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.

Blogs to Create Networks around Projects

We usually say that blogs are students and teachers’ collaborative production sites, with a physical environment which is the classroom. In this sense, blogs become an “expansion of the classroom”. But can these sites network if their authors are not physically in the same place? Are blogs tools to build such remote bridges “in the air”?

These thoughts derive from a concrete, remote, and collaborative experience: the ARCA Project, which is carried out by Laura Benadiba, from ORT Technical School, Tomás Biosca Esteve, from the El Morell de Tarragona Institute (Catalonia), and their students. This project, based on Oral History work, was awarded towards the end of last year by the Institute of Educational Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona for its innovative methodology and for being a student-centered experience (See video of the awards’ ceremony).

Laura Benadiba narrated in the Oral History and Education blog that the project applies the methodology of Oral History to analyze how people remember the last military dictatorship – Franco’s regime in Spain and the 1976 dictatorship in Argentina- and the silence that still remains in both cases. The Oral History is a useful tool to think about the individual and collective past, and to promote the dialogue among different generations.

During the first phase of the work, there was training in the use of this methodology; the second phase, which will be carried out this year, will deal with the comparative history in both cases and the analysis of the interviews. Therefore, it will be very helpful to have a space for exchange and collaborative network production as the blog, which in turn enables the analysis of the progress attained in the work.

Tomás Biosca Esteve fostered this type of remote, collaborative work, which was facilitated by the new technologies: “an attractive project, a clear goal, and willingness to work are the only things necessary”, he said.

Related post: Videoconference among students from both campuses.