educ.ar is the educational portal of the Argentine Nation created with the support of the Martín Varsavsky Foundation in 2000, but after the economical and political breakdown which took place in Argentina in 2001, the portal needed to be reorganized. In 2003, the re-launching took place in the hands of Alejandro Piscitelli who considers his experience in educ.ar as the most challenging in his life.
The aim of educ.ar re-launching was to work for and with Argentine teachers on digital literacy. An initial team of 23 specialists helped teachers and heads of educational institutions to get familiar with the use of ICT. Thus, the portal became one of the most respected online providers of educational contents and was the first educational national portal in Latin America. Actually, it has about 1,450 million of users and about 2,000,000 hits per month.
Educ.ar Mission
- To generate opportunities for all the inhabitants of the Argentine Republic to learn no matter their place of residence. (Argentina is quite a big country very different geographic areas)
- Offer the teachers the corresponding tools to teach in the knowledge society.
- Collaborate in the reduction of the digital gap.
- Create networks between the government and the private institutions
Educ.ar Pedagogic Project (2003-2008)
Taking the idea of in a constantly changing world, he who stays in the same place goes back, educ.ar team was conscious of the urgent incorporation of the digital and mass media literacy to education. They considered that TV, Internet and other mass media should be related to school.
Results
To mention some of the achievements, by the end of 2008, educ.ar developed 20 different titles in CD-Rom format, offered e-learning courses, trained 13,000 teachers to use different Web2.0 tools (weblogs, wikis, webquests, forums, podcasts, collaborative tools, etc.), 800 computers were recycled and redistributed .
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