Learning about the educational uses of the internet by producing an educational web site in an interdisciplinary and virtual team

Abstract

The ‘ICT-2000’ project at the University Teacher Training Department for Science and Technology (TULO) at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, puts student teachers to work in a productivelearning task. Student teachers at different TULO locations cooperate in an interdisciplinary team to produce an educational web site for use in secondary education. Research on the year 2000 cohort (n=18) was aimed at evaluating the appreciation of the project as well as its learning outcomes in the eyes of the students. Initially the students were not all that enthusiastic about the project, but their appreciation grew as it proceeded. According to the students, the project was instructive. An additional evaluation of the educational web sites showed these to be attractive and useful to employ in upper secondary education. The student teachers' learning results mainly concerned the educational uses of the Internet and team collaboration. Electronic distance collaboration still presented problems to be solved in the future. The web sites produced by the student teachers were successfully used in secondary education.