Learning languages and working together online, that's what TILA is about!
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Our mission
Improving the quality of foreign language teaching and learning processes by means of meaningful telecollaboration among peers: that is the aim of the European project Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition (TILA).
The TILA project has been funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme (2013-2015) and continues since then.
Watch our video to learn more about TILA
Innovation in language teaching
We want to innovate and enrich language teaching programmes at secondary schools and make them more motivating and effective by stimulating telecollaboration for intercultural awareness with peers of other cultures.
Teacher and learner empowerment
We empower language teachers and teacher trainers and contribute to the development of their ICT literacy skills and organisational, pedagogical and intercultural competences for telecollaboration, by promoting experiential learning in telecollaboration tasks development, implementation and evaluation.
Telecollaboration
By connecting schools, teachers and pupils in different countries through interactive online tools (video communication, virtual worlds, chat, forum, blogs and/or wikis), we provide an engaging environment for learning and practicing foreign language skills.
Promote intercultural understanding
Through telecollaboration in the language classroom, we aim to promote intercultural awareness and understanding in our pupils.
Our tools
OpenSim Virtual World
An engaging 3D virtual world where pupils can work together in a closed environment.
The OpenSim platform provides a safe, attractive and interactive environment for intercultural exchanges between schools in different countries.
This virtual world was created for language learning and offers countless possibilities for having pupils work together online, on any level: introducing oneself, discussing habits, solving problems...
Teachers can quickly build extra buildings or landscapes if necessary so as to tailor the environment to their specific needs. The potential of this virtual world is in its multimodality: pupils can interact with their peers from abroad by speaking, listening, writing and reading. They love it!
Big Blue Button
Video communication software that allows voice chat, text chat and document sharing - all at the same time.
BigBlueButton is an open source video conferencing platform used as a medium for performing engaging intercultural language tasks. It allows people to meet and to communicate through different channels: webcam, microphone, voice chat and text chat.
What makes BigBlueButton really interesting for intercultural encounters is the possibility to share documents, such as pictures or PDF's: after uploading them in the presentation screen, one can comment upon them by chat (text and voice) but also by using the drawing panel.
BigBlueButton is integrated in the Moodle, so pupils and teachers will have almost everyting under one safe roof.
Tila Moodle Learning
A rich learning environment filled with resources and telecollaboration tools.
Moodle allows you to access, create and organize your telecollaboration sessions.
It contains all kinds of resources, such as teacher training materials, best practices and webinars. It also offers networking facilities (partner searching tool, discussion forum, meeting rooms with recorded videocommunication...) and elaborated telecollaboration tasks.
And of course it is the environment where pupils meet their peers from abroad: in the Moodle they can engage in wikis, text chat, discussion forums and videoconferencing.
Resources
All out resources can be found at the website of the E-LIVE project
Who we are
These institutions are part of the TILA consortium
Join us now!
Join the TILA / TeCoLa / E-LIVE project network now and learn everything about Telecollaboration.
Click on the button below to join the network.