1. ITALES
Innovative Teaching And Learning
Environments for Schools
Building an eCommunity for schools
The overall aim of ITALES is to develop a European-wide virtual teaching and
The overall of ITALES develop European-wi virtual teaching and
opean-wid
learning community that will enable teachers to share and re-use digital
learning content, and allow both teachers and their learners to work
together with the support of several innovative tele-presence/
communication tools.
unicati the eCommunity learners
unity, follow
communication tools. Within the eCommunity, learners will be able to follow
eLearning prepar
epared their teachers using the ITALES authorin
oring
eLearning courses prepared by their teachers using the ITALES authoring
and conten management tools. The ITALES
tent anagemen provi
ovid centr
tral
and content management tools. The ITALES system will also provide a central
Tomorrow
repository containing digital learning content that teachers will be able to
access for building courses for their learners. In addition to course
customisation, teachers configur the Web-based
gure
customisation, teachers will also be able to configure the Web-based 3D
virtual learning environment – both visually and functionally – to suit the
of their learners Specifically ITALES developin the followin
ers. cally, eveloping ollowing
needs of their learners. Specifically, ITALES is developing the following
components:
of
1. A set of authoring tools that will enable teachers to prepare suitable and
School
meaningful content for personalised learning;
2. New content management tools that can be used by teachers to facilitate
planning and construction of customised online courses;
3. A library of databases to allow content sharing and re-use as well as teacher
the
configuration of the 3D virtual learning environment in terms of its visual
appearance and the tools and content accessible by the learners;
towards
4. A Web-based 3D virtual learning and teaching environment containing all the
above tools together with suitable tele-presence/collaborative tools to allow
teachers and learners to communicate with one another and to work
together.
age:
Importantly, this project will use appropriate Learning Technology Standards to
facilitate storage, retrieval and interchange of learning content. Of equal
significance are those increasingly important issues related to open source digital
approaches to the exploitation of educational software. ITALES will therefore
develop its own tools and content according to such approaches. In designing
and developing the ITALES system, the project team will also take into account
the important issues of interoperability and access – where possible, the tools
the
and content will be usable outside of the ITALES environment and, conversely,
the ITALES environment will be able to link to external tools such as suitably
chosen third party authoring tools.
in
Teacher needs and their continuous involvement
youth
Prior to the development of the above components, an integral aspect of early
research and requirements gathering will be to determine what types and scope
of educational content teachers and learners find most valuable. As key
European
stakeholders, teachers will play an important role during this stage of the
project; not least, they will help the project team identify the nature of the
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2. Project No:
IST-2000-26356
Duration:
36 months
Economic Sector:
Education & Training
Action Line:
School of Tomorrow
Full Title:
Innovative Teaching And Learning Environments
for Schools
Project Type:
Education and Training Research
Start Date:
authoring tools considered most useful in their own pedagogic situations. They
28/06/2001
will further help the team to establish the kind of tele-presence and
End Date:
collaborative tools considered most beneficial for themselves and their learners.
27/06/2004
Results from the project’s user needs assessment will then be used to inform the
Project objectives:
next stage of the project – technological research and development of the To develop a European-wide virtual teaching
ITALES tools, content and services. During development, the teachers will and learning community whose key aims are
the promotion of pedagogic content sharing
continue to be deployed in an advisory capacity to help influence the
and re-use, exchange of opinions and
functionality of the tools (authoring, content management and communication innovation and the provision of both pedagogic
Tomorrow
tools) as well as the 3D virtual teaching and learning environment. Towards the and pastoral support for learners
end of the project, these same teachers, together with their learners, will Target audience:
participate in the ITALES experiment. This will involve extensive user assessment European schools, teacher resource centres
and training colleges, Ministries of Education
of the ITALES developed tools and content at three European pilot sites – in
and National Governments, regional and local
Spain, Italy and Scotland. administrations with education competencies
of
Key words:
Customising the teaching and learning experience eLearning, 3D Virtual Reality, 3D Worlds; Open
From the teacher’s perspective, the ITALES virtual teaching environment provides Source, Open Platforms & Tools, Authoring Tools,
School
Personalised Learning, Learning Technology
teachers with a collection of authoring tools – ITALES-developed and third party
Standardisation, Re-use, Sharing, Learning Objects
– from which they can choose to prepare their own learning content. Beyond
Technology:
content preparation, teachers can further access the ITALES content ITALES will be an open system, heavily reliant upon
management tools/learning content database to assemble customised ITALES open source approaches (Linux, XML) as well as
the
learning technology standards (e.g. Learning
online learning courses for their learners. Finally, the virtual teaching and
Objects Metadata Standard for school use). ITALES
learning environment itself can be configured by the teachers in terms of the should also allow externally developed/third party
towards
tools needed for themselves and their learners as well as the user interfaces of tools to be linked to its own environment for use
by teachers and learners. The same applies to
the 3D virtual learning environment.
importing and exporting learning content. ITALES is
exploiting virtual reality technologies and 3D
From the learner’s perspective, the project team believes that school learners animation technologies
need to be initially motivated, interested and engaged. The children will require
age:
an enriched environment that is stimulating and will fully engage them in the
learning process. ITALES is developing such an environment which, it is hoped,
will help motivate the children to learn. They will be able to navigate inside
Project Co-ordinator
digital
“immersive” 3D worlds, assume their own configurable online identities by means Mr Gerard Queen
of 3D avatars and use interesting tele-presence/communication tools such as 3D Learning and Teaching Scotland
Glasgow G12 9JN
chat, voting, pager, meeting board and so on. ITALES will develop and
United Kingdom
experiment with a Web-based user interface that uses virtual reality technologies Tel: +44-141-3375058
the
to present the metaphor of a school building containing rooms and other areas, Fax: +44-141-3375070
E-mail: G.Queen@LTScotland.com
as would be found in a real school.
URL: http://www.LTScotland.com/itales
in
Project Participants
Learning and Teaching Scotland (UK)
youth
EPTRON S.A. (ES)
CEAC Instituciones S.L. (ES)
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto
Matematica Applicata (IT)
DIDAEL S.R.L. Societa Per La Didattica Con
European
Elaboratore (IT)
Center for Futurism in Education - Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev (in co-operation with
Empowerment Through Electronics, ETE) (IL)
Limburgs Universitair Centrum - Expertise
Centrum Digitale Media (BE)
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