Special Interest Group 1 has launched a Portal The SIG 1 Portal is made by Centre for Educational Technology (CET) on Tallinn Pedagogical University. Have a look to the SIG 1 Portal including theory and practice of tools.

Intro

Comp@ct website of Special Intrest Group 1

During the last years lots of schools have been involved with national and transnational projects. In many countries schools have nowadays quite good access to use different kind of communication and collaboration tools. These tools and equipments as well as connections are being developed all the time.

Important question is: What do you want to use technology for? Technology based learning and communication is never the same as face-to-face communication but it can be used as part of learning methods when using Problem Based Learning, Collaborative Learning and case studies to exploit web-resources or to acquire diversified communication skills like students giving presentations in videoconference.

What is synchronous communication and asynchronous communication?

Synchronous communication means communication that happens at the same time, is simultaneous and asynchronous communication takes place at different times or over a certain period of time. These concepts have been used in online learning when the teacher and students are not in face-to-face situation.

Examples of uses of asynchronous communication:

• e-mail
• electronic mailing lists
• e-mail based conferencing programs
• messaging programs.

Examples of uses of synchronous communication:

• chat rooms
• using whiteboard software
• NetMeeting (or other software to online collaboration)
• VOIP (Voice Over IP)
• videoconferencing (point-to-point or multipoint)
• collaborative working spaces (web publishing, e-learning environments)

What are the objectives of Special Interest Group 1?

• to offer Comenius schools and teachers background information that will help them to start or develop their ICT-related projects
• to share general guidelines for various types of collaboration and offer basic guidelines for project-work communication
• to disseminate good communication, collaboration practices
• to provide a database (knowledge database) and links to regional/national lists of users of videoconferencing facilities.

What are the benefits for schools of using these technologies?

• to be able to acquire distance learning methods
• to have rapid or online interaction
• to be able to access external expertise
• to provide students possibilities to learn and use modern technologies
• to provide students different learning and collaboration methods
• to be independent on time and where you live

Comp@ct partners in this thematic area are:

Glossary will help you to check the meanings of certain words used in this field.

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