This morning I had the opportunity to give a talk for a group of Armenian and Georgian professors. The context was that of a TEMPUS European project ARMAZEG – Developing tools for lifelong learning in Trans-Caucasus region: e-Learning. The place was that of the School of Engineering in Florence.
It was a good meeting with exciting discussion and feedbacks. I’m grateful to all the participants for that.
The title of the talk was “Open and continuous teachers training for an open school: experiences from the Italian University Line”.
We outlined the activities at the IUL in the context of the distance education scenario in Italy as well as all over the world. We told the eight-years story of the iamarf.org blog, from its very beginning to the last initiatives, such as PirateBox in classroom and Kano computer in classroom.
As usual, we also demonstrated the use of these devices, allowing the participants to downloads contents from a PirateBox and showing the use of the Kano Raspberry computer, accessing it remotely by means of a laptop through a VNC connection over the network provided by the PirateBox. By means of this setting, we showed Terminal Quest, a game for learning some basic Unix command through a story – a game we have recently translated in Italian for a classroom experimentation we are going to begin in November.
Those participants who did not have a device to connect to the PirateBox, will find here links to
- the slides (PDF 429 KB) we used this morning
- the text written by Richard Stallman Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software – of course, this link points to the original resource since now you are no more in the close environement of my PirateBox!
- a nice resource on Scratch programs to do math in 4th grade classes – as above, link pointing to original resource.
I thank again the participants for their contributions.
Andreas Formiconi 