INTACT project: bilingual teaching resources tailored for students’ mobile life

At present interactive teaching and learning materials are either only usable with a certain technology, like interactive whiteboards or tablets, or bound to a certain provider software. Until now there has only been a small number of materials available that allow synchronous, collaborative work at different locations on a shared task, independent from the technology used. Against the background of this the Comenius multilateral project INTACT (Interactive Teaching materials Across Culture and Technology) develops interactive teaching and learning resources for bilingual education in different subjects, evaluates them and provides them on an online platform developed for them. INTACT creates and implements reliable teaching resources for example for Mathematics, Geography, Technology, Second Language Learning, Primary Science, Secondary Science and Environmental Education with the aim to promote a culture of collaboration among students and an interactive approach to learning inside and outside the classroom. Since the technological requirements in schools are diverse, the teaching resources will be implemented in HTML 5, thus ensuring independence of specific hardor software. In many partner countries schools are not used to a bilingual setting in the classroom, and INTACT addresses this with a special emphasis as a way to introduce the CLIL methodology in countries where it is not yet used on an everyday basis and at such different age levels. 1. Background and innovative aspects In the last years the use of technology in schools has increased. In current literature different authors describe possibilities of interactive whiteboard usage in educational settings (Gutenberg, Iser, & Machate, 2010 [1]; Higgins, Beauchamp, & Miller, 2007 [2]; Kennewell & Higgins, 2007 [3]; Martin, 2009 [4]; Schlieszeit, 2011 [5]; Smith, Higgins, Wall, & Miller, 2005 [6]. Further research in this field can also be found in Manny-Ikan, Dagan, Tikochinski and Zorman (2011) [7], Shi Yang, Hao Yang and Liu (2012) [8] or Thomas and Schmid (2010) [9]). The use of mobile devices has grown rapidly and this leads to a growing relevance of mobile learning in education. Mobile learning enables students and teachers to have their personal learning environment with them every time and everywhere (Johnson et al., 2013 [10]). Examples for the use of tablets in educational settings can be found in Aufenanger and Schlieszeit (2013) [11] or Henderson and Yeow (2012) [12]. An overview of the current state of research can be found in Clark and Luckin (2013) [13]. There are more and more results concerning research and studies in this field (Janke, Norqvist & Olsson, 2013 [14]; McCombs & Liu, 2011 [15]; Reid & Ostashewski, 2011 [16]). Up to now existing resources are developed for a specific technology that often requires the additional use of a specific software and therefore their usage is frequently bound to a specific producer of interactive whiteboards or system software of mobile devices (Android, iOS). Due to this the appliance is either connected to the use of a copyrighted program (for example notebook for SMART and Active Inspire for Promethean interactive whiteboards) or to proprietary software like flash that is not compatible with all kinds of mobile devices. There is also only a small number of materials available that allow synchronous, collaborative work at different locations on a shared task, independent from the technology used. Furthermore, the technological requirements in European schools are widespread and diverse and there is still a lack of resources that focus on bilingual instruction for sciences in primary and secondary schools. Therefore the INTACT-project (INteractive Teaching Materials Across Culture and Technology) faces the challenge of developing interactive teaching and learning resources for bilingual contexts in the areas of science as well as second language learning. The main outcomes of INTACT are to develop and implement cooperative and collaborative resources for bilingual learning settings and the development and implementation of an online platform as repository and facilitator for the use of these resources. In order to guarantee flexibility and independency from a specific technology or software, the INTACT-Project implements all resources using HTML5. Due to this the resources can be used in schools all over Europe with different devices from computers and interactive whiteboards to smartphones or tablets, thus resulting in a more user-friendly technological approach. Apart from that the INTACT-project promotes interactivity in a double sense – interactivity with digital learning resources and international interactivity which allows connected learning all over Europe using a common INTACT-platform. The resources developed and implemented by the INTACT-project aim to initiate the collaboration between schools in the region and also across borders in sciences and to offer a wide variety of free resources for this field. Target groups are school teachers and stakeholders as well as information multipliers who are interested in using ICT for bilingual teaching in primary and secondary education. The purpose of the INTACT-project is to provide examples of interactive teaching and learning resources within the platform to facilitate bilingual learning beyond cultural boarders, 2. Development of the project INTACT is a multilateral Comenius project, funded under the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union. The project is funded for three years total, and was started in December 2012 and consist of a consortium with partners from six European countries. The six project partners are (1) University of Education Ludwigsburg (Germany), (2) Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain), (3) Kecskemet College (Hungary), (4) St. Patrick’s College, Dublin (Ireland), (5) Polytechnic Institute of Braganca (Portugal), and (6) Babes-Bolyai University Cluj (Romania). Ludwigsburg University of Education is responsible for overall work areas and oversees the general project task areas, for example quality control. The project includes three major phases: (1) development, (2) implementation and (3) evaluation of the resources and the online-platform. Each partner cooperates with at least one pilot school. Researchers of the partner institutions that are experts in their field have developed concepts for resources based on current scientifically approved educational approaches cooperatively with teachers of the pilot schools. All resources took into account the different curricula of the countries involved as well as the language level to be used. The resources will be tested at the pilot schools in autumn 2014 and, with consideration of the results, will be revised accordingly for subsequent technological implementation. Until now the development of resources for bilingual instruction in different subjects took place as well as the collection of functional requirements of the online platform based on the concepts of the resources. Table 1 shows the subjects and topics of the developed concepts for the resources. Table 1 Developed concepts for resources