Clarín newspaper published yesterday, at the Education supplement, an article on ORT Virtual Campus Web of Weblogs titled “The Blog: A New Educational Tool”. It narrates some experiences and general concepts of this project, which aims at establishing a different relationship between students, teacher and parents and the school.Here's the translation of the article:
Twitter, Flickr, Podcast, You Tube… The vocabulary and the IT skills of the “
digital natives” (term used by specialists to refer to those kids who have had cell phones and Internet at home since they were born) have put in check anyone who is not familiarized with the information technologies. Unlike their parents, teachers or other children, these kids grew up in environments where doing many things at the same time and being connected to their friends’ network is something very common. We usually see them chatting, watching TV, talking on the cell phone with their parents and receiving messages… everything at the same time. That is why catching their attention and teaching them with a blackboard and a chalk becomes such a difficult task.
Hence, both ORT Technical School campuses in Buenos Aires have decided to renew their educational philosophy, and in April 2007 incorporated the element that revolutionized the Internet and the adolescent’s life:
the blog. And they made it big: they created a Virtual Campus -
http://redblogs.ort.edu.ar - which consists of a network of these free, easy-to-use blogs. They started with 17 blogs, in September there were 90, and in February 2008 they got to 120 blogs, with up to 20 thousand visits per day (external visits, not from the school).
What does this digital spiderweb have to attract Internet surfers? Almost everything. Apart from the blogs updated by the courses or teachers related to the project, it offers blogs to document travels, to write about football or to listen to the contents broadcast by the school radio, called La Corneta. It also offers a channel at You Tube with more than 90 own videos, a job placement area, or access to the medical department. The icing on the cake is that any Internet surfer can receive alerts through Twitter – an Internet instant messaging channel – on the updates there are.
To understand the success of the project, it is enough to cross this ocean of information for a while. What is there? Adolescents who post the analysis of Pablo Neruda, for instance, which they wrote to pass the Language subject, or Natural Sciences teachers who upload videos in English on breathing. You can even read how some parents thank the school for rebroadcasting live –through the Internet- an activity where their kids participated. Just as Guillermo Lutzky explains, Director of ORT Virtual Campus, the idea is to finish with the exhausting phrase “What have you done today?”. In this way, students, teachers and parents can establish a different relationship with the school.
This is possible because this initiative has an impact on two basic aspects: public documentation of the learning process and the expansion of the audience that students have for their practical assignments. Thanks to this synergy between technology and teaching, any cybernaut can surf the 5IA blog of Image and Communication, for instance, click the label ‘pueblo’ (peoples), and search for the exercise “Produce a web for peoples of less than 10 thousand inhabitants”, and see how Federico Snieg and Maximiliano González prepared
http://www.chos-malal.4to.com/, a non-official website devoted to Chos Malal (Neuquén). Besides, if readers want to and agree on the teacher moderating the comments, they can give their opinion. Therefore, “native digitals” claim for a revolution of the traditional teaching system.
Some of the IT words – which students use so naturally- might be translated as Interaction, Simultaneousness, Personalization, shared Creativity…. As Guillermo Lutzky explains, the positive chemistry between adolescents and blogs lies in the fact that “this tool allows them to integrate knowledge and everyday skills, and also allows them to share the outcome with others. That makes students feel they contribute with something of their own, thus getting emotionally involved”.
By Rubén A. Arribas, Clarín.
Sunday, February 10th, 2008.
class, track, etc., has its own blog. At each of them -and in special subjects- students produce, organize and edit what they did with their classmates from their ‘subblog’ and then share it with the rest of the school. In this way, the classroom is no longer a closed room, where the teacher dictates and students copy. "Now, teachers and students work all together", explains Guillermo Lutzky, Director of the Virtual Campus. Prof. Lutzky now wants to carry out a digital literacy training: "Not only does everybody have to learn to handle the tools, but also to find and process the information in the best possible way; they have to network. It is important that students understand that everything they ‘upload’ on the Internet is their responsibility". 
