology (INTACT) intends
to present an alternative way in the teaching paradigm as it intends to be a
resourceful tool in the teaching/learning process. Both teachers and students can
work together cooperatively and collaboratively, two different ways well explained
by Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó further ahead. Teachers will no longer become
the centre of learning but they will become guides and facilitators throughout all
the learning process. Students can learn from their teachers but the latter can also
learn from the former.
The novelty here is that learners are engaged online in a different set of activities
and among students. Therefore, the INTACT platform caters for an online collaborative
learning community comprised of both students and teachers. As Sarolta
Lipóczi so well puts it, the crux of the matter is ‘learning to learn too’.
The teaching paradigm is changing and we are witnessing different approaches
and techniques in pedagogical matters. In this context, at the basis of the INTACT
project is a display of a wide array of new techniques and methodologies that account
for active learning based on multimodal teaching and learning resources. Students
will thus interact cognitively and in a constructivist way with different materials,
such as visuals, texts, audio, to name a few. INTACT offers students and teachers
options so that they can choose several actions in the course of the learning unit, for
instance watch, browse, select, compare and manipulate all the resources available.
Bearing in mind this short introduction to the project, in Part 2 Mary Glynn and
Ildikó Szabó give us a better definition of INTACT and the educational arguments underlying its foundation. They also focus on the difference between collaborative
and cooperative learning and on the importance of bilingualism and the advantages
of CLIL, now one of the trendiest bilingual teaching methods,
In part 2, we find a sample of resources ranging from Biology to second language
learning. In the first learning unit, Toni Cramer and Steffen Schaal from the
University of Education-Ludwigsburg, Germany, conceived an 8-lesson unit plan
on the Human Immune System. Through these 8 lessons, students will learn how
to explain blood types, to describe the parts of the human immune system model
and collect data and interpret the spreading of diseases using adequate simulations,
among other useful knowledge.
The second and the third learning units are targeted at primary school students.
The authors’ main purpose, Mary Glynn, from St. Patrick’s College in Dublin and
Mariangeles Caballero from Universidad Complutense – Faculty of Education in
Madrid, respectively, is to enhance students’ knowledge on science and technology
by exploring and applying scientific ideas and concepts. Magnetism and the
Human Circulatory system are therefore the proposals presented by the authors.
Framed in the Geography programme of the 7th grade of the 3rd cycle of the
basic education, for a target audience aged 12-13 years old, Maria Antónia Martins,
from Emídio Garcia Secondary School in Bragança-Portugal, conceived the fourth
learning unit on Elements and Climate factors regarding the Translational Motion
and the Seasons of the Year. The temperature element was chosen to be studied
throughout 3 lessons. In the course of these, students should not only be capable
of relating the diurnal and annual variation of the temperature according to the
movements of the earth but also to understand the relation between the annual
variation of the temperature and the latitude of the place.
The fifth and the sixth learning units aim at improving foreign language and
social skills while at the same time students are taken back in time, thus broadening
their knowledge on culture and history. Through the most suggestive title:
‘Legends and heroes – To be a Knight in King Arthur’s court’, Ildikó Szabó, from
the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty in Hungary, takes us on a tour
through medieval times meeting the needs of several learning styles, such as acoustic,
kinaesthetic and visual.
Sarolta Lipóczi, also from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty, conceived
the sixth learning unit titled ‘Mozart as a child and his travels’ a way to learn
German as a foreign language. In this unit, primary school students are given the
story of a famous musician born in Austria. Students thus develop cultural knowledge
and language competences through exciting learning objects and activities.
In part 3, Birgit May, Annika Jokiaho and Vítor Gonçalves, with the collaboration
of José Exposto make a brief overview of the INTACT platform, explaining the
methods adopted and highlighting more technical issues related to results achieved
during the the project. Subchapter 3.2. reflects on good practices resulting from the whole project. It also records the national teams’ experience in working with
the others for accomplishing the various tasks as well as the numerous unexpected
and unavoidable problems that came up in the three years during which the project
was completed.
Being all said, we truly hope that this ebook can become an appetiser to the
project, largely to make both students and teachers frequent users of the interactive
platform
