Abstract:

Content learning through projects is becoming increasingly fashionable when teaching English in the classroom, as it is an important part of the learning process. This teaching strategy represents an authentic education model in which students design, implement and assess their projects and finally, connect them to the real world (Blank, 1997; Dickinson, et al, 1998; Harwell, 1997).
In this project, we drive our students to learn through projects as well as we promote cooperative learning, autonomous learning, working with groups together with the use of the ICT. We have achieved this aim through a project consisting on a task where university students from the Music Education Degree, taking our English course, had to select a web page from the Internet which could be used to teach music to primary school students. Students had to include the Webpage URL and explained the reasons of their choice. Then, they needed to summarize the main content and detailed its sections and chose 1 or 2 favourite activities and explained them with some examples. The final task was to upload their projects in a virtual environment in order to carry out a shared group task consisting on creating a reference material for the subject and for future students.
Results show that our students got involved in the task improving their basic knowledge of the English language and developing interpersonal, autonomous and cooperative skills.

Keywords:

projects, cooperative learning, autonomous learning, ict, virtual environment.