Project+-+Pinocchio2.0

= Pinocchio 2.0  = = Teacher’s name:  = [Linda Giannini] – [Carlo Nati] = Type of initiative:  = [Pinocchio 2.0 is a Multimedia Content Management housing and displaying of records from the Italian educational projects inspired by ER, and stores material from several subjects (language and literature, language’s analysis, artistic education). These records pertain to fables, narrations, stories, robotics projects, robotics kits design, handbooks, and many of the educational activities envisaging in some way the role of reproducible elements, and little interactive artifacts: the idea of the robot.]

= Target topic:  = [social networks – blog; The project is tuned on the spirit of the Web 2.0; the Internet is used “to do”, but specially “to do together”. Students link up to Pinocchio 2.0 not only to check out for information, or to witness about their work, not only to simply exchange information: every member involved finds the way to “do together”, to share and co-design..] = Age of target group:  = [cooperation with a network of several Italian schools, from kindergarten to upper-school and to university enabled thousands of students to learn in an innovative way through educational robotics (ER), sciences, itc, .....] = Number of students involved/targeted:  = [Lazio, Italy] Istituto Comprensivo don Milani di Latina - kindergarten  Sec. B = 29 children [3-4-5 age]   Sec. C = 29 children [4-5 age] -Primary school  1A = 22 students   1B = 22 students   4C = 20 students   4D = 21 students   5A = 26 students   5B = 23 students - Secondary school  25 +25 +25 schoolgirls s    Total pupils 267 s approximately [Lazio, Italy] Art School of Latina = 25 students [Liguria, Italy] Scuola di Robotica [Liguria, Italy] I.P.S.I.A. Gaslini in Genoa, Bolzaneto = 18 students [Liguria, Italy] School Gaslini hospital in Genoa = 25 students [Lombardia, Italy] Niguarda Hospital School in Milano = 25 students [Lombardia, Italy] School in Milan's, San Carlo hospital = 25 students [Lombardia, Italy] Milano Rinnovata, primary school = 50 students [Lombardia, Italy]secondary school Gambolò Marconi, PAVIA = 25 students [Lombardia, Italy] Professional school, ITIS "A. Righi" Treviglio (BG) = 25 students [Piemonte, Italy] primary school Cuneo are involved in robotics creative Robot with Lego bricks 5 classes Primary School: Total pupils 120 s   [Piemonte, Italy] M.C.E. Movement of educational cooperation [Puglia, Italy] Nursery School Accadia, Foggia = 25 students [Puglia, Italy] Primary School Parisi, Foggia = 25 students [Sardegna, Italy] Primary School 1° Circolo di Sassari = 35 students [Veneto, Italy] Comprehensive School "Bartolomeo Lorenzi" Fumane (VR) are involved in the project of educational robotics: 3 classes of secondary school teachers (about 80 students) 2 primary school classes (approximately 50 students) the group of "large" in kindergarten (about 25 children) Total 150 to 200 pupils + Network Scuola di Robotica + 2 trainees Speech Therapy - University of Rome "La Sapienza", Ariccia (Roma, Italy). + Over 480 partners connected in Facebook [since March 2011] [] Schools eTwinning partners EUN + + (*) including: (*) Support Services: e-twinning between schools in Europe, a new tool to create innovative educational partnerships through the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This official site [|http://etwinning.indire.it] __ Observers and / or employees __ [Tuscany] EGOCREANET, University of Florence, Italy [Sardegna, Italy] Andrea Mameli, freelance science journalist and head of science communication research center CRS4 di Pula (Cagliari) Class type: [e.g. general education, vocational education, special needs, etc.] = Location :  =
 * Preschool Braila, Romania = 25 children
 * Primary School Základní Skola Skycov - Skolska 299-951 Skycov 85 - Slovakia = 25 students
 * Secondary school Vitrioli, Reggio Calabria, Italy = 25 students
 * Istituto Magistrale "S. Rosa da Viterbo", Viterbo, Italy = 25 students
 * students, children / teens [kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, high school, university]
 * teachers, retire and not [from kindergarten to university]
 * trainees
 * parents
 * experts
 * observers [research institutes, universities, ...]

[the country where you are implementing your eSafety initiative] Mainly in Italy, but occasionally involves some schools in Europe and, with regard to Facebook, international contacts = Source : [website]   =

Blog Pinocchio 2.0  [] Facebook Pinocchio 2.0  [] Collection post about blog "Pinocchio 2.0"  [] Pinocchio 2.0 from Sketchcast [for example]  [|http://blog.edidablog.it/blogs//index.php?blog=275&m=20101016] Pinocchio 2.0 in Active Worlds  [|http://www.activeworlds.com]   [] Pinocchio 2.0 in eTwinning website  [|http://etwinning.indire.it] = 1. Purpose  = [Explain the purpose of your initiative, the objective it is meant to achieve] The first, key Pinocchio 2.0’ aim is the assessment of learning rising from the educational use of one of more collaborative environment/s, the real ones and the digital. Besides the more traditional intervention, Pinocchio 2.0 made use of some educational paths mediated by ICT technologies.

These tools accounted for:

 * Students’ needs for expressing and communicating;
 * The previous project’s results, in order to built on past educational experiences;
 * The national Guidelines for every schooling program;
 * The training and educational opportunities offered by multi-mediality;
 * The cooperation with colleagues working in Italian and European schools.

The educational aims are:
= 2. Raison d’être  = [Explain the motivation, the reason for starting your initiative in the first place] Pinocchio 2.0 is a project housing several other projects whose common denominator is the fantastic and scientific literature (fables, stories, narration, designs) produced by boys and girls and inspired by their ongoing activities on educational robotics, sciences, ITC, creativity... Narrating coincides with sharing, which in turn means finding tools suitable not only to any students’ age class, but also to each context. Each tool has its own pros and cons. Through these years, a large number of Italian students have worked on representing and narrating “robotics” stories while engaged in ER projects. This double-use opened up a path where educational robotics not only works as end but as mean to stimulate in young people the habit of learning and sharing. For teachers and students, the knowledge and the communication are values that conjugate only when are located in a continuous process.
 * To know, mastering and juxtaposing different communication level, personal and social;
 * To know, mastering and comparing communication media, at personal and social level.

The didactic aims are:

 * Data collection, processing and interpreting;
 * Representing situation, issues and proposing solutions;
 * Developing intentional and creative communication skills;
 * Tell the paths’ results to outside observers.
 * Interrelation and behavioral aims are:
 * Understanding the meaning of belonging to a virtual community;
 * Developing the ability of team-working, especially the one at local and at virtual level;
 * Promoting multi-media didactic, and the use of different languages and codes;
 * By way of the use of multi-media, promoting knowledge, socialization, and the development of logical and operational abilities
 * Redefine the key patterns of the literacy process on the basis of the new requirements of technological evolution;
 * Overcoming the fragmented knowledge, accepting complexity;
 * Minimizing the geographical gates through electronic data transmission.

= 3. Description   = [Describe your initiative and what it’s about; address its different aspects and operational stages] Pinocchio is a fictional character that first appeared in 1881, in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Carved from a piece of pine by a woodcarver, he was created as a wooden puppet, but dreamt of becoming a real boy. Pinocchio is the Italian name for Pine Eye. For an Italian kid, this fictional puppet recalls the idea of the robot, that is an artificial entity mechanically animated. Pinocchio 2.0 is a Multimedia Content Management housing and displaying of records from the Italian educational projects inspired by ER, and stores material from several subjects (language and literature, language’s analysis, artistic education). These records pertain to fables, narrations, stories, robotics projects, robotics kits design, handbooks, and many of the educational activities envisaging in some way the role of reproducible elements, and little interactive artifacts: the idea of the robot. The project “ancestor” of Pinocchio 2.0 began some years ago and was carried out by the same (although, less numerous) network of teachers. Afterwards, with the development of the Web 2.0, teachers and students could upload their records in it: Pictures, drawings, free software, designs, multi-path stories, suggestions, songs, movies, memories, curiosities, games and links. Now, Pinocchio 2.0. takes in, along with the wooden marionette, other fictions characters that inspired several ER projects: E.T.A. Hoffman’s Coppelia (the mechanical doll that is the” primadonna” in a famous ballet), and some of the characters of The Narnia Saga. All are common legacy of the imaginary world of Italian (and most of the world’s) students, from nursery to University.

4. Innovation
[Explain in what sense your initiative is innovative and how it offers a new approach to tackling eSafety] Pinocchio 2.0 works like a fil rouge connecting several educational projects of the school in the community. It is a kind of a robot that, livening up thanks – this time - not to ICT technologies but through children’s imagination, started to teach and to be used by children as a tele-machine. In our community, Pinocchio embodies every subject and/or object that is designed and shared by many communities’s partner – be it shared in vivo o via any telecommunication media. I believe that this experience is extremely important for the students. It lays the groundwork for a constructive opening to the external world through the Internet and it enables adults to check what level of comprehension has been achieved with relation to the differences between reality, imagination and "virtual reality". The main aim of this experience is to seek a method of understanding which takes account of certain elements of experience in which students are immersed. = 5. Sustainability and mainstreaming  = [Explain what makes your initiative sustainable and replicable by other teachers and how it can contribute to mainstreaming eSafety in schools] The several paths initiated in whole school years demolished the boundaries of distance not only physical (thanks to ICT), but also the ones coming from the different ages of participants (students from childhood to university). The advantage was the enhancing of the comparison, the co-building and sharing of different competences. We were happy to have with us retired colleagues, experts, SSIS students and parents. We consider this project not complete but in progress. As per implementation we noted that Pinocchio 2.0 was taken as example in other schools. We wish then to our colleagues that are now starting their path to achieve great satisfaction and success. We think that this is the natural consequence of knowledge sharing and on-line information gathering, that eases development and growth of ideas. = 6. Student participation   = [Explain in what sense students are actively involved in their learning process] To maintain the needed educational continuity, an ER project should be vertical, which means that it has to inspire and influence the whole schooling period. To sustain this continuance, the projects housed by Pinocchio 2.0 are focusing on an uninterrupted sharing of the projects’ records loaded and available through the Web 2.0. ** eTwinning space ** showed to be little use for sharing material, because Project’s partners are preferring to keep more direct contacts, via e-mail. However, it was useful to the project’s dissemination feeding the grow of partners’ number. ** Facebook: ** There, the members group Pinocchio 2.0 gathers up to 480 members which, every day, add in it records and documents related to the ER projects (videos, drawings, and updates of their projects); allow external people to find records and material useful for educational processes. We wrote the “Cooperation Call” forwarded last Summer in several languages – eight. Today, March 2011, Pinocchio2.0 members are 480. Pinocchio 2.0 is posted in eTwinning [] ** Skype and Messenger chat : ** Some schools that joined Pinocchio 2.0 are using Skype and Messenger video conference on a weekly basis, to share ideas and project’s results with other colleagues. Also School of Robotics holds Skype conference with many Italian classes, enabling teachers and students (from nursery on) to follow the development of some robotics prototypes in our laboratory. Through these meetings, teachers and students feel that they take part in a broad group of people. The Blog : The blog of the project is Rob&ide, and houses the news coming from the member schools and from people (roboticists, teachers, educational experts).

The blog allows the collaboration between different schools and partners located all over Italy. The School of Robotics and the Robot@Scuola schoolnetowork; ** Online drawings : ** through some online software like the ones loaded in [] students can cooperate in common drawings, even if they are not in the same location nor in the same school. This is a mean to enable very young kids (3-4-5 years old) to get close to technology in a collaborative and non-invasive way. [video 01] Here Daria, Valeria, and Eleonora [5 years old] are drawing on Emanuele’s pc using the shared on-line blackboard. In the meantime, their mates, in the same class room, are playing with other on line games and with more traditional ones [video 02]. Then, all the kids are interviewing one another, and sing. Here some occasions for creative and co-constructed: from patch to machine. 3-4-5 years old kids help each other and self-organize the space around them, choosing their games, and retracing in their own way Pinocchio’s tale and that of their own life. ** Painting on line with Sketchcast ** []
 * Hospital Schools;
 * eTwinning Schools
 * Parents
 * Students, from kindergarten to college

Active worlds
Active Worlds can be defined a system of tri-dimensional virtual worlds (Italian, Spanish, Russian, English, and American worlds) where some people have the responsibility that all the activities are carried out correctly; these supervisors are called Public Speakers, and are recognized by bold writing. Worlds can be traveled by users in the form of "AVATARS".

Avatars are characters divided in categories, such as: men, women, animals, objects, and each user can choose the one he/she prefers. These characters have a nickname that can be chosen at the program start, and have the peculiarity of being animated. Avatars can walk, run, fly, dance, fall, etc. Due to this fact, we can say that the worlds of the chat mentioned above are "active". The users of active worlds can be citizen or tourists. Tourists can only access a part of the options of the chat system and do not have all the privileges: they cannot send telegrams, create a contact list of friends and join them wherever they are, modify the avatar and create buildings....   All these privileges can be obtained paying a yearly subscription fee, in this way becoming citizens. Our experience has been carried out in this context. For years [since 1997] the students interact in 3D and chat between the avatars who can choose no Pinocchio. So child / children have the opportunity of meeting in active worlds and to reinvent the adventures of the puppet / boy avatar [] Pinocchio makes its appearance in the virtual worlds in 2002, during the relative paths to Narnia [es. log of one of the many chat [] ] Video: both the blog Rob&ide and School of Robotics have opened up their Youtube channels for sharing information, where we upload also videos recorded by the teachers during their lessons. Letters: it is not disdained the traditional method of using letters to share opinions and impressions related to robotics. = 7. Challenges and areas for improvement   = [Address the challenges that you have faced as part of this project and the areas for improvement that you have identified for the future] In Europe, Educational robotics is gaining popularity. Continuity is the key word. In the last five years, School of Robotics in cooperation with a network of several Italian schools, from kindergarten to upper-schools and to university enabled thousands of students to learn in an innovative way through educational robotics (ER). Through these years, we have witnessed – and contributed to – a considerable number of successful educational experiences. In this paper, authors outline the different tools on hand in the Web 2.0 employed by the Pinocchio 2.0, along with the methodology of continuity devised for the development of new projects Often it happens that those are considered Pilot projects, operating only in very specific social environments. Continuity should be the true key world, from now on.

Pinocchio 2.0’s main features are:
**Continuity** with previous projects, uninterrupted cooperation with partners of macro/micro paths; **Flexibility**: every partner can intervene according her/his teaching style and learning pace; **Opening to the external world:** Besides our Rumenian partner, whom we knew already, all the other eTwinning partners subscribed in August and September, 2010, and more are to come; **Activities:** face meeting, e-mails, chat, forum Robot@Scuola, mailing-list, and other ways of synchronous/asynchronous communication, all these media are building bridges and networks. Social network, wiki, blog, podcast, YouTube video-clips are some of the tools where imagination and creativity match with technoscience and robotics, through songs, clips, recalls, games, links, statics and dynamics images, pictures, drawings, free software, “diverging stories” and much more. = 8. Learning and feedback   = [Explain what the learning has been from this project both for your students and for yourself, tell us about the feedback that you have received and if/how you would adapt the project if you were to implement it elsewhere] All these methodological paths, started in several different ways through the years, are updated and enriched by the shared news loaded on the Web 2.0. Many hypothetical ideas are becoming reality in this common space, as a manifold learning environment: sharing means meetings in presence, emails, chat, the forum Robot@Scuola, mailing-list and other media synchronous/asynchronous that constitute bridges and networks. Social networks, wikis, blogs, podcasts or Youtube are some of the areas where fantasy and creativity links up to science, ICT and robotics. Moreover: suggestions, songs, movies, memories, curiosities, games, informative links, virtual images, photos, drawings, free software, multipath stories and many other materials can be added. Anyone can participate by joining the Facebook group of Pinocchio 2.0 or through the blog Rob&ide. The project is tuned on the spirit of the Web 2.0; the Internet is used “to do”, but specially “to do together”. Students link up to Pinocchio 2.0. not only to check out for information, or to witness about their work, not only to simply exchange information: every involved member finds the way to “do together”, to share and co-design. “Because the resources (..) are inside us, in our own powers and will of collaborating, of being present, of living.” (P. Beneventi) Thanks to the Web 2.0 the students feel involved in a broad project regardless of their scholastic grade, schools and teachers. The confidence in the continuity and steadiness of the records’ storage allows student to participate with a greater commitment and passion to the achievements, step by step, knowing that a path will be traced and kept, thanks to their study and dedication. The projects housed by Pinocchio 2.0 offer the chance of trespassing the school’s borders, the grade, and the teachers, acquiring a different reality through the online documentation. ** Contact person ** [ Linda Giannini calip@mbox.panservice.it ] From  REPORT TEMPLATE - FOR “TEACHER OF THE MONTH” CASE STUDIES __ Bio on the net: __ Skype and Messenger – alcuni riferimenti sitografici relative al progetto: [] [] [] Blog Rob&Ide del progetto Pinocchio 2.0 [] Lavagne on line come – alcuni riferimenti alla documentazione on line [|http://blog.edidablog.it/blogs//index.php?blog=275&m=20101016] Real Children Learn in Virtual Worlds []