The Virtual Rural School

Report on the teachers’ training undertaken in Spain within the frame of the NEMED project.

2nd training phase.

Authors: Mónica Martínez Paz, Sara Silvestre, Mario Barajas and Roser Boix

University of Barcelona. Future Learning Research group.

Introduction

Next you will find a small report that reflects the training process designed and implemented by the University of Barcelona for the multigrade teachers of the NEMED Local Network in Spain. This training process was designed from January to April 2006 and has been implemented in 2 different phases: 1st training phase from April to June 2006, and second from October 2006 to January 2007. It is foreseen to continue the training with a third phase, which will finish in June 2007.

The report is structured in the following way:

  1. Virtual Rural School: Goals, Contents, Target, etc.
  2. Technical Resources Used in Virtual Rural School: Moodle, Forums, Skype / Chat / Videoconference, e-mail and Distribution List (Googlegroups), Power Point and Word, Video, others
  3. Educational expectations and results obtained after the implementation of Virtual Rural School
  4. The future of Virtual Rural School, that is, the future of the NEMED Network in Spain: educational proposals at a local level and educational proposals at a global level
  5. The use of the Virtual Rural School in figures

Before starting with the report contents, it seems pertinent to present the list of the Rural Schools active in the NEMED Local Network in Spain:

Region / School / Teacher
ARAGÓN / AULA DE ARIÑO-
ALLOZA
(CRA Ariño-Alloza) / Isabel Rodrigo
Isabel Simón
José A. Blesa
Gemma Clavero
Mª ÁngelesGiménez
CRA DE TEO
GALICIA / COLEXIO RURAL
AGRUPADO DE TEO
(SOLLÁNS) / Manuel Mesaguer
ESCUELA DE EDUCACIÓN INFANTIL DO AIDO / Ángeles Pousa Díaz
ESCOLA DE BAMONDE / María Blanco Corral
ASTURIAS / ESCUELA DEMUÑÁS / Norberto Martín Gómez
CATALUNYA / CEIP SANT SERNI / Miquel Moyà Altisent
CEIP PORTELLA BLANCA / Rosa Rius Safont
CANTABRIA / ESCUELA UNITARIA
DE SAN ANDRÉS DE
LUENA / Carmen Fernández Ceballos

Virtual Rural School

Within the Nemed Project, an Educational Platform called Virtual Rural School has been created ( in both Spanish and English versions, although, due to some temporary problems with the server, we have placed it in In this space we have placed the training activities designed for the module, as well as some spaces designed for exchanging opinions and ideas among the students (multigrade teachers), the teachers and the tutors. These spaces are discussion forums, chats, distribution lists, spaces to share documents, etc. The method used is e-learning, understood as distance learning based on the use of computer and telecommunications and within a Virtual Learning Environment.

The Virtual Rural School has been designed using the free, Open Source software package Moodle. This software is a Course Management System designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. This system allows an easy interaction between teachers and students, as well as among students. The design and the development of Moodle are based on a "social constructionist pedagogy", which asserts that learning occurs particularly well in a collaborative environment that everyone builds together. This Virtual Learning Environment includes characteristics that support role sharing, such as permissions options that allow each participant to be a teacher as well as a learner. Furthermore, the role of the 'teacher' can change from being 'the source of knowledge' to being an influence, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

Besides this space, a Webpage has been created with the theoretical contents visually organized and shown in three languages (Spanish, Catalan and English) ( This webpage will facilitate the implementation and development of the activities suggested in the Virtual Rural School.

With this educational platform, as a research group we aim for:

  • Training the multigrade teachers in the designing of the Telematic Projects in order to implement them in the multigrade school.
  • Familiarizing the rural teachers with the onlinetraining so that they can experience it as students before implementing it with their own students.
  • Contributing to the creation of a small virtual community of rural teachers who share similar social realities within the same country.
  • Encouraging the cooperative and collaborative work, since we consider it essential for the correct development of the NEMEDNetwork and enriching for every educational process.

These goals coincide, at the same time, with some of the goals of the NEMED Network, such as the following:

  • Offer specialized support and training to multigrade schoolteachers.
  • Evaluate the application of ICT-based methodologies and practices addressed to multigrade schools.
  • Create the conditions for the sustainability and expansion of the network. The same process of creating a small virtual community of multigrade teachers in Spain is also generating the suitable environment for the subsequent incorporation of these teachers into the international Network.

A suitable question would be why this training module is based on the design and creation of telematic projects. The answer to this question is very simple. First of all, because of the experience that our research group has in the design, implementation and development of telematic projects in Primary and Secondary Education. Secondly, because we consider them as a tool that allows integrating the different curricular disciplines, as well as allowing incorporation of the telematic activities in the curriculum. Furthermore, they are flexible andadaptable; they encourage the collaborative work and promote the use of ICTs. All these features indicate that telematic projects are a good tool for multigrade schools.

We would like to highlight the cooperation and collaboration networks that can be created through the Virtual Rural School, as well as through the rest of training activities and environments developed by other partners in the NEMED project, because we firmly believe in the real possibilities of a project like this. By real possibilities, we mean that it isn’t sufficient to remain ata superficial level, that is, at the merely technological level. We want to place these technological resources at the service of the teachers’ needs. This also implies theclear identification of the learning needs of the teachers we are working with.

Furthermore, we point towards undoing the usually hierarchical existing relationships between experts (researchers and academic staff) and practitioners (teachers), since only in this way is a project of cooperative nature meaningful. The goal is that experts and practitioners work together, so that experts are nourished by the practitioners’ knowledge while practitioners stop being dependent and create their own knowledge and learning communities. These must be global and self-managed communities founded on experience and not only on theory, all this being possible since the experts provide technological resources and knowledge (virtual rural school, wiki, etc.).

Technical Resources Used in the Virtual Rural School

During the course of the module given by the University of Barcelona within the NEMED project, the Multigrade School teachers who have taken part in it have used the following ICT tools:

Moodle

It has been the educational platform used for the execution and development of the course in the Virtual Rural School. The pedagogic team of the University of Barcelona has decided to use this Course Management System because, besides being a free, Open Source software that allows creating online teaching-learning communities, it makes knowledge construction possible through collaborative learning.The adaptation of the teachers to the platform was simple and effortless. We offered them a tutorial that allowed them to easily use the teaching-learning scenario.

Forums

The use of the Moodle platform has allowed the teachers to discover the Discussion Forums and to use them. The different forums of the platform have become the main tool used by the teachers. From this we can deduce that the teachers’ tacit need of communication has arisen, above all with the purpose of exchanging ideas and experiences among colleagues.

Skype / Chat / Video Conference

During the development of the course we realized that the teachers did not feel completely motivated and comfortable with the use of the Moodle platform. We wondered what the reasons could be for this, since they knew how to use the tool and were responding positively to the development of the activities. However, we perceived scarce fluidity and motivation, which led us to think that, probably, teachers needed a type of communication more direct and similar to the face-to-face one.

For that, the educational team -coordinator of the educational platform Virtual Rural School- suggested replacing one of the activities with another in which teachers had to use a program that allowed them to talk in real time. The selected tool was Skype. We prepared a program tutorial and we asked teachers to install it and register themselves as Skype users.

We suggested that they carry out a first contact meeting in which, besides meeting each other, they could exchange ideas about possible subjects to use in designing the projects that they would have to develop collectively later. It seems that our conjecture was true, for since that moment the NEMED group of teachers have met once per week by Skype to exchange experiences, impressions, ideas, and to design their project.

E-mail and Distribution List (Googlegroups)

E-mail is the most direct, personal and effective method, besides the telephone, that we have to get in touch and to communicate from the university with the teachers active in the project. The reason for that is that all the participants in the project have complete control of the tool (e-mail).

The idea of creating the distribution list arose as a result of the NEMED teachers’ first on-line meeting. One of them wrote an e-mail to the research team communicating the intention of creating a distribution list to facilitate and improve the communication among them.

The UB team created the account, since we had the complete list of the electronic addresses of all the teachers registered in Virtual Rural School. For this, the free service offered by Google (Google Groups) was used. The electronic address of the Virtual Rural School group is: .

Power Point and Word

The popular presentation programme and word processor developed by MS Windows has allowed the teachers of the project to exchange the materials done in their classes, especially those who do not have other ICT tools such as video cameras.These are well-known tools and were already used by most of the teachers belonging to the Virtual Rural School before joining the project.

Video

Some of the schools that take part in the project have the parents’ authorization to record images of the pupils. This has allowed the teachers of the Virtual Rural School to exchange visual materials among the multigrade schools. The exchange of the material has been carried out through the Moodle platform. From there, any member of the NEMED network can watch and save the videos uploaded in the Educational Platform.

Pedagogic expectations and results obtained from The Virtual Rural School

The University of Barcelona research team designed the training module Virtual Rural School, with the intention that the teachers participating in NEMED learn to design a telematic project for subsequent creation and application in their own rural schools.The activities that configured the training module were created to be carried out individually; however, the teachers were asked, specifically, to upload their exercises in the educational platform with the aim of sharing them with their colleagues.

The UB educational team had considered a collective work for the second part of the module, in which there were different activities to carry out together among the teachers of the rural schools.Fortunately, to our surprise, the teachers of the Virtual Rural School decided to overturn the activities scheduled in the educational platform, converting them into collective activities; by doing this they managed to jump towards to what the UB educational team had scheduled for the third training phase.Therefore, the module had to be quickly restructured in order to answer the need expressed by the teachers active in NEMED, with the subsequent satisfaction of the educational team, which assessed this change of plans very positively.

The teachers’ attitude is very satisfactory, for they have managed to create a relationship that is only possible if are really thrilled with and committed to the project. On different occasions, the teachers in the Virtual Rural School have expressed their wide satisfaction and gratitude for being offered the opportunity to be connected and to generate a collaborative work that fills them with new ideas and thrilling experiences (exchange of photographs, videos, opinions, experiences, beliefs, etc.).

An indication of the success of the project is the incorporation of the schools of AIDO (CRA of TEO, Galicia), School of Ariño (CRA of Ariño-Alloza), School of Bamonde (CRA of TEO, Galicia), CEIP of Laredo (Chapela-Vigo, Galicia), CEIP Perez Viondi (Pontevedra, Galicia). The introduction of these schools to the project was due to the motivation, enthusiasm and satisfaction of the teacher of the school of Campos in TEO (Galicia), the director of the CRA Ariño-Alloza, and the teacher of the school of Prats i Sampsor (Catalunya).

From all that has taken place in this training process, which has lasted for more than one year now, we can state that we feel satisfied, since the goals that we had set have already been reached. We have achieved the creation of a Local Network of rural multigrade teachers, who are designing and applying a beautiful telematic project with which they expect to reinforce and consolidate the link already established among them. Meanwhile, they are sharing and acquiring knowledge in different disciplines, as well as the use of ICT, which was the basic aim of the project. Furthermore, they are learning an educational use of ICT, and they are getting involved in the design through ICT of educational materials adapted to their schools’ real needs and wishes.

Next you can find a small sample of the work carried out together by the teachers of Virtual Rural School during the design of the telematic project "Sharing Traditions":

Telematic project "Sharing Traditions"

The purpose of the project is to share the traditions that we celebrate at schools. The ways of sharing them can be different, such as we noted in the meeting via Skype and which Miquel commented on in the forum.

Two ways of getting in touch will be needed:

Synchronous Contacts (online) to explain to each other what we are doing to prepare activities and to solve problems. We will do the synchronous contacts via Skype.

Asynchronous contacts (offline) to send to each other those activities to carry out and those already carried out. We will do the asynchronous contacts via electronic mail and within the educational platform.

Human resources: The teaching staff and the student body of the participant schools.

Material resources: The traditional resources used at schools.

Technological resources: The ways of sharing them are different, all involving the use of ICT: Internet, Skype, e-mail (teachers’ or class’ e-mail), Office (Word and PowerPoint mainly), image processing, digital camera, sound processor application), microphone with speakers and earphones with micro, digital video camera, and also possible specific programs as Click, Hot Potatoes, spreadsheets, etc.

Following our e-tutor’s instructions, we can keep comparing our listings in this forum and address the needs in a synchronized meeting (Skype).

The future of theVirtual Rural School

Pedagogic goals at a local level

In the remaining months of the project we aim for the following:

1)A bigger involvement of the schools that have expressed interest but aren’t yet completely involved in the project: Canary Islands, Zaragoza and Ariño.

2)Writing a document about the design of the telematic project entitled "Sharing Traditions" (by the multigrade teachers of the Virtual Rural School). This document will be the guideline for other teachers to repeat the experience designed by the members of the Virtual Rural School. Therefore, the document will not only have the design of the telematic project but also a section entitled Recommendations and improvements of application based on the experiences of the Telematic Project “Sharing Traditions”.

3)An optimal development of the telematic project "Sharing Traditions" that allows the continuation of the already created Network and that, in turn, updates and improves the teachers’ knowledge in ICT.