MEANINGFUL, COLLABORATIVE LEARNING THROUGH WEB 2.0 TOOLS

This paper describes and analyzes the design, development and results of a collaborative school project mediated by information and communication technologies (ICT). A specific action-research approach was used in order to facilitate the students a meaningful learning and foster the professional development of the teacher responsible for the subject.

The techno-pedagogical design was based on a collaborative environment, where various Web 2.0 applications were used, through which the key concepts of the official curriculum of the course were handled. At the same time, basic digital competences were developed both at the level of citizenship and employability.

The experience was specifically developed for the subject Greek I baccalaureate in a secondary school in Oleiros (A Coruña) during the first half of the academic year 2012-13. Teacher and students used a blended learning approach to the research tasks, where Diigo was used for classification and tagging of various manifestations of ancient Greek theater; Mindmeister, for the construction of concept maps on the subject, and other Web 2.0 tools for creating online presentations.

Protocols of collaborative work, which promote dialogue, mutual support, distribution of tasks and effective coordination among students, became a core element for the development of the process.

The results of the experience seem to show that students were able to gain significant benefit from using social-networking tools in order to implement collaborative academic research projects and to distinguish and express the most relevant concepts of the topic in the form of social tags. They were also capable of building with them a concept map reflecting its structure as well as of developing multimedia web documents as a creative expression of their learning achievement.