Opinion - News Analysis   

World's largest interactive classroom project

Merlin John

Teachers could learn from the experiences of Mexican schools in developing multimedia learning platforms.

IT'S PROBABLY the world's bravest, most imaginative and ambitious implementation of education technology — putting interactive whiteboards into 165,000 state primary classrooms by the end of this year — but it could also be the least understood outside its own country, Mexico. Because, contrary to expectations, the scheme, called Enciclomedia, is not a whiteboard project.

Raul Medina-Mora, the education consultant behind the project, insists it hasn't arisen from an infatuation with whiteboards.

It is an entirely practical and cost-effective way to transform classrooms for 10- and 11-year-old Mexican pupils so that they engage with their education and stay on at school. As they move on to secondary school, the investment will follow their progress through school, year by year, making them the first generation of Mexican children to have enjoyed a "digital" education.

By the end of 2007, 185,000 classrooms should have been completed, and that will change teaching and learning — the whole curriculum — for five million Mexican children and 200,000 of their teachers. That's why they call it "the world's largest interactive classroom project."

"We are designing a new learning community in the classroom which includes children and teachers in a dramatically and radically designed learning space," says Mr. Medina-Mora. He is employed by the ILCE (Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicacion Educativa) to represent the project internationally and develop collaboration and business with other countries. The changes are to the classroom rather than the curriculum, he says, and learning is a "social phenomenon — we don't focus on the individual but the classroom."

"We also know that learning is enhanced when it is multi-sensory. The classroom must be fun again. We have taken advantage of technology to enhance the learning process through multimedia. We actually need to be better than television and Nintendo. That is what we are competing with," he says.

Despite the dramatic scale of the challenge, Mexico started out with a significant, natural advantage — the government is the publisher of its school curriculum. While ICT policy makers in the U.K. were concerned with putting in infrastructure, training teachers and helping to stimulate content to enrich the online experience, the Mexican government already held the ace card — curriculum content. The teachers were already using the materials they wanted them to use.

It commissioned designers to digitise the entire curriculum and illustrate and demonstrate its features with photos, artwork, film, sound, and animations in an engaging range of multimedia. The aim was to bring alive old and new worlds for teachers and pupils. Teachers are using whiteboards to teach the curriculum they have always been required to teach, but now in different ways. So Enciclomedia was born.

Massive task

The scale of the task is massive, stretching world production of whiteboards (Promethean and Smart are among the suppliers), cabling, and communications.

"Mexico is very complex in terms of its topography and geography," says Mr. Medina-Mora. "There are two major mountain ranges, east and west, with peaks of 5,000 metres." Whiteboards are being put into classrooms where there formerly were no ceilings, and into communities where there are no proper roads. And a small number of schools just don't have the necessary infrastructure.

Then there is the range of languages and dialects across a country of some 100 million people, which describes itself as "pluricultural."

Training for teachers is another challenge, but the need is lessened by the fact that the curriculum is the same and that the motivation for change is higher in Mexico than in, say, the U.K. Mr. Medina-Mora quoted a teacher in Tijuana who said that, despite patchy training, "it has been wonderful. It has changed the lives of our children for ever." In fact, initial assessment of students before and after the project's implementation — over six months — showed an average increase of average scores of 1.68 in favour of Enciclomedia.

Tijuana teachers attended the U.S. major national conference for ICT in education, NECC, in San Diego, to promote a cross-border project with U.S. schools. And Mexico's influence at the NECC was significant, with bilingual sessions in English and Spanish for the first time. More leverage will certainly come with the results of the next development through Mexico's new digital platform — teaching students English, something they always thought difficult, particularly as their teachers don't speak it.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Time to demilitarise?
Connecting Asia
Russia's high-risk game in Chechnya
A wave of defence diplomacy
The changing face of publishing
World's largest interactive classroom project
On corruption
Why such hype?
Email versus post

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu