Abstract:

We are today the Information Society, with a multitude of digital amazing and powerful solutions. The progress of education, science and culture is primarily a result of sharing information and creating new ways of learning and knowledge.
This project aims to make better use of information technology, taking advantage of the educational potential of interactive multimedia and hypermedia contents, thus allowing a virtual community which provides information and deepens the history and traditions of the Azorean around the world. In this context, this project includes two main objectives: the creation of interactive multimedia content to divulge the history of the Azores and their traditions to children from 4 to 12 years in schools in the Azores and emigrating communities in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, Brazil and Hawaii and the creation of a website to collect and share information, experiences and realities relevant to the development and validation of the project. In fact, this project allows to promote the use of new technologies as a support for motivator and efficient teaching and learning as it is possible to collect and disseminate Azorean people traditions in the region and in the Diaspora, to promote sharing of experiences between generations and between spaces on the identity spirit, to use the Internet as a preferred means for establishing learning communities, information sharing and collaborative work, to fill the serious gap in the History of the Azores in the universe of educational material for any age group and to provide greater fluency in Portuguese and English languages.
Thus, it is essential to develop projects that take advantage of the potential of new technologies enabling a new fascination in school. Schools must open their walls and allow students and teachers to talk and search at their own time with other students and teachers in the same city, same country or the world, creating opportunities for new types of collaboration, sharing resources, information and experiences to support the development and implementation of successful practices.
The development of virtual environments, based on reading and writing of multimedia documents and various forms of online communication, has emerged as a promising strategy of integration between theory and practice, interconnection of knowledge and context of learning. The interactive multimedia, in addition to ease of access to information in diverse formats, allows a proactive and dynamic interaction in information analysis and the establishment of new connections and interrelationships.
It is essential to break the geographical discontinuity between schools and, especially, encourage, implement and evaluate the interaction of school, family and the community. Indeed, to the educational process in the information society, it is important collaborative work and partnerships that facilitate students learning, in particular, from the knowledge society in which they live and the natural and historic heritage of the region.
It is necessary to establish deep integration between the society and school, between learning and life: the classroom will be a continuous time-space of learning.
In fact, the multimedia technologies applied to education for these age groups allow not only a reference to knowledge, but an evolutionary process, the result of creativity and imagination, allowing in the future, a full citizenship.

Keywords:

Interactive multimedia, e-learning, azorean history and traditions.