Online Projects

What makes a course year memorable for students and teachers? Often it is a special project enthusiastically undertaken by teacher and students together, with surprises, challenges, and finally a hard-won bit of authentic knowledge they can call their own.

Special projects can take many forms. Probably, they draw their life from the genuine excitement and dedication teachers bring to the effort. So, the project must be something you as a teacher believe in and want to do.

Online projects are a relatively new type of special project made possible by internet technology. From the beginning ICT has provided a spot for teachers to locate, participate in, develop, and discuss online collaborations. Online projects can be found in many places (example of EFL online projects).

Why online projects? / What are the benefits to students?

The opportunity to deal with real material:

Online projects enlarge students’ opportunities to deal with real material by offering entree’s into research at many levels: background research, data collection, analysis, and presentation.

Students encounter realistic challenges in designing, setting up, and carrying out these pieces of work which are more significant than traditional classrooms.

Motivation:

It is intrinsically interesting and fun to communicate with students from distant schools and engage in common activities.

Students share thoughts and even pictures of themselves and their schools.

Online projects give students an opportunity to take charge, be active and creative in their own learning.

Because results will be communicated to other schools, students have an added incentive to be careful and rigorous.

Students of all ability levels can contribute and get recognition.

Improved Communication Skills:

Participating in an online project requires clear communication in order to achieve understanding among participating groups. So, students will practise their writing a lot and they will improve their communication skills.

Online projects not only develop the students linguistic competences, they also develop audiovisual and ICT competences.

Using Technology:

By definition, online projects use computers and the Internet in some way. They give students a real reason to become familiar with the internet connection at their homes, schools or libraries and to range out from there to explore the wealth of information available to them. Technology becomes a tool not an end in itself, as it should be.