ORT Virtual Campus Offers Students Remote Access to their Works

ORT students can use from their homes a new service provided by the Virtual Campus, which is in beta version: the file administrator.

When entering the Campus, students will have access to their personal folders and files stored at the schools’ servers. Students will have to log in at the internal network (usually with their ID number) and their password. Once they have finished this step, they will be able to get to their files through the highlighted icon of the image.

The file administrator contains all the functions that are usually provided by virtual storage servers, such as file uploading and downloading, folder creation, documents previewing, etc. By using this service, students will be able to continue their homework at home or at school without having the need to forward it by e-mail or copy it on a pendrive or a CD. In some weeks, the file administrator will also be available for the students of the Institutes and for all the teachers.

The Virtual Campus aims at improving the services provided to our students, and keeps on working on one of its fundamental ideas which is to “constantly accompany students”, since their works will be permanently at their own disposal, from any computer, cell phone or PDA connected to the Internet.

Interactive Painting at the Museum of the Cabildo

The project consists of a software which reproduces the picture painted in oil in 1909 by Pedro Subercasseaux. Those who visit the Cabildo will be able to ‘have a conversation’ with the painting by clicking on a close plasma screen TV. In this way, when clicking the mouse, you’ll be able to learn about the names and biographies of all the people who participated that day, the expenditures of the event, how they voted, what was the average age, and what was happening in Europe and in the Spanish Viceroyalties towards 1810.

This article was written by Clarín newspaper on Sunday, August 17th.

ORT Virtual Campus at Parents’ School Meetings

In the last weeks, several parents' meetings for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd–year were held. This year, the teachers showed parents the works their children had posted on the blogs: works on English, Language, Social Sciences, Productive Processes Workshop, and Natural Sciences.

ORT Virtual Campus also showed the web of weblogs and various institutional videos. These are some of the pictures taken at yesterday’s meeting.

ORT Virtual Campus at LA RAZON

The Blog at School: A Tool that Grows and Motivates Children

The web offers tools for projects, links, and communication, and also to send practical works. The students, happy.

Students open a blog, choose a template, post texts, upload photos, leave comments, add a visits counter, change background colours, etc... They start classes and after the first breaks, they handle those terms. With the beginning of the school year, teachers have a new challenge: how to exploit that energy, which is applied to the use of the Internet, for the benefit of the school curriculum. In order to achieve so, blogs are a valid alternative in classroom projects.

Among the schools that include technological tools in the syllabus of some subjects, we can mention ORT, with more than 140 blogs running from the two campuses. The Director of the Virtual Campus, Guillermo Lutzky, makes emphasis on the idea that blogs are useful for ‘communication and production’: "Some children upload their poems, instead of handing in a sheet of paper; or in the case of the Mass Media track, students upload videos. But there are also blogs to monitor students, and even a medical department blog for prevention. Some teachers use them as weblogs: two students take turns to register the class, the activities, the tasks and then post them for the rest".

In turn, the Geography teacher Eugenia Alonso from the Liceo N° 1 José Figueroa Alcorta María, says that the school has a blog where the information on the different activities (such as ceremonies, excursions, championships, celebrations of last year’s hundredth anniversary, etc.) is constantly updated. "Besides, I give students guides, links to search for information, and work proposals. At another blog, I include information on courses of study for 5th and 6th-year students, enrolment dates, scholarships, syllabuses, and different university sites", adds Alonso, who has been working with weblogs since 2005.

Teachers agree on the fact that students get hooked on blogs, which are useful to hand in practical works or as a means of communication in the classroom. "It is like a blackboard that accompanies us. It is a network tool, which is part of the future. Therefore, the idea is that children can produce works they can keep for them and which they can show", emphasizes Lutzky. “Above all - he explains- it is interesting to go and look for children in that virtual environment: students spend more time on line than with the TV”.

“Many times, teachers are afraid of using a new tool, which the student knows better, but that can be from the instrumental point of view because the one who knows about the subject is the teacher. And it is ok that the student can share what he/she knows with the teacher.", indicates Laura Rodriguez, from Programa Red, Department of Education of the City of Buenos Aires.