INNOVATIVE WEB TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS, Study report

Evaluation of the IPM Tools project

The last section of the questionnaire consisted mainly of open-ended questions addressing the satisfaction with the activities, central and local management, as well as the impact of the project.

We asked the respondents to list three most useful and successful activites in the project. The most often mentioned (thus, most valuable and successful) activies were collaborative projects, WebMagazines published by students and project seminars (especially the ones organized by the local coordinator):

• Collaborative partner projects, International Writing Project IWE, German articles in the eJournal (Dafnord activities)
• Seminars where teachers could meet each other and compare their experiences
• Training sessions
• Collaborative activities between students, Webquests, Newspapers on line
• Collaboration between teachers
• Sharing different materials between schools
• Publish articles about my school activities
• Materials made with clickdata bases
• Seminar organized by the local coordinator
• Tales with activities, poems workshop, students´works
• Partners meeting – seminars, activities with students in this project
• Project for 'mother day', lessons for teachers and director, Webmagazine 'Pasaulis is arti'
• Magazine Europe 25?, eJournal cooperation with, Spain, Slovenia and South Africa, teachers' seminars in Vilnius and La Coruña
• Magazine with the parents and village people.

We also asked the respondents to list three most valuable skills they have obtained during the project. Most often were mentioned the skills of using Web tools (Peda.net WebMagazine, Impressio eJournal), producing multimedia materials (incl. digital photo editing, PowerPoint slide shows and quizzes with HotPotatoes), general ICT skills and English language skills. Most of Estonian teachers also mentioned the skills of facilitating constructivistic and problem-based learning activities, as these were the topics of local seminars. Surprisingly, some teachers mentioned here also the skill of designing the traditional Web pages using the old-fashioned offline tool MS FrontPage. This is difficult to explain, as there is no need for such skills if you have new powerful Web tools available for use. Some additional remarks from respondents:

• New community-building methods
• Pedagogical excamples from other teachers
• Editing e-learning materials, integrate e-learning in the classroom
• Working together with other teachers
• Preparing photos for Internet
• Work with pictures and videos in Web
• After learning one Web tool, it´s easy to use others as well

The satisfaction with the project management was evaluated by respondents on two levels:

1) central project management by the University of Jyväskylä
2) local project management by University of Jyväskylä in Finland, Tiger Leap Foundation in Estonia, Center of IT in Education in Lithuania, Sogn og Fjordane University College in Norway, Srednja ekonomska šola Maribor in Slovenia and The Training and Research Centre A Corunna in Spain.

Figure 13 below illustrates the distribution of responses on the four-point scale (Very good, Good, Satisfactory, Poor). The local management has received slightly more praise from participating teachers. This can be explained by the fact that local activities were carried out in local language and matched better the local interests and possibilities, as well as cultural traditions.

The respondents were offered an opportunity to submit also more elaborate evaluation comments, but only few used this opportunity. One teacher expressed his/her satisfaction with central project management: „I have always received friendly help from the management in the form of instructions and offered opportunities for every day work and international connections. As a teacher I even felt priviledged as to the way our South African project was guided by the management and Jyväskylä University. My cooperation especially with Spain and Slovenia has been given support and encouragement. This has been a great project to work at. Many, many thanks especially to Mr Pirhonen and Mrs Kurki for all the chances given to me and my school!“.

With regard to the local management, respondents mentioned good support to team building from local coordinator: „We worked like a team, it was very interesting“, „It was wonderfull, the cooperation between students and teachers in different schools“, „We made a very good working group“. Estonian and Lithuanian teachers appreciated especially the financial support for buying digital cameras from local coordinating institutions.
We asked the respondents to describe in free form the impact of the IPM Tools project on their own everyday teaching work. This question resulted with a lot of positive feedback:

• I started my project making via and on the Internet in 1993, IPM Tools projects brought me to quite a new level of project making
• quite an important role and I plan to use it in future with even younger students.
• It gave me positive feedback from other partcipants and made it clear that the tools developed for Finnish schools can be used in other countries as well in different ways
• It improved very much my way of teaching
• I introduced the use of computers in learning
• It helped me to adapt new technologies in the classroom activities
• Better cooperation between teachers and pupils, pupils' motivation has increased.
• Now I´m able to publish works in internet, do materials
• It´s an important resource for my classes
• It was a real meeting point: web and I
• very important, new methodologies, new materials
• very important , I´m not afraid to use computers now
• stimulate me to use me IT
• New contacts and expierence of coleagues from foreignNew web tools
• Project improved my teaching methods, help in communication with other teacher
• New possibilities to develope my work and to give new experiences to kids
• I started to use project-based learning in my lessons
• I updated completely my media course
• Encouraging, inspiring, developing my skills, opening ways to international contacts - very valuable indeed.

And finally, we asked for suggestions regarding to the possible follow-up project. Majority of respondents were interested in continuing the cooperation with their IPM Tools project partners, they also wanted to learn more about ICT and the methods of using Web tools in teaching and learning. Some teachers provided more specific ideas for further project work:

• Develop eJournalism as an innovative eLearning method
• Organising a magazine on international level with monthly topics and active cooperation of different schools through articles, reporters from partners' schools with questionnaires and polls, topics of the evryday school life.
• Dissemination project: Integration of ICT into curriculum
• To organize student activities beetween countries
• Dissemination project within participating schools; as a result of IPM Tools project, in most schools only one teacher is able to use WebMagazine
• New media applications: digital video, mp3, interactive excercises on the Web.