Wikiscuola is a collaborative wiki created by an Italian school in order to share ideas and material in order to create the content for in-class lectures

1. Wikiscuola Case study Giantommaso D’Astolto NEST project Alta ScuolaPolitecnica VII cycle

2. What is it? Collaborative wiki used by an Italian middle school in northern Italy The goal is to share experiences, ideas and knowledge and to interactively create teaching material

3. Homepage The homepage contains a simple explanation of how to use the tool On the left side we can see the structure of the website and on the top of the page we have a tab that shows the functionalities we can use At the bottom there is a list of comments left by registered members

4. How does it work? Students and teachers can work together to create shared content for future lectures The content is firstly organised by classes and then by subjects All the members can edit pages and upload video and documents, professors have also the role of moderator and support team for their pupils

5. IT tools Document uploader for material transfering Wikis for interactive collaboration Chat and forums for comment sharing

6. Strengths/1 The material is well organised, and the explanation on how to use the tool is comprehensible The overall impression for a web surfer is very catchy, thanks also to an appealing layout

7. Strengths/2 The idea of creating the content of future lectures with students is extremely innovative. Moreover a student that is involved in the preparation of the lesson should feel more stimulated to active participate to it Example of feedback that shows studentparticipation

8. Weaknesses Some users complains for browser incompatibility There are no tools for simultaneous interaction (such as video-audio conferences) Example of feedback about browser problems

9. Business model The service was conceived by the Italian school, which firstly used it for a single class (pilot experiment) It was developed thanks to the support of an organisation of experts (Centro Metid, Politecnico di Milano) Now the service has been expanded to the whole school and people need to sign up to become members

10. Conclusions and take-aways The idea seems to have had a great success, in terms of participation and commitment Since the tool has been developed for a single school, there is no need for scaling it down, it just takes some adjustment with respect to the institution that wants to use it The tool can be useful as a part of a bigger project that involves the use of other kinds of resources (such as videoconfences)