proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

One strength of cooperative learning is its social nature. Students are encouraged to interact and
share with one another, which helps reduce the students' desire to talk or gossip with one another about
unrelated topics. With interaction constantly occurring, a cooperative learning classroom tends to be
somewhat noisy, but classroom management is easier.
Cooperative learning helps students develop conceptual reasoning and problem-solving skills. It
also helps creates a warmer relationship among students and a positive attitude towards the subject matter.
Discussion
Discussion involves free, interactive dialogue between teachers and students. It is more than just a
question-answer period, and requires the teacher to give control of the classroom to the students. The
students guide the discussion, meaning that it may not always progress in the direction the teacher
anticipated.
A successful discussion requires that all student responses and ideas be accepted and considered,
even those that are immature or have not been thought out. Teachers and students need to be open-minded
and willing to consider perspectives different from their own.
Supporting the learning process
From a theoretical point of view, speaking of educational support to the learning process refers to
the interactions that take place within an educational context and give rise to learning. Distinctions within
this concept are introduced, emphasizing different points of view on the supporting activity and consequent
differences in the didactical planning.
Modelling
The term Modelling refers to the kind of support that guides the students to acquire expert
behaviour in problem solving. In this case, attention is focused on the analysis of expert’s results, on what
knowledge they use, on what cognitive and meta-cognitive processes they carry out during a problem
solving activity. Modelling includes the analysis of meaningful cases, and implements an approach to
educational support which is problem-oriented and guided by the teacher (Busetti, Dettori, Forcheri &
Ierardi, 2005).
Coaching
The term Coaching refers to the teacher’s activity supporting students’ efforts to solve some tasks.
In this case, the emphasis is on students’ work. Here, the teacher follows and regulates students’ activity,
by analysing it and providing feedback and suggestions. This kind of support, hence, develops during the
activity and entails a high degree of interaction between students and teacher. It is not necessarily limited to
class activity, though, since distance communication tools, such as e-mail, platforms or videoconferences
can be used to allow coaching in ICT-based environments (Busetti, Dettori, Forcheri & Ierardi, 2005).
Scaffolding
The term Scaffolding refers to any incentive or help, adapted to the student’s ability level,
intentionally given in order to help a student to perform some task (Jonassen, Mayes, McAleese, 1993). In
this case, the focus is mainly on knowledge to be acquired and tasks to be tackled, taking into consideration
the systemic factors that may affect performance.
It can include also some activities which are typical of modelling and coaching, provided they are
implemented so as to progressively decrease while the learners acquire the ability to work on their own.
From the point of view of application, scaffolding can be subdivided into categories taking into
account the requirements of the educational situation at hand (Winnips, McLoughlin, 2001; Reiser, 2004).
Preparing pedagogical scenario for preparatory teaching
There are different opinions on the effect of technology in education. One of the earliest
arguments questioning technology’s role in learning comes from Clark (1983, 1994). He argues that media
(technology) is nothing but a vehicle that delivers instruction, and that technology would not affect student
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 112