Case study

Giantommaso D’Astolto

NEST project

Alta Scuola Politecnica VII cycle

Wikiscuola

What is it?

Collaborative wiki used by an Italian middle school in northern Italy

The goal is to share experiences, ideas and knowledge and to interactively create teaching material

Homepage

The homepage contains a simple explanation of how to use the tool

On the left side we can see the structure of the website and on the top of the page we have a tab that shows the functionalities we can use

At the bottom there is a list of comments left by registered members

How does it work?

Students and teachers can work together to create shared content for future lectures

The content is firstly organised by classes and then by subjects

All the members can edit pages and upload video and documents, professors have also the role of moderator and support team for their pupils

IT tools

Chat and forumsfor comment sharing

Document uploaderfor material transfering

Wikisfor interactive collaboration

Strengths/1

The material is well organised, and the explanation on how to use the tool is comprehensible

The overall impression for a web surfer is very catchy, thanks also to an appealing layout

Strengths/2

The idea of creating the content of future lectures with students is extremely innovative.

Moreover a student that is involved in the preparation of the lesson should feel more stimulated to active participate to it

Weaknesses

Some users complains for browser incompatibility

There are no tools for simultaneous interaction (such as video-audio conferences)

Business model

The service was conceived by the Italian school, which firstly used it for a single class (pilot experiment)

It was developed thanks to the support of an organisation of experts (Centro Metid, Politecnico di Milano)

Now the service has been expanded to the whole school and people need to sign up to become members

Conclusions and take-aways

The idea seems to have had a great success, in terms of participation and commitment

Since the tool has been developed for a single school, there is no need for scaling it down, it just takes some adjustment with respect to the institution that wants to use it

The tool can be useful as a part of a bigger project that involves the use of other kinds of resources (such as videoconfences)