(440)“RAíZES/ROOTS”: EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA PROJECT ABOUTHISTORY AND TRADITIONS OF AZOREAN PEOPLE

摘要

We are today the Information Society, with a multitude of digital amazing and powerfulsolutions. The progress of education, science and culture is primarily a result of sharinginformation and creating new ways of learning and knowledge.This project aims to make better use of information technology, taking advantage of theeducational potential of interactive multimedia and hypermedia contents, thus allowing avirtual community which provides information and deepens the history and traditions ofthe Azorean around the world. In this context, this project includes two main objectives:the creation of interactive multimedia content to divulge the history of the Azores and theirtraditions to children from 4 to 12 years in schools in the Azores and emigratingcommunities in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, Brazil and Hawaii and the creationof a website to collect and share information, experiences and realities relevant to thedevelopment and validation of the project. In fact, this project allows to promote the useof new technologies as a support for motivator and efficient teaching and learning as it ispossible to collect and disseminate Azorean people traditions in the region and in theDiaspora, to promote sharing of experiences between generations and between spaceson the identity spirit, to use the Internet as a preferred means for establishing learningcommunities, information sharing and collaborative work, to fill the serious gap in theHistory of the Azores in the universe of educational material for any age group and toprovide greater fluency in Portuguese and English languages.Thus, it is essential to develop projects that take advantage of the potential of newtechnologies enabling a new fascination in school. Schools must open their walls andallow students and teachers to talk and search at their own time with other students andteachers in the same city, same country or the world, creating opportunities for new typesof collaboration, sharing resources, information and experiences to support thedevelopment and implementation of successful practices.The development of virtual environments, based on reading and writing of multimediadocuments and various forms of online communication, has emerged as a promisingstrategy of integration between theory and practice, interconnection of knowledge andcontext of learning. The interactive multimedia, in addition to ease of access toinformation in diverse formats, allows a proactive and dynamic interaction in informationanalysis and the establishment of new connections and interrelationships.It is essential to break the geographical discontinuity between schools and, especially,encourage, implement and evaluate the interaction of school, family and the community.Indeed, to the educational process in the information society, it is important collaborativework and partnerships that facilitate students learning, in particular, from the knowledgesociety in which they live and the natural and historic heritage of the region.It is necessary to establish deep integration between the society and school, betweenlearning and life: the classroom will be a continuous time-space of learning.In fact, the multimedia technologies applied to education for these age groups allow notonly a reference to knowledge, but an evolutionary process, the result of creativity andimagination, allowing in the future, a full citizenship.