engleski

School Model for New Millenium Croatian Project of E-school

In general, regular school curricula do not provide a sufficiently individual approach to gifted students. Recognition and an openminded approach to those students provides a powerful impetus for their later expert profilation. This is a fact from which every society should benefit and was established as one of the goals of the ”E-school of young scientists” project. The project is a teaching model based on the ”student-teacher-scientist triangle” which enables direct collaboration between students and teachers of Croatian high schools with scientists and lecturers of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Zagreb. The main aim of the ”triangle” is training the student in the scientific method. This is achieved through the ”scientific miniproject”. The term ”miniproject” was originally introduced by Ariel H. Guererro and in Croatia was first adopted and developed by Petar Vrkljan. Further developments were obtained through this project. The interactions of the working trio are schematically represented by the following diagram. This particular organisation of work provides various benefits. Students living in areas displaced from universities and larger cultural centers are thus enabled to get more up to date bibliography, more information and equipment. ”E-school” is part of extracurricular activities that engage the students and represent a useful way of spending free time. It is of great importance that a student is in contact with more than one tutor. Four-year experience has shown that students participating in the project significantly contribute to better quality of teaching and promote science as well. By doing so they represent the main resource pool for recruitment of future experts, teachers and scientists. Permanent communication with active scientists gives the teachers an overview of latest scientific achievements and continuous inservice training. Both students and teachers have insight in ”scientific odd-life”. The most important benefits for scientists are constant renewal of knowledge, versatile understanding of phenomena and popularisation of science. ”E-school” is an educational project of the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences and it covers the fields of astronomy, biology, physics, geography and chemistry. The project was implemented through Internet with the use of almost all network services. The Internet proved itself as an extremely powerful tool giving the ability of distant real-time communication. Network support to the project is provided by CARNet-the Croatian Academic and Research Network. The project began in the spring of 1997, and since then several dozens of miniprojects were successfully finished and approximately the same number of projects are currently running. Correspondence is in Croatian now but will soon be possible in English, too. The ”E-school for chemistry” is currently in contact with students from Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As far as we know, it is the only project of this kind on the Internet. Its uniqueness is best described by its background of more than fifty Ph. D.- s who provide, create and especially select information that are available via Internet. http://hpd.botanic.hr

E-school; miniprojects; Carnet; education

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