MFL Collaborative Projects

This asynchronous conferencing software has enabled us to run a pilot project through March-June 2002, involving Year 9 students here and in Gymnasium Munster in Germany.
They have used the system to post information about themselves (in the form of Word and HTML documents) and exchange messages about holiday destinations in various parts of the world, based on personal experience.
All correspondence has been in French and FirstClass has enabled the students to comment upon each others' use of the language.
The culmination of the project will be for groups of students from both countries to work together to produce a simple guide to some of the resorts.

The multipoint video conferencing that had been envisaged back in 2000 fell foul of network security setting requirements which, as things stand at present, can only be changed with the certainty that the security of the school network would be hopelessly compromised.
The SEGfL are aware of this, of course, and will be working to seek a solution as a number of schools would like to explore the possibilities that video conferencing would offer.
In the meantime, The Ashcombe has held point-to-point video conferences with a number of teachers in European partner schools. The most spectacular link-up, however, was in March 2002 when students and staff participated in the final stages of an English-speaking Festival held in our Chinese partner school, Changzheng Middle School, Shanghai. Since then, video link-ups have been a feature of several other visits and partnerships.

This software is an extension of CSE Workspace Explorer which is used throughout the MFL department to ensure that the workstations are consistent and secure. Its two key additional features are that it allows secure remote access to personal work areas and that it allows teachers to set up 'Project' folders with restricted access rights, to hold resources, work in progress and the completed projects.
It is likely that future collaborative projects will use this software.