BSCW As A Managed Learning Environment For International In-Service Teacher Education.

Vol. 3 No. 2

Year: 2007

Issue: Sep-Nov

Title: BSCW As A Managed Learning Environment For International In-Service Teacher Education. 

Author Name: Gisli Thorsteinsson, Tom Page 

Synopsis: 

Fiste is a three year Comenius project based on a need for innovative and effective ideas for in-service teacher education. The participants are from five countries Finland, Romania, Iceland, Latvia and Spain. The Fiste project is funded by the European Comenius and deals with the use of new web based educational technologies for teaching in-service teachers in Europe.  The Fiste’s main task is to create a common in-service teachers’ course as a new way to provide in-service teacher education based on ICT.  The participants used an on-line platform to set up a course with web-based learning tools.  The World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within locally separated working groups.  The BSCW has been developed as Web based groupware tool using the metaphor of joint virtual workspaces.  The system is particularly practical for teaching and learning in the context of on-line education and already used by large communities for cooperation between students and teachers in distributed areas in Europe.  The paper focus on the use of the BSCW, in the context of the Fiste project.