Report of the Comenius 1 History Project Meeting

Bucharest, 8-13 April 2003

The meeting in Bucharest built on the experience and work of the previous meeting and on the efforts of the various partners to implement agreed proposals. It became clear that each of the partners had widely differing opportunities and environments in which they were operating.

An example of this is the difference between the UK and Italian partners. Stevenson College has concentrated on developing teaching materials and the website. While there has been student input into this (involving the questionnaire and students writing material on the subject of 'people on the move') there had not been many opportunities to do more than this.

By contrast, the Italian partner had been able to set aside two weeks of the academic year for an intensive history project course. This meant rewriting both the teachers' and students' timetables (the teachers, for example, being given a week's extra holiday in return for intensive work in two weeks). The students had opportunities for research on the web and for the development of PowerPoint presentations and CD-Roms of the results of their work. Since the project is a 'school development project' this accorded well with the overall aims. It is difficult (indeed impossible) to imagine such flexibility being operated at Stevenson. Another difference that emerges in terms of practice is that the Italian partner uses tests quite considerably. Here the emphasis is much more on evaluative essay type work.

Other partners had been involved in various other ways, though there was less student involvement than in the Italian case. (The Swedish and Portuguese partners were unable to attend this meeting although they remain part of the project.)

An important part of the discussion at Bucharest therefore revolved around the ways in which the different partners would have to find their own individual routes to involving themselves and their students in the project. This approach was particular emphasised by the Spanish partner. While the topic of universal suffrage and the questionnaires had been things that all had been able to do in common, for the later stages of the project it may not be possible to do this on the basis of agreed topics. Collaboration may therefore take a different form such as fostering direct links between students, videoconferencing and so on.

So a key theme that emerged from the meeting at Bucharest was the need to find ways of involving the students actively in the project. While not all partners can follow the Italian model, it is important that we do find ways of giving the students new teaching experiences and ways of relating to history. One very important tool in this is through ICT and it was for this reason that many of the sessions in Romania were devoted to this topic.

Use of ICT in the Project

During the week of the meeting there were a number of opportunities for each of the partners to demonstrate how they had used ICT in the project to date and to discuss how we wanted to use it in the future.

The Italian students had used online messaging with the Spanish students on several occasions during the year and the Romanian students also communicated online with the Italian students during the week of the meeting. The communications were informal and used as ice-breakers to allow them to meet and chat about themselves and their interests. The Italian students had also made substantial use of ICT in researching and presenting historical topics relating to the project. The web was used as a research tool and Microsoft PowerPoint was used for their presentations which were compiled onto a CD and demonstrated during the week.

Both the Spanish and the Italian students have created personal web pages to introduce themselves, to present their interests and to enable communication with other students in the project.

Several questionnaires had been developed to assess the students' knowledge of European history, the European Union and to discover their personal interests. Both the Italian students and the UK students had completed these. The methods of analyzing the results were demonstrated and discussed.

The Stevenson History web site, developed for the project, was demonstrated in some depth over two of the mornings. The site contains the history articles submitted by all the partners, a discussion forum, information about the project, an online database-driven version of the questionnaires, and full search and navigational tools.

Over the next period the project partners will seek avenues to school development and opening up exciting new ways of teaching and learning for our students.

Agreed actions

It was agreed, after some discussion by the project partners, that the web-sites would be used purely as starting points for studying historical topics, and that there would be no requirement for the partners to produce long articles. Instead, it was hoped that the web sites would encourage students to carry out research on historical themes using the web. For example, there could be links from the introductory articles to authoritative web pages on other sites.

Several partners agreed that the content of the web sites could be used as an introduction to history at the start of their courses.

It was finally agreed that the Stevenson web site would be used as the official site of the project, and that it would contain links to all the other partner sites.

The following actions were also agreed:

• To create an online forum (within the Stevenson web-site discussion forum) that will enable all the partners to discuss how we want the project to develop, how to publicise the project within the schools and colleges and to the broader community, to set the goals for next year and for the rest of the project. All the partners are invited to participate
  
  
• To incorporate the presentations of the Italian students onto the project web-site
  
  
• To produce a CD version of the website and distribute it to all the partners by the end of June to support each country's bid for continued funding of the project
  
  
• To set up video-conferencing facilities at each centre to allow the staff and students to communicate with all the other centres
  
  
• All the partners have to send to Stevenson College (to Harry Kogon web master) all the material produced in the school year in order to put it on the web site, on the CD ROM and sent to the Socrates National agency.
  
  
• All the partners will send the questionnaire and their results to Stevenson College.
  
  
• New ideas for developing school project (Why change something? What we need to change in order to develop better our project?)
  

Next meetings

The next meeting of the project is planned for Seville between 21 and 26 October which falls within Stevenson's October break.

The project group were hoping to have the following meeting at Stevenson College some time during the spring of 2004.