Abstract:

Over the last few years, the process of convergence with the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has reformulated the vision and educational values, highlighting the importance of the development of students' abilities.
In this educational project we suggested the inclusion of Personal Learning Environments (PLE) to dynamise the knowledge acquisition process. Web 2.0 tools are the perfect framework with which to build PLE's, offering a wide variety of free online software to create and share content. Our main objective was to shift away from the traditional teaching methodology, moving to a model in which students themselves draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize. In this new context students abandon their previous role as passive consumers and become partners in the learning process.
We proposed the use of Web 2.0 tools in several challenging courses from the Computer Sciences degree of the University of Cordoba. Students were encouraged to open a twitter account that established instantaneous teacher-student and student-student communication and allowed organised information sharing (by means of tags). Collective tutoring via twitter was especially valuable. Additionally we asked our students to create their own blog, in which they posted their contributions to the course. Every new post had to be advertised and properly tagged on twitter. An interesting activity was posting the synthesis of the key contents studied in class, accessing and analysing information critically. Furthermore, all information posted on the blogs was accessible by anyone. The correction of exercises was performed by teachers or by a student peer-review process.
In addition to blog publication, some activities required a collective oral presentation, in which students' presentation skills and self-confidence noticeably improved. Finally we provided self-evaluation sheets at the end of each block of contents. These sheets collected key questions about some of the concepts studied and did not include the answers. They were a good rehearsal for exams and the aim was for students to answer questions collaboratively on a wiki. A wiki allows real time multiple editing and the debate took place on twitter. Students learnt how to assess their own progress and to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

This project can be implemented with a reduced budget as it can be developed using only free Web 2.0 tools. The preliminary results obtained short time after the beginning of this educational experience were very positive. We have perceived a relevant improvement in student competences without a reduction in content. Amongst other improvements were the total integration of new technologies in the classroom that led to closer and more supportive relationships amongst classmates, as well as more precise evaluation of students' work. Moreover the students' motivation and engagement in class increased, resulting in much better results than those obtained in previous years (more students passed the course and with higher grades in average). To conclude, we have proven the usefulness of Web 2.0 tools for encouraging students to take an active role in the learning process, improving their results, skills and competences.