Concept

The challenge

Vocational colleges and universities are the suppliers of future employees for industry, craft and public management, and their students should be prepared for growing IT demands. The students need to master new technologies, and they need to develop their competencies in order to achieve creative, innovative, efficient and critical use of modern IT tools.

In recent years, internet-radio has become easily accessible via podcasting technology. And even more interesting: The production of audio files has become practicable for the average user of information technologies! This has brought new possibilities for teachers and students.

The students involved in this project broadened their technical, personal and cross-cultural consciousness and hopefully will contribute with these competencies in their future jobs.

The application of information technologies within daily life, in industry and as a platform for international communication is developing incredibly fast. There is a particular need for tools and assistance, when vocational teachers wish to implement new information technology as learning media.

Target groups

The primary target groups for the results of this project are teachers and education planners at institutions for vocational education and training (VET): Vocational colleges, technical universities and business schools.
The secondary target groups are institutions for VET teacher training.
But also primary and secondary schools as well as university faculties have shown up to be interested, for pedagogical and communication reasons.

Objectives

The project aimed towards:

• developing and implementing methods for computer-aided use and production of internet-radio broadcasts.
• encouraging vocational teachers to develop their technological competencies and involve their students’ learning styles.
• facilitating access to the new media MP3 and podcasting.
• strengthening the students’ technical, personal and cultural competencies by working project-oriented and communication-focused.
• facilitating cross-national communication between students and teachers.

The outcome

During the project, a proposal for a teaching module was developed, supported by an ‘audiovisual starter-kit’ for education planners and VET teachers that now is accessible via the internet and as a cd-rom.

The starter-kit contains:
1. Technical advice
2. Pedagogical advice
3. Journalistic advice
4. Cases and sound samples

The project aimed at simplifying and spreading knowledge about “Internet-radio as a teaching and learning tool”.
The starter-kit is freely obtainable from June 2008. Temporary results could be downloaded from this website and often were acquired from the project organisation.

The evaluation report is available from October 2008.

Financing

The project has been sponsored by the Leonardo programme of the European Commission and partly has been self-financed by the partners of the project.