Project information

StatusFinalist
URLGo to website
CategoryEducation
Formal education
CountryColombia
Operational areasUrban, Rural
Target groupsChildren, Youth, Women, Men, Seniors
Fixed connectionDSL, Cable
Wireless connectionWiFi, Satellite
Access pointsSchool, Telecenter
InteractDesktop Computer, Cellphone
Software License TypesOpen Source, Proprietary

Project location

Random images Challenge 2008

“Virtual School”: democratizing knowledge, information and communication in rural schools and communities of Caldas

  • Brief description
  •  “Virtual School” democratizes knowledge, information and communication to foment sustainable development by giving rural schools and communities, new tools and capacities that allow them to solve their problems, have new life alternatives and establish collaboration bonds. The project opens a communication channel and information access to the historically isolated rural population. It is an option for improving education quality in Caldas´ rural schools and reduces the rural-urban-development gap in Colombia. Our aim is to extend the opportunity to peasant children, adolescents and adults and narrow the technological gap.
  • Vision, Objectives and Goals
  • Vision
    “Virtual School” has a social vision. We are willing to use the information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a tool for the transformation of schools and rural communities. Hence, we look forward to discover and promote mechanisms for it to contribute with the construction of new communities guided by common values as fairer, less excluding relationships that encourage equal opportunities for all.  “Virtual school” must consolidate itself as a project of local, national and international recognition, characterized for offering rural schools and communities, which have been historically isolated, democratic information and communication access. Therefore, “Virtual School” shall engender: an innovation culture in peasant children, teachers and adults with abilities to face unknown situations; creativity to take advantage of the information, optimization of information use and its technology; ability to produce new knowledge; capacity to solve problems from distinct points of view; facilitate continuous information update; proper collaborating behavior; disposition to learn though sharing and reciprocity; skills to work in cooperative networks; adaptability to different contexts; disposition to learn by means of experimental approaches; creative and inventive thinking and long term learning.Objectives·        Stimulate skills to approach unknown situations; innovation capacity; creativity to optimize information uses; abilities to produce new knowledge.·        Offer children, teachers and adults opportunities to expand their knowledge, contributing so to their growth in all scopes of human activity.·        Highlight the importance of the rural communities.·        Democratize information and communication access.·        Build a pertinacities educational community based on common values that contributes to a general improvement of education in the rural zone. ·        Develop skills for technological teaching and adaptable learning. ·        Propose a pedagogic and technological alternative applicable from the perspective of the New Schools pedagogic model. ·        Offer an educational program that fulfills the expectations of the agents involved in the New School model though the ICTs integration in classrooms and day by day activities.·        Increase the value of computers, software and Internet as pedagogic tools by integrating them transversally to all the school programs.·        Use the ICTs in interdisciplinary way, activating specific procedures and data and linking these to daily life. This way, the pedagogic purpose of specific ICTs –software, Internet, video, etc. - will be enhanced in classrooms.·        Act as a communication channel to relief lack of information and knowledge available to poor rural communities.·        Generate spaces in which teachers, students and the community as whole can share their learning experiences and activities with the use of ICTs in their daily life.·        Improve the learning environments and integrate as an educational community with others in the nation and the world.·        Facilitate knowledge and content creation in schools. Rather than acting as receptors only, schools will know posses the tools to speak out and the target audience is the world.Goal “Virtual School” goal is to build 2.000 schools, train 5.567 teachers in the use of ICTs in scholar life, replacing the paradigm of rigid ICTs with the integrated one.  Thereby, the program will benefit 50.4000 children and adolescents and 35.000 peasants.  7.657 teachers,  65.2000 children and young people, 45.680 peasants, involved in problems – solutions, experimenting, investigation, evaluation -  open to share with others, so that they are capable of, supported by ICTs, participating actively in the construction of a knowledge community and encouraging social development according with their contexts, with a clear vision.
  • How does ICT contribute to the organisational objectives
  • The Caldas Coffee Growers Committee is a regional organization of coffee planters. Its mission includes promoting education initiatives, investigating and promoting regional development, recovering and protecting the environment and the regional cultural identity. “Virtual School” exploits ICTs potential to facilitate peasant teachers, children, young people and adults, the acquisition of skills that allow them to explore and develop their inventive capacity, construct and design projects. The ICTs arrived to rural schools and communities to stay and “Virtual School” has reoriented the way it is interacted with the, in classrooms, schools as whole and the rural community, taking advantage of its use and establishing more equal, productive and bidirectional relationships between teachers, children, adolescents and adults, increasing skills to experience, read, communicate, argument, understand the world and our epoch and act in it. This process has been achieved through recognizing school teachers as valuable professionals skilled to use ICTs, moreover giving sustainability to the project by bringing down the false perception that only teachers involved in technological and informational areas can use ICTs. “Virtual School” is a compound of tools, resources, strategies and methodologies to give an effective use to ICTs in rural schools and communities.
  • Transferability
  • Any organization, public or private, can reproduce the project always that it embraces rural community as a key actor in the project empowering it. The organization must accompany the project for 5 years to assure its continuity. Public compromise is required. Strategic alliances are a key to success.
  • Project summary
  • “Virtual School” is an effort of the educational communities, parents and local leaders with the sponsoring of national and international public and private institutions. It constitutes the only option available for 22.349 students of 956 schools in the rural area of Caldas to reduce the urban-rural development gap by using ICTs as tools that allow them to integrate as an educational community with others-national and international-, access knowledge, information and solve their problems. “Virtual School” it prioritizes the development of aptitudes to understand why and for what ICTs must be used. From this point of view, the principal value of the ICTs user is he/her contextual and relational capacity of enriching the use of information to create new knowledge, that favors the conformation of innovation nets based in reciprocity and cooperation. Teachers are first trained in ICTs so that they can discover themselves the possible applications of ICTs at their daily work. Our challenge was and still is to truly integrate ICTs in schools, sustain them and promote them by means of not only endowing equipment, but introducing the “New School” pedagogic model, supporting good ideas and giving logistic solutions that take into account what happens day by day in schools. Indeed, ICTs have created new added value, changes in academic interaction and have improved teachers and students’ life opportunities. The project develops systematically under the following principals: learning by doing, interactive learning, learning by searching and learning by sharing. The strategies employed are to: explore, imagine, prepare and accompany with the view of a teacher set to a clear goal, an educative end.  Development Method:1.      Appropriation of ICTs: Teachers are trained for the integration of classroom activities with ICTs with various software –free, licensed, open, closed-,  virtual science laboratories and records other rural teachers classroom experiences in http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com//experienciasdeaula –a space dedicated to learning by doing, interactive learning, learning by searching and learning by sharing-.  In this stage cooperative work and the creation of new knowledge is evident. Rather than acting as receptors only, schools have the tools to speak out and the target audience is the world. For example, the creation of a local and school radio, a robot that solves a problem in the community have been achieved and can be evaluated. The variety of software used in the project can be checked at http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/adaptaciones_de_guias/index.htm; the robot prototypes elaborated by the children are at http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/creativosvirtuales/index.htm.  In general, software such as Micromundos Pro, the Criker package is used to make the robots.2.      Community projects supported with Internet: teachers, children and community leaders and trained in the elaboration of projects to solve target problems within the school and community. Schools communicate with each other though e-mail, blogs, chats and discussion forums.  Students and teachers handle creatively ICTs, for example in image digitalization, web-page design, animation, integration of video, audio and animation, therefore contribution to problem solution in their communities. Schools have their daily schedule and involved in improvement of diverse communication skills –oral and written. Themes such as environmental conservation, disaster prevention, and sexual education, well use of free time, moral values, journalism and communication are central. There are more than 200 projects and their results publicized at http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/proyeco/index.htm. It’s necessary to highlight the projects of environmental conservation (http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirual/proyeco/El_agua/index.htm) as well as the sexual education projects due to the high rate of pregnant girls between 13 and 16 years and the expansion of AIDS (http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/proyeco/el_sida_unproblemadetodos/index.htm). “My sexuality, my future and my present”, (http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/proyeco/mividasexual/index.htm) among other projects, approaches this theme that thanks to ICTs is available in distant areas other mediums could not have reached. Other projects like “The Colombia’s Political Constitution: a heritage of peace and harmony” (http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/proyeco/constitucion/index.htm) attempt to prevent corruption through educating youth about their rights and duties. 3.      Creative People to Set the Difference: groups of children, adolescents, adults and teachers organized to investigate, generate and produce knowledge with ICTs; investigating from and for the rural school and community. Four main focuses have been delimited: Robotics, Creating Future, Photography as Medium of Expression and Vibratory Movement. There are some brilliant results in robotics such as DETECTABROCA, a robot doted with sensors that determine the amount of broca in a coffee plantation, a useful fact to decide the amount of pesticide needed; MEZLAFUR, a tank with blades and sensors, that shreds organic waste and transform it in fertilizer and other prototypes such as SECAFE, SOLAR ENERGY PLANT, WATER PURIFICATOR, PAPER RECYCLER, etc. Micromundos EX, Chiker, sensors, pulley, bands and engines, where used in their making. The prototypes can be checked out at http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/creativosvirtuales/index.htm.  This shows the different levels at which ICTs can be used. It is evident. The results show they have learnt to plan and organize investigations to solve target needs using ICTs.  For this purpose they worked over scientific, communicative, argumentative, information production and competitive reference competences and created their own learning routes. The rural community has created a network where each one complements the common database. Furthermore, information is processed differently: we create new knowledge rather than reproducing it only. The activities proposed in the projects require now a higher cognitive level and more team work, therefore demanding more tolerance towards diversity so that each agent can contribute to the project competition. 4.      Communitarian Management Centers: When lectures end, the schools open its doors to the rural community to provide access to ICTs. Teaching peasants to work with a mouse, so different from their usual tools has been poetic, enriching and challenging.  Despite the difficulties at the moment of writing an e-mail, navigating or doing some mathematics, farmers have determined the project success. We are working in changing the view of that education is not a continuous need through life. We let these groups set what they wanted to do with ICTs. Parent-children communication has improved, they have sent and received e-mails, they have solved doubts and knowledge needs, and most importantly, they have discovered new possibilities for a better communication accepting ICTs as part of their community. Done with this first phase of accepting ICTs they are working on challenges like: Knowing and Loving myself, Gender Equality, Participation, Writing my Culture, My Costs, About the Broca among others. For more log on to    http://evirtual.recintodelpensamiento.com/escuelavirtual/centrosdegestion/index.htm

    5.      On-line Training: The free software Moodle, has allowed the creation of work spaces in various formats (text, tables, photography, audio, video, web-pages or PDFs between others) and formation resources such as on-line homework, exams, surveys, forums, etc. People are working on physics, simulators, virtual laboratories and many other resources that complement classroom learning. “Virtual school” stimulates the Web Technologies 2.0 principle of “social networking”. That is, taking advantage of communication channels -digital boards, writing tools, simultaneous messaging and calls, web logs, wikis, CMS- that promote team work, interchange, and common agreement of meanings. In this same line, technological training integrated with collective principles is taking into account as a very relevant element for the better use of ICTs.  “Virtual School” has reinforced skills to confront unknown situations, innovate, exploit information and produce new knowledge. It has strengthened the capacity to aboard problem solving from different contexts, the continuous renewal of information, the intelligent use of technology and collective behavior. The project has reinforced the population disposition to learn by doing and experimenting, work in networks and adapt to different environments. It gave a boost to creative, social and inventive thinking.