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Cross-Atlantic Partnership

A partnership between Portsmouth High School and Collège/Lycée Maintenon in Hyères, France has begun to flourish with the support of RIEPS and RINET's Video Conferencing service. The initial phase of the project culminates next year with two exchange trips during which the French students will visit Portsmouth and attend classes at Portsmouth High School and then Portsmouth students will visit Hyères and attend classes at the Collège/Lycée Maintenon. The project has the following objectives:

To improve French/English foreign language acquisition in the two schools with an emphasis on achieving greater functionality in language usage.
To facilitate comparisons of student life, the organization of teaching and the operational environments of the two schools with the aim of sharing best practices.
To achieve a better understanding and appreciation of culture and society in France and the United States at local, regional and national levels.
To establish sound communication links that can provide the basis for a continuing and evolving partnership between the two schools in future years.

The students have already met virtually during a videoconference made possible by RINET's membership in Internet2, and supported by RINET staff. The conversation opened with a panel discussion on movies and music as the students started to learn about each other's culture. It was an exciting, but anxious, first meeting for the students. You can learn more about the videoconference in a recent article from the Sakonnet Times available on the Internet at http://www.eastbayri.com/story/291723475377268.php.

The students and teachers will use the Rhode Island Electronic Portfolio System (RIEPS) to support the classroom work of the project. RIEPS is based on the Open Source Portfolio, part of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) offered by RINET to support instruction in Rhode Island classrooms. The CLE provides online tools that allow project members to post announcements, share resources, post and respond to assignments, share project calendars, and participate in online chats and discussion forums. A Project Site has been created for this project and the staff and students from both schools have been added as participants. More about RIEPS can be found at http://www.ri.net/RINET/products/portfolio/index.html.

More information about the Portsmouth/Maintenon project can be found on the project web site at http://phs-maintenon.monsite.orange.fr/.

RINET hosted second annual Rhode Island Sakai Conference

Being a high school student isn't what it used to be. To graduate, Rhode Island students should be able to do as well as know. The Rhode Island Board of Regents and Department of Education have created a high-school diploma system that is drawing the attention of states from across the country. In addition to standardized tests, Rhode Island students demonstrate proficiencies and critical thinking skills by applying course information and skills to real-world projects and problems. RINET (Rhode Island Network for Educational Technology), is working with the Department of Education to provide a technical solution to help students gather and present a supporting body of their work. The Rhode Island Electronic Portfolio System (RIEPS) is based on the Open Source Portfolio, part of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment. In April 2009, RINET hosted a successful Sakai Conference which brought together 150 teachers, administrators, technology support staff and even students from around the nation to share ideas on teaching and learning with Sakai.

What is Sakai? Sakai is a free, open source Collaborative Learning Environment, that carries the tag "Free to Use, Free to Develop, Freedom for Education." Often used to support ad hoc group collaboration, portfolios and research collaboration, Sakai is unique for its "Community Source." Sakai is built and maintained by the global Sakai community. Through the two day event, RINET notably again served as K-12 Sakai Conference host and drew great interest from those looking to further explore the use of Sakai in a K-12 environment. As a true Sakai success story, RINET shared its implementation of the open source platform that currently supports 11 districts, 25 high schools, 26,000 students, 1,900 teachers, 13,000 courses and over 100,000 assignments! Conference attendees explored and discussed topics from ePortfolio to professional development to advanced course offerings and course credit retrieval, all reinforcing that Sakai is more than a portfolio system. It is an entire collaborative learning environment. RINET looks forward to continued efforts to spread the word on Sakai, further building upon the community and fostering a platform of pooled resources, partnerships, and most importantly, knowledge sharing.