Abstract:

AREA is the acronym of Actividades e Recursos Educativos Abertos (in English: Open Educational Resources and Activities). This is the name that we have given to a Web system based on the principles of the Web 2.0 and the Social Web to support teachers innovation and professional development. AREA involves several functionalities that have been taken from different kinds of applications.

First, AREA is a referatory because it provides information of learning resources such as their name, description, main features or location (e.g. the URL). It is not a repository as long as the actual resources are not located in this system. The resources are available in real repositories and we harvest them in order to get their descriptions. In AREA, resources’ descriptions will be classified in accordance with different categories (e.g., type, educational level, difficulty), rating, use, etc. Users will be allowed to search and explore the resources described in AREA.

Second, AREA includes an inventory of innovative learning activities and activity sequences offered to teachers as inspiration and guide. These activities and sequences are presented in an abstract way, without any assumption about the subject or the context in which they could be performed. The goal is to provide new ideas to teachers that can be adapted to their specific context.

Third, AREA provides an authoring environment to create lesson plans and document learning experiences. A lesson plan in AREA will involve a set of learning activities (e.g. an activity sequence), a particular context (e.g. subject, students level, classroom type) and specific resources from that context (e.g. computers, software applications, videos). Using this authoring facility teachers will be supported to create their own lesson plans from the activities and resources available in AREA. The documentation of the learning experience is performed after the teaching/learning process has been carried out. They can include photos, video, comments and all type of outcomes produced during the development of the learning experience. We hope this kind of documents will promote teachers action.

Four, AREA is a curation platform. Teachers can create lists and collect learning resources, learning activities, lesson plans and any kind of Web document related with their teaching interests. This functionality is similar to the one available in existing platforms such as Scoop.it or Pinterest. The interesting thing is that we use the information collected in these lists to maintain a user profile and to update our knowledge base of learning resources and activities. Eventually, taking advantage of this information, we will provide recommendations to users when they are looking for a particular resource or when they are authoring a lesson plan.

Finally, AREA is conceived as a social application where users can find other users with similar interests and create communities. A user can decide to follow the activities of other users, provide suggestions of resources to friends, comment and rate resources, etc. A reputation policy is established to promote action and participation in AREA.

Keywords:

Lesson planning, curation platform, recommendations.