Abstract:

The most diffused media and devices of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) should become fundamental tools in modern schools. In particular, web contents and their visualization through mobile devices ought to be adopted and become completing parts of modern schooling.
On the one hand, in fact, the school must keep technologically up to date and adopt the means young students are accustomed to since the early years; on the other hand, an appropriate and productive use of such media within the school can prevent the young from their misuse or excessive use outside.

At present, several ways to use computer science and the Internet at school coexist and no international standard tools have been adopted yet. A good compromise, for the moment, could be to use the most general and diffused technologies at disposal, such as the web and web sites accessed through mobile devices (such as laptops, tablets and smartphones).
The proposed approach is to take advantage of the peculiarities of such technologies to improve the students’ capability to express themselves and speak in public, so to make their schoolmates understand their solution to specific problems proposed by the teacher.
In more detail, a different theme is proposed to each student and they are asked to present a survey to their classmates and representing it through a simple web site.

The layout firstly used, put at disposal by the teacher, is suitable for desktops and laptops of about 15 inches screens. This forces the young to organize material in a schematic way, using all the media they desire, such as images, text, videos, further web sites, etc. On the other hand, however, the screen surface allows to use several menus and extended contents.

A further step derives from the needs of small handheld devices, such as smartphones (about 6-7 inches screens). This is the second step of the proposed approach, and a suitable web layout is proposed and put at the students’ disposal. Small screens force to scale web sites to minimal dimensions. The first consequence in this second phase is that students are lead to design their site in a different way, more synthetic, using less menus and avoiding long descriptions. In this way, they are forced to adopt a strongly direct and concise way of expressing themselves.
The third and last phase is to propose layouts with responsive web design techniques, where contents are adapted to different devices. More precisely, responsive web design is taken into consideration, which allows to craft sites and provide easy reading and navigation with only a few resizing and scrolling operations across a wide range of devices. In this phase, students can organize their web site developing it for wide screen and smartphones at the same time and choose contents properly for both dimensions.

This exercise is important for several reasons:
(i) students get accustomed to use web techniques in a stimulating and interdisciplinary way, not only within computer science courses;
(ii) they learn to use web layouts through easy wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) tools, free and downloadable from the Internet;
(iii) they are forced to design their sites and organize presentations keeping in mind they can be accessed through heterogeneous devices with different screen dimensions.

In general, the exercise tries to compromise between traditional teaching needs (i.e.: organize a speech about a subject) and modern web-based content organizations.

Keywords:

Speech organization, web sites, responsive design.