Tuesday July 5, 2005

Schools use Internet to teach languages across the world

Schools across Europe and in the Far East are using the Internet to teach foreign languages with students using computers to attend lessons in a virtual classroom.

The ambitious program for the teaching of modern languages online has been launched by the Académie Bordeaux in France, enabling exchanges and teaching between different schools across Europe and Asia. One of the experiments involves students aged 17 and 18 at different educational establishments across the Aquitaine Region using Marratech video conferencing to learn German as part of their Brevet de technicien Supérieur (BTS).

Explained Stéphanie Roussel, accredited German teacher at the Académie Bordeaux: "These students will shortly begin a six month training period in Germany, but do not have any German language ability. The videoconference is used to teach them the language where there is no German teacher available in their school."

The Académie Bordeaux has also exchanged with schools in Germany, Poland and Portugal as part of the European ‘Comenius’ program, while the ‘Magendie et Singapour’ program has enabled Bordeaux students studying Chinese to engage in virtual exchanges with Singaporean students studying French.

The Académie Bordeaux tested several products including H323 video conferencing which proved too expensive. ISDN worked well but the cost per hour was too high, while other Internet products required too much bandwidth and the hardware for multipoint conferences was too costly.

Added Stéphanie Roussel: "We chose Marratech because it is easy to set up and provides rapid access for users. Being an educational establishment, it also had to be inexpensive to acquire and use. We were anxious that users quickly forget the computing element and concentrate on the learning experience. The powerful whiteboard and excellent sound and image quality are essential to the learning experience."

After the first year’s experiments, the project leaders take a final deployment decision when it hopes to be using Marratech for institutional meetings in the Académie, developing modern languages in schools where the number of pupils does not justify a full time teacher, and for developing new Europe-wide projects.

Participating students join their lessons from a variety of standard laptops and PCs in a web based virtual learning environment which has enabled better management of teaching resources and provided the ability to respond to individual demands.

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