by teachers willing to use a given tool or software to set up a concept map or a video footage for a project or to create a class blog or a website, to store and share their students products) or they are used at a ‘system’ level by all teachers 2) whether technologies are used occasionally or systematically, by teachers and students, creating productive networks of software and tools and capitalising sharable resources that can be implemented from that time on within the different subjects/areas of the school curriculum 3) whether technologies are used not just to show but to ‘make’ things that students can easily and immediately visualize or even ‘touch and feel’ as their own creation, gaining that sort of awareness and short term feedback that would work as a powerful drive, boosting up further activities. It looks there is a big difference in the outcomes of technologies integration into teaching activities depending on a few key factors: 1) whether technologies are adopted on a sort of individual basis (e.g. The Primary aim and theme of this project, carried out during the last 4 years and still in progress in six middle school classes of an Italian state school, beyond that of integrating specific tools and software in a TEFL/ESL context, has been the experimenting and successful integration of a blended learning - web based - environment with an immersive, opensim based, environment into one multi-layered learning environment that could be easily reproduced at class or school level. The primary aim has been the cooperative construction of ‘one' three-layered (real world + web + virtual world), synergic, learning environment that would increase students engagement by challenging their cognitive, socio-emotional and making skills and propose itself as a functional model of blended environment for the whole educational community. A Learning Management System (Google Apps for Education), fully integrated with free/open web tools, open source software and a school virtual world 3D environment based on Sim-on-a-stick and OpenSim, through overlapping ‘making' activities based on coding (Scratch animations), textual collaborative editing (Google Drive/Doc), web design (Mozilla html tools) to graphic design of 3d shapes (Blender) and virtual world texturing, building and scripting “learning objects” on prims. AbstractCross-curricular, content-based CLIL learning paths have been experienced extensively in a middle school class TEFL context, with students aged 11 to 13 for a period of three years.
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