EDUBLOG AND WEBQUEST PLATFORM DESIGN CONNECTED TO SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES AS A TOOL TO TEACH FUNDAMENTALS OF CHEMISTRY TO NON-CHEMISTS AT MULTIDISCIPLINARY UNIVERSITY MASTER’S DEGREE LEVEL

In the last years, the University teaching has set us to teachers a development process and change in our educational practices. We must find new and innovative alternatives to pass on knowledge to our students. In the age of new technologies and communication, a huge amount of material can be found on the Internet. The fundamental role of teachers is to use all these tools for the benefit of students’ knowledge with a previous pre-selection and validation of the resources.

Chemistry is present in different fields such as architecture, archaeology, biology, geology, etc. In some cases, professionals of these fields have a basic knowledge on chemistry. However, taking into account the work that they are going to develop in the future, they need to increase such knowledge. The University of the Basque Country offers two official postgraduate master’s degrees such as the Master on Restoration and Integral Management of the Built Heritage and the Master on Environmental Pollution and Toxicology, in where graduates of the previously mentioned four areas of expertise are included. Therefore, both masters make up multidisciplinary groups of professionals from technical and experimental sciences expertise areas. In both master’s degree curricula, different subjects dealing with medium-advance level chemistry concepts are included. Considering the previous academic year’s experience, a lack of some basic-medium level knowledge in chemistry was detected. Most of these concepts are common for some of the subjects of both masters (e.g. steps of the analytical protocol), therefore a common forum to broadcast all these additional chemist resources can be found to increase their knowledge in chemistry. A good alternative can be the creation of a blog. This Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool can be used as a support to the E-learning to establish new channels of communication between teachers and students. Specifically, the edublogs are those blogs used to support the teaching-learning process in an educational context. In this abstract we present the preliminary stage of an edublog creation to teach basic-medium concept to non-chemist, useful for their professional future. The experience of this ICT tool application was restricted to two (one from each master) subjects (Restoration and Preservation of Materials and Environmental Biogeochemistry). In this preliminary stage, a design of some webquests which are going to be included in the edublog as strategy of guided learning are going to be commented. This resource is an appropriate tool to design tasks for the students. Results derived from the webquests (research work reports) are going to be accessible in the edublog for all the students, together with additional material for their personal study. Moreover, taking into account that sometimes the students look up in a higher rate their profiles in social networking sites than educational resources in other websites, the RSS feed of the edublog is going to connect to the widely used Facebook social network. This fact will allow students to have direct actualizations of the new contributions on the edublog (1-2 hours) in their personal Facebook wall, without the necessity of a direct revision of them via the edublog website.