itslearning is supporting the ELvis Comenius project, an EU-funded project that aims to prepare students for a new technological age without traditional country borders. As part of the project, a group of students from the Netherlands recently visited a school in Italy – and got themselves on Salento WebTV.

The video below (in Italian) shows students from Sophianum School in the Netherlands as they visit L.S.S. Cosimo De Giorgi in Italy.

What is the ELvis project?

Back in 1996, a group of European schools asked themselves how the internet and email will change the face of education. With true pioneering spirit, they set out to test early video conferencing equipment – which at the time took hours to set up – and looked into how email and web pages could be used for student collaboration.

Nearly 15 years on, these tools have been refined by itslearning, and schools in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany and Italy are using our learning platform to run the type of cross-border courses that the early ELvis pioneers could only dream off.

Tackling global warming

ELvis projects involve creating an online course that students in each of the participating schools can join. One example is a global warming project that combines science, technology, politics, geography, citizenship and history.

Students from the schools meet to plan, conduct experiments and share ideas. They then return to their schools and continue their collaboration online through the it’s learning messaging system, discussion forum, blog, ePortfolio and conferencing tools.

Another course, on the UK political elections, resulted in a number of mock manifestos on the ELvis YouTube site.

Why ELvis?

ELvis stands for the EuroLink Virtual International School. It should not be confused with Elvis Presley (although, a new ELvis course may well include a unit in which students record and share their own music videos in itslearning.)

Find out more on the ELvis website.