Using web Radio as a Pedagogical Tool: Skills Development and Collaborative Learning.

Radio has been used in education since the beginning of last century. With the rise of the internet, web radio came into life and provided new possibilities for web radio content (e.g. video apart from voice and music), asynchronous broadcast, and cooperation between students from different schools. In this paper, we present our experiences with the NEStOR (Networked European School Web Radio) project, which promotes web radio as an educational tool. The NEStOR project employs the European School Radio, a collaborative web radio station, where schools participate with both entertaining and educational radio shows produced exclusively by students (http://www.europeanschoolradio.eu). This paper presents the skills and the dexterities that students can develop, when web radio process is used as a pedagogical tool within this framework. As part of an introduction to digital tools, creating a web-radio production allows students to get involved in group projects, where they can discuss and reflect on various subjects (intra- and extra-curricular), and collaborate in order to produce a radio show. Moreover, while students search information online for their radio production, they gain information literacy skills and develop critical thinking, as they have to filter the information that is available on the internet. The process of finding information and music for a radio show and the process of recording the final production help students to develop also media literacy skills. We conclude there, that web-radio activities may be employed in classrooms to promote the aforementioned skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]