Proposal for educational project

SoNeCS - Social Networking for Catering Schools

Funded by HP

Summary

The project goal is to expand the educational opportunities through the creation of social networks. Nodes of these networks will be first of all the students of a catering school based in Rome, the IPSAR SAFI: together with their teachers they will create learning objects and other useful material. They will share them on an open source Learning Management System (Moodle), where they will be able to use different kind of tools: links to Internet and Intranet resources, forum, chat, quizzes, tests, etc. The students will be encouraged to personally create Multimedia Learning Objects (slide shows, videos, animations), not only under their teachers' supervision, and to perform 'social tagging': we plan to introduce a new interactive system so that they will both have fun and create valuable output. They will play and help determine the contents of Learning Objects (images, videos, recipes, etc) by providing meaningful labels for them. Later on, the students will create a section open to alumni and parents for information concerning: job opportunities, carrier vacancies, higher education opportunities and cooking advices. In a further step, the network will also be available for other catering schools in order to enforce communication and sharing among students and teachers.  

Users

Students of a catering school between 14 and 18 years old (Istituto Professionale Alberghiero, undergraduate school) In the very first phase the project will involve 40 students of SAFI catering school and their teachers. Later on, the activities will be extended to two partner schools (in Bari and in Palermo) with another 40 students. In a further step a public section for alumni and parents will be created. In this section we will include ‘social activities’ like blogs, wikis etc so that the project could be extended also to students from every part of Italy.  

Topics

Catering and other subjects like history, literature, geography. We will examine microcontent, social software, and social bookmarking (blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs, and other networking tools).

We assume that by the end of the project in 2009, our students will be able to use social software and other tools of Learning Management Systems or Content Management System to build a website with learning objects. This will enhance the learning process and determine the inclusion of the students in the teaching process. Furthermore, the project will test the possibilities that Web 2.0 offers for enhancing the pedagogy of “on the job” activities.

With the introduction of PC’s, our school focused on teaching computer skills in isolation, like another subject area to cover. In the last years we have attempted to have our students gain knowledge from the computer, using it as a valuable information tool. In today’s schools, the shift is for students to “learn using technology”. We believe that computer skills can be acquired while the students are learning other subjects in a meaningful, relevant manner. Therefore, the focus has now shifted to advancing and enhancing the curriculum with the integration of technology.

Our previous experience in using mobile devices for teaching gave us positive results, which makes us confident in going further. Researchers are studying technology as a possible catalyst influencing change from a traditional classroom to an environment sometimes referred to as a ‘community of learners’. Within this model of teaching and learning, students and teachers work together as resources for one another. Students collaborate and participate; teachers support and provide leadership. Furthermore computers are useful to monitor students activities: for example, in a catering school, real-world activities, such as those performed on the job, can be documented trough portfolios: the students collect experiences from their work and teachers are granted additional preparation time to work with each other on units of instructions.

The students of catering school have also maths and entrepreneurship among the subjects of their curriculum. We plan to extend the project to all the subjects of the curriculum and to include also project work focused on environmental topics. For example:

• systems of food production and relationship to their impact on the environment and food safety;

• consumer demands and the effects of food processing and packaging;

• issues of population pressure and sustainable development

• problems concerning food waste

The school mission is to help young boys and girls learning a job and starting it as soon as they end the school. Generally, the students come mostly from small towns in the south of Italy where they have scarce possibilities of accessing quality higher education. The project goals are the following: - to expand the educational opportunities available to students of catering schools, giving them the possibility to receive a high quality education; - to build a community of schools (teachers, students and their parents) to allow the exchange of information concerning education and job opportunities; - to test the educational possibilities of the Web 2.0 and social tagging. Since many of the students, once graduated, return to their home town, we imagine that this project will enhance the possibility that they could still keep in touch with their colleagues, creating a community of interest.

In order to measure the impact of the proposed project on teaching and learning, we plan two kind of actions

1. measuring growth in student content knowledge and skills compared with a “control” group (growth in student content knowledge and skills in the same class in previous years);

2. to study the correlation between students’ usage of social networking and their results in the final traditional exams.