The Webboard Project

The Doorway to Instruction and Learning in the Web.

The Context:

The continuing investments of government, civil society and private schools to improve delivery of instruction through deployment of computer workstations and Internet access in the library, instructional laboratory, and student computer activity center have brought the opportunity for the on-line learning repositories to improve curricular content and instructional delivery.

The proliferation of Internet Cafe, computer shops, community e-centers, and TELCO offering Internet access services at affordable rate per hour has given impetus to students and out of school youth to hang around these places. In the process, the Internet services have come to redefine the attitude and approach to interactivity, leisure, and learning of the students and other users.

Hence, with the digital opportunity comes the challenge to improve understanding of learning and teaching within the context of on-line instructional event.

The teachers must be self-enabled, empowered to fulfill their role of “teaching” inside the digital space.

But many schools are faced with the challenge on how to begin. On how to align and optimize the Internet investment to achieve the goals of instruction and learning.

The Project:

The WebBoard Project provides the implementation framework on how the school can initiate, plan, build, deploy, support and evaluate on-line learning services through open source solutions, or by merely using the readily available Internet based service infrastructure to jump start the integration of information and communications technology in teaching and management.

Get the Internet Services:

The WebBoard Project opens an implementation strategy for the schools to use the e-learning resources in the Internet to support instruction and learning.

It brings the school website to students, teachers, and parents as the on-line space to experience instruction and learning.

It introduces a process to bring into the hands of the teachers the guidance, the walk-through experience, and the tools to create and manage on-line instructional web space. The guided exposure to the on-line learning content will improve the knowledge base, and enrich the instructional activity of teachers.

It empowers the teachers to engage the students to learn inside the Internet.

From the classroom, the students are led to continuous learning inside the WebBoard where on-line instructional presentation, reference, activity, and assessment are openly published and updated by teachers within the context of the school’s defined competency standards.

The Project Components:

1. Creation of teacher- managed instructional website to elearn. A web based extension of the teacher’s blackboard, named as WebBoard. It involves:

• Setting up of content hosting address
• Use of templates and authoring tools
  
• On-line writing, editing, publishing and support of instructional presentations, guided activities, reviewed references, and test materials that students can access on-line before and after the classroom based instruction.

2. Capability Building Workshop designed for the teachers to:

• Define the common language, work objectives, work packages, process and technology to implement e-learning.
• Create on-line identity through the use of public Internet services.
  
• Define the framework to formulate the Instructional Plan that integrates digital technology resources
• Create reusable Instructional Plan template that incorporates modalities of e-learning and content from readily available digital repositories.
• Search and evaluate reusable learning objects that are readily available in the Internet.
  
• Design and build the subject e-learning web board to contain subject instructional guide, study guide, lecture notes, links to on-line forum, e-mail group, blogs, wikipedia, and on-line content references.
• Review and use curricular content and standard references from the World Wide Web, and integrate the use to the approved curricular references.
• Work with open source application software that run both in Windows and Linux to get into the Internet, to search and retrieve information, to create presentation, write and publish web pages, and to collaborate and communicate.
• Use Open Source Licensing Framework to publish instructional presentations on-line.
  

Project Sites:

1. ischool WebBoard
2. CWC Webboard
3. NDGM WebBoard
   
4. Municipality of Imus
5. TeacherWebboard
6. BalsontheWeb

A View on WebBoard Project
Tales from the Edge: how the web is changing learning
A keynote paper by Gerry White, CEO of education.au, presented at the ACEC conference in Australia