Videoconferencing keeps Frisian language alive in secondary education
The Christian comprehensive school Bogerman is a broad comprehensive school for remedial education, lower secondary vocational education, higher general secondary education and college prep, and is actively integrating IT with its courses. Students in Sneek, Koudum and Wommels, can follow classes in Frisian, the language spoken in the province Friesland, through a videoconferencing link.
Many students are raised with Frisian as their mother tongue. Yet it's not possible for students to pass their final exams in Frisian because the current learning environment only allows Dutch as language. Few students choose Frisian as a subject, making a dedicated teacher simply too expensive. Stichting Afûk started a pilot project called Edufrysk: Four schools in Friesland are now working together to make remote education in Frisian possible. Videoconferencing is a handy tool, but it takes more than that to give classes. Students have to be able to hand in their assignments and teachers have to be able to correct them and give feedback. The schools can do just that by combining videoconferencing with an e-learning environment.
"The Province of Friesland gave a grant for the Edufrysk project. But the grant was only high enough to pay for videoconferencing system at two schools. We didn't have any experience with videoconferencing and didn't know which equipment we were supposed to use, how it worked and who we could hire to get things up and running," explains Francine Behnen, IT coordinator/teacher at CSG Bogerman and chairwoman of the IT Expertise Team of Christelijk Voortgezet Onderwijs (CVO) Zuid-West Fryslân (Christian secondary education South-West Friesland). "We finally found Talk & Vision. They made a list of the equipment we needed and installed two loan system until more grants became available,"continues Behnen. CSG Bogerman are now teaching three virtual classes in Frisian, and philosophy was recently added to the package.
"Working with videoconferencing equipment is challenging and somewhat complicated for the teachers. Behavior that isn't annoying in a normal class setting seems to be very annoying in a videoconferencing setting," says Behnen. "This teaching method confronts teachers with new problems. There's still a lot of work to do in terms of didactics. Should the focus be on the teachers or not? What do you, as a teacher, want to achieve with the students and what do you do with the students during the lesson?
Despite these problems, this type of education adds value to traditional education. It also has a social purpose, because it's a way of enabling geographically dispersed students to follow the courses they want to. The technology works, all we have to do is sort out the didactics."
Francine Behnen continues: "Talk & Vision installed the system and did the training to our full satisfaction. They are very helpful and the service is very good. Even when multi-site lessons are given across five locations, the connection is established through Talk & Vision's MCU bridge without any problems."
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About Stichting Afûk
Stichting Afûk was founded to promote education in Frisian and ensure the language remains alive.
About CVO Zuid-West Fryslân
CVO Zuid-West Fryslân is a foundation for secondary education that consists of four schools (one of which is CSG ‘Bogerman') in the south-westerly corner of Friesland, and is actively involved with the Frisian language and the integration of videoconferencing in education.
For further details, please contact:
WMX Communications, Events & Productions
Sandy Bergkamp
Telephone: +31 (0) 6 - 41340801
E-mail: sandybergkamp@videoconference.nl
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