Teaching Resources

Portale eniscuola.net/it

Eni

2000

Web Site/Portal, Downloadable material

Basic, Medium

Problem solving, Experiential learning

Life Chemistry, Materials Science, Environmental Chemistry

Primary School, Lower Secondary School

Italian

No

The prerequisites
The students have to be able to surf the Net and explore a web site in order to find information or solutions of a problem. It could be useful to have a good knowledge of measurement system (length, capacity and especially weight).

Contents, aims and task description
The website aim is to give teachers and students extensive information on energy and environment issues.In the home page, opening the grey links in the higher bar, you can find documents, pictures, graphs, charts, experiments and interviews about these 7 subjects:
- Energy
- Air
- Water
- Earth Life
- Ecosystems
- Space
For each subject there are 4 “focuses”:Sustainability, Games and quiz, Multimedia, Appointments and news.In particular Multimedia (Mediateca in Italian) offers a lot of interesting videos and experiments that could be useful in class, either in Primary or in Secondary school.The texts and vocabulary quality is instead suitable for pupils of Secondary school (in the first and second grade); for Primary School you can download a pdf format file (the junior version), but it is a single page that summarizes the several resources available for higher levels of school.

How to use it in class
The website is a very rich source of information either for teacher’s planning and preparation or for students’ studying; It can be used in class in various ways, related to the teacher’s objectives and his style and methodology. For instance:
- the teacher can find and show to the class reproductions of experiments difficult to make in classroom for logistical problems or lack of time and then ask children to implement the conclusions they had previously reached with their former experiments or discussions;
- the teacher can ask the students to explore the topic they are studying in class (on which they have already reached some shared conclusions) in order to find new information or validations of their hypothesis and conclusions,
- the teacher can add the site to a list of sites the students have to explore to find answers to tests regarding topic already done.
- the site can be included among sites recommended for an individual or in-group study (in-depth), at school or at home.
As you can see, it is a resource useful to a “led-by-the-teacher” learning: the teacher prepares in advance the resource and the pupils can see or listen to it, but they can’t act (operate) directly on it (it’s not interactive).

Points of strength
The wealth of topics and resources.

Points of weakness
The home page is slightly dispersive and only when you carefully explore the site, you find MEDIATECA, the most interesting part.

Scientific reliability
The scientific reliability is good, although experiments and test are only displayed and there are not specific comments or explanations.

Pedagogic value
Good. Especially as regards the students’ chance to explore the site on their own, looking for connections between new topics and what they already know.

University of Genova