Abstract:

Information and Communication Technologies foster communication between teachers and students. In this context, each educator shall be asked to contribute to the creation of multimedia content and the development of learning communities.
In this paper, we intend to present a virtual learning platform, called 2ndschool.eu, in which teachers and students built a learning path based on the global society. By interacting with netizens from different parts of Europe, students were able to develop their own critical cultural awareness, co-create knowledge and rebuild their own values and believes.
This platform includes different Web 2.0 tools, namely chat, discussion forums, e-mail messaging, podcasting, videocasting and slidesharing. The main product of this project is the creation of critical analyses of present-day topics of national or international news by the different international teams.
With this eTwinning project, which was awarded the European Quality Label, teachers were able to develop a teaching-learning process based on the introduction of the 5 Cs: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities (cf. Philips & Draper, 1999). In this way, having a critical pedagogy into account, the learning process could be seen as a liberatory activity, in which students became aware of their own ability to contribute to an effective change in the society they make part of.
Moreover, by developing a dialogical interaction, the different students were able to create a mental awareness of one point of view and its opposite, which resulted in the accomplishment of the Freire’s cycle of action-reflection-new action. This implies that these pronétaires were capable of developing a techno-democracy (Levy, 1999), in which each one of them had the opportunity to make himself/ herself heard.

Keywords:

pronetaires, critical pedagogy, virtual learning platform.