Internet coaching for schoolchildren

Students at Swiss schools are interested in more than just Facebook & Co. or the latest party photographs. By entering for the Junior Web Award, they face up to topical issues and, with their teacher, create their own website and put it in the internet. Global warming, sport and love – but also the prevention of drug abuse – are just some of the subjects chosen by young people in competing for the award made to the best websites created by school classes in Switzerland.

The current round of the Junior Web Award is the third one, and for the first time SWITCH has received more than 500 applications. Up until now, around 200 school classes from all over Switzerland have registered their project on the JuniorWebAward website. Approximately four-fifths of these are from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, but more than thirty projects come from the French and Italian-speaking parts of the country.

Internet in school – school in the internet
"This is the opportunity for using the internet in tuition", says teacher Urs Plüss. He is competing with his class 9b from the Rebacker-Schulhaus in Münsingen (Canton Berne). Their chosen project, "Humans and Machines", simultaneously tackles two of the subjects on the curriculum for the ninth year of school, namely the nervous system and robotics.

Urs Plüss has opted for the "cmsbox" web application with a design template, on the grounds of not having to do his own programming and not having to waste some of the class’s time with questions of design. The system is made available free-of-charge by SWITCH. Urs Plüss comments that "the young people are going to be confronted with a content-management system’ (CMS) sooner or later anyway, and it makes sense for them to learn to work with one while still at school."

He spent a double period showing the class how the CMS works and then they were thrown in at the deep end: "when the students see a computer, they want to try it out immediately themselves. Few of them would even dream of reading the instructions." It all works in practice too. The young people soon find their way around the system, and they thoroughly enjoy placing their own content in the internet. One of the girls in the class recounts that "my parents got a very pleasant surprise when they realised that we were able to come up with something like that at school. They are proud that there are texts of mine in the internet!"
 

Mixed teams work more efficiently
The schoolchildren work in twos, on one theme at a time – "always a girl and a boy together – that is more productive" says teacher Urs Plüss, speaking from experience. The members of the class appreciate the change from normal tuition. As one of them, Oliver, puts it with a grin, "what I like in particular about this project is that we are being allowed to make our own website – and we are doing that in school time". Along with Aline, he is working on two of the sensory organs, the tongue and nose, and they have chosen the name of "question of taste" for their contribution to the website.

Right at the outset, Urs Plüss gave his class a few tips on how to arrange the website to make it user-friendly. Aline has taken that to heart, because it is her experience that "many pages in the internet are arranged in far too complicated a manner", and now she is working on making a simple page, which even younger schoolchildren will be able to understand. While they have been doing that, another group has been tackling the subject of artificial intelligence. Their contribution to the website has information about all the situations in which robots are used and also describes how they built their own robot with Lego parts and then programmed it.

Shouldering responsibility for one's own learning
Quite apart from working for the Junior Web Award, the teenagers often use the internet at home to look for information when they have to prepare a presentation, for instance. What is even more important for them is communicating with their friends through chat pages for or social-network platforms. The internet is nothing new for today’s schoolchildren, because they belong to a generation that considers the "web" as something to be taken for granted. They are also already aware of possible problems in the internet, such as being flooded with useless data or risks arising from fraudulent websites.

To make sure that individual members of the class don’t "go their own merry way", each team also has the job of coaching one other group. This ensures that they receive feedback from one another. Urs Plüss himself repeatedly advises the groups in short sessions held with each of them individually. He is convinced that the students benefit from such problem-solving processes. They are also able to acquire additional skills, going beyond the actual project work. A typical example is that they are required to produce the images they use as far as possible themselves, which familiarises them with image-processing programs. The young people really like to be able to work on a topic they have chosen themselves and especially appreciate being able to work autonomously. They enjoy taking on responsibility, or, as Urs Plüss puts it, "each one of them works on what they are interested in and can feel enthusiastic about, and in the end the knowledge is all drawn together on the website. The product does not disappear in a drawer, but is made publicly accessible."

Who's going to make it to the finals?
The public vote, in which it is possible to express preferences for the various websites, begins in April. Urs Plüss is satisfied with the way the project has been running. The teenagers of class 9b would love to win the competition. After all, they have put a lot of effort into gathering all the knowledge, expressing it in their own words and presenting the content in a comprehensible way. They are proud of the versatility of their website, on which they have integrated text, images and videos. There is even an item called "Take a test", where visitors to the site can check how much of the material they have assimilated. Another of the girls participating, Simone, says "I expect that many young children – and older ones too – will look at our site and learn something from it".

The public vote to choose who the finalists will be starts at the beginning of April at www.juniorwebaward.ch, where there is also a video report on class 9b.