SoNeCS - Social Networking for Catering Schools
Final report - July 2008
Funded by
HP
Project goal
Expanding the educational opportunities through the
creation of social networks among students of a catering
school between 14 and 18 years old (Istituto Professionale
Alberghiero, undergraduate school). This goal has been
achieved using different approaches.
First of all giving students and teachers the opportunity
to publish their own contents through a Learning Management
System or through blogging. Students built blogs not as
“diaries” but as a personal demonstration of what they were
learning, so that contents could be useful for other
students. We enhanced the relationship between school and
families and between our institution and similar ones by
rebuilding the school website, in order to show all school
activities but also to make useful information easily
available: job opportunities, historical archive, etc.
Our goal was to enlarge the network including societies,
professionals and other stakeholders.
Participants
40 students
of SAFI catering school and their teachers were involved.
Later on, the activities will be extended to two partner
schools (in Bari and in Palermo) with 40 students more.
Results
 Learning
Management System
The first step was to enable the use of a Learning
Management System, using Moodle, an open source program
which is gaining wide acceptance in Italian schools and
universities. The experience of ELIS vocational training
school, which has been using the tool for some years, has
been useful to adapt it for the needs of SAFI catering
school.
The students decided to set up sections regarding their
lessons and "on the job" activity. Therefore
procedures, instructions, glossaries as well as tests and
exercises are filling the site, as you can see in a
composition of screen shots aside.
Some audiovisual lessons, recorded in other classrooms out
of SAFI, are included. They provide extra training and
are available also from the students' home, giving them the
chance of enhancing their competencies.
The students started publishing resources they already had
access to, and are now creating new learning objects which
will be tagged by anyone accessing the site, in order to
give them "social value".
The access to the site is restricted to the students of
SAFI.
Public site
The http://safi.elis.org
public site has been rebuilt from scratch, in order to
better address the needs of the future students: it is
primarily a show of what the school is able to provide. The
imagery publication process is on going with the help of
current students.
The historical archive is a report of the most important
activities of the past years, to give an idea of the wide
range of lessons, excursions, training, internships and
meetings.
A section called "offerte di lavoro" is dedicated to alumni
who are seeking a job or are looking for employees.
 Specialized
search engine
The students started a specialized search engine, using
Google co-op custom search engine. The goal is to provide
all students of catering schools with a tool to easily find
information about topics in their field, avoiding the
overhead generated by a general purpose search engine. They selected
some sites which they regarded as reliable and useful. The
list is slowly growing because of a careful assessment for
the validity of any new entry.
The name has been proposed following these criteria:
-
easy to
remember
-
not in the
Italian or English vocabulary
-
not existing
on the web
-
recalling the
idea of looking for ("trova")
-
recalling the
idea of catering schools ("scuole alberghiere")
The students are
now voting the acceptance of the search engine name, using a
specific tool in their Moodle site.
Personal blogs
Some of them decided to open a personal blog, using free
resources on the net. They published information for their
colleagues. In the picture you can see the one dedicated to
the analysis of websites of catering schools in Italy.
The experience of blogging with educational purposes is very
important. Unfortunately, among teen-agers, there is a
tendency of using the web as an entertainment resource or a
place where to find information. Very few of them are
enriching the web with their personal knowledge, although in
many cases they are fully able to set up valuable and useful
sites.
In some lessons with teachers, parents and students, we
noticed for example that very few, and sometimes nobody, has
ever written a single word on the Wikipedia. This behaviour
is particularly negative when dealing with teachers: they
are the "experts" in many topics, and are not willing to
share their knowledge, leaving the task to other people who,
less skilled, may write erroneous information or data on the
Wikipedia. Given that, in Italian, the Wikipedia has become
one of the most relevant sources on the Internet (it is
usually the first result in searches of many words), we are
committed to foster the production of good articles by
experienced authors.
Arte e salute in cucina
 A new idea from a teacher and a former student was to start
a special course for learning how to cook in a nice, simple
and effective way for people suffering from diabetes, hypertension,
celiac disease.
To promote the lessons, especially for
housewives, they set up a website
http://asc.elis.org with
information, recipes, videos and the methodology, based on
mental mapping of the procedure to prepare a dish.
They
also produced a blog (a partial screenshot is aside) with more information on the topic and
some social networking tools (voting, new recipes, tests,
games, Q&A, etc.).
New ideas stemmed from the original project: a "cooking bus"
touring the schools in order to teach students how to cook
(and eat) healthy food and a special course for dieticians.
Fund raising is on going to support these activities.
Next steps
The news about
www.albatrova.it (registered
in July 2008) will be spread among the partner schools of
SAFI in Bari and Palermo. From these schools the students
will cooperate in adding new validated sites for the search
engine list. Later on, when the list grows to a sufficient
level, we shall inform all the catering schools in Italy
about the availability of Albatrova. We shall seek only
cooperation from reliable sources, opening the contribution
for the enrichment of the list to everybody, but with a
validation of the quality of the proposed sites to add.
The cooperation
with the Alumni Association and their site
http://avel.elis.org will
be enhanced to give more services to former students of
SAFI, while asking for help from them, fostering the social
network.
|
