Task-based learning and ICT: creative activities in the context of a European project

Task-based learning and ICT: creative activities
in the context of a European project
Manuela Delfino & Giuliana Dettori,
CNR, Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche - Genova, Italia

Valentina Lupi
Scuola Secondaria di I Grado “Don Milani-Colombo” & Università di Genova, Italia

Summary

The dissemination of innovation at school may be supported by favouring the exchange of
educational materials and reflections, leading teachers to learn from each other’s experiences.
This was the main goal of Efelcren, a Comenius 2.1 project which aimed to boost the creation
and collection of inventive and effective ICT-based educational materials for all school levels.

The project was based on two simple but powerful ideas: 1) helping teachers to exploit the
variety of software available in order to develop innovative and creative activities with their
students; 2) sharing not only educational materials but also pedagogical competences.

In this paper we describe two activities proposed by the Italian team that well illustrate the spirit
of this project. Though different in aspects concerning the length of the activities, the content
knowledge addressed, the kind of tasks proposed and the ICT tools used, the examples we
describe share several qualities. In both cases students were asked to create a particular
product according to their interests and experiences and directed to a public outside the
classroom, and therefore real. In both cases they were also requested to use creativity and they
were totally free to conduct the activity, leading them to feel protagonists and responsible for
their own outcomes. Both activities can be easily adapted to different educational situations,
because their strength depends on the underlying ideas more than on the products developed.

The innovation of these examples is not the methodology nor the technology applied, but rather
the way they are used. These examples suggest that working in inventive ways may actually be
effective and not difficult nor expensive to implement. To this end, teachers need to use
creativity in their pedagogical planning and learn to look at ordinary tools with different eyes.

Keywords: pedagogy, ICT tools, task-based learning, creativity at school, Efelcren, Comenius,
Italy, open source, educational software, re-use creative material

1 Introduction
The diffusion of innovative approaches and ideas in the school can be supported by favouring
the sharing of educational materials together with reflections on their use, hence leading
teachers to learn from each other’s experience (Busetti et al., 2006). This was the focus and
concern of Efelcren 1 , a Comenius 2.1 project which involved researchers and teachers from six
European countries 2 , with the aim to boost the construction and collection of creative and
innovative ICT-mediated educational materials for all school levels.
1
Educational flexible and creative environments, 226552-CP-1-2005-1-ES-COMENIUS-C21, run from October 2005
to September 2008, see the project website http://efelcren.cesga.es/.
2
Spain (project leader), Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy and Lithuania.

eLearning Papers • www.elearningpapers.eu • 1
Nº 16 • September 2009 • ISSN 1887-1542

The project was based on two simple but powerful ideas: 1) helping teachers to exploit the
variety of applicative software currently available to develop stimulating activities with their
students; 2) sharing not only educational materials but also pedagogical competence and
experience, and to do it on a large scale, beyond the limits of one’s own school and country.

The focus, hence, was not on educational software, but on the use of technological tools that
can play the role of authoring environments. These can allow teachers to implement their ideas
without needing to learn programming, as well as to guide their students to build simple learning
artefacts, so as to promote their active and creative involvement. Attention was paid, in
particular, to free and open source authoring software, in order to favour the re-use of materials
and activities, independently of schools’ financial means and without violating copyright
constraints. The fact to easily create personalized materials, rather than using educational
software, grants teachers greater freedom in the choice of a learning approach, and at the
same time highlights the importance to choose a methodology.

All the materials proposed within the project were developed or tested with at least one group of
students. They range from simple exercises up to long, compound tasks, and belong to five
different types: interactive activities (games, simulations, tests, puzzles, etc.); conceptual maps;
multimedia presentations; webquests and treasure hunts; creative use of media (graphical
projects, animations, etc.). Some materials were developed by the teachers for their students,
and are ready to be re-used as such. Some others were developed by the teachers with their
students; in this case the material consists in the description of the experience and the idea
underlying it, to be possibly replicated and adapted to other school contexts.

Each material was completed by a pedagogical guide for teacher and student as well as by an
information sheet describing its technical characteristics, pedagogical intentions and use
outcomes, together with suggestions to adapt it to different educational contexts. All resources
were translated in English (that was used as interchange language), and those that were
judged as best practices were translated in all of the project languages. Both originals and
translations were collected in an online Resource centre 3 which is freely available to anybody
interested in sharing and re-using creative and innovative educational materials.

In this paper we describe two of the artefacts proposed by the Italian team that well illustrate the
spirit of the project. They differ as concerns length, content knowledge, kinds of activity
proposed and ICT tools employed, but share an active approach to learning, the use of non-
standard activities, and the incentive to creativity. We discuss their organization and main
aspects, and conclude with some reflections on what can be learned from the project’s
experience.

2 Two examples of creative materials
The two considered materials are addressed to junior high school students and consist in the
description of an experience. They can be seen as good examples of task-based learning, a
methodology that is widely used in language learning (Ellis, 2003; Willis and Willis, 2007), but
has been investigated also in relation to learning in other fields (e.g., van Weet and Pilot, 2004).
It consists in actively involving students in joint work on tasks that are relevant to their
experience and make sense for them, and therefore contribute to raise intrinsic motivation
(Ryan and Deci, 2000; Kawachi, 2003). Its implementation entails the definition of a number of
limited, self-consistent tasks (micro-tasks) that contribute to the realization of a wider one
(macro-task), which, in turn, motivates the development and increases the significance of the
micro-tasks (Guichon, 2006).

3
http://efelcren.cesga.es/center/


The accent on meaning is of primary importance, especially for language learning applications,
where it is considered a critical factor to activate linguistic learning (Skehan, 1996). According
to Ellis (2003), meaningful tasks are worked out by:
− involving learners in pragmatic activities, rather than in exhibitions of knowledge;
− setting up activities that are perceived as real;
− requiring a definite, concrete, meaningful production;
− putting into play more than one ability;
− stimulating learners’ cognitive processes by means of operations such as selection,
classification, evaluation, problem solving.

2.1 Non-profit advertising

The first activity was realized within an optional course on “Multimedia technology” run one hour
a week in afternoon hours in a computer lab with the aim to improve students’ competence in
the use of ICT tools. It took place in the final part of the school year and lasted about two
months.

The macro-task planned by the teacher was the design and realization of a set of non-profit
advertisements, to be displayed on the school walls, on themes chosen by the students. While
commercial advertisements are designed to encourage the purchase or consumption of a
particular product or service, social advertising aims to call attention on social issues and
attempts to promote positive behavioural changes in relation to those issues. Proposing such
activity aimed to avoid making the practice of ICT tools an end in itself by requiring the
realization of a concrete and cognitively meaningful product. At the same time, it also aimed to
help pursue some wider learning aims: motivating the students to concentrate on work by
means of a creative activity; observing the school and out-of-school contexts; becoming aware
of personal values; paying attention to multimedia communication; producing a convincing
representation of a positive message. These additional aims, besides leading to a better
exploitation for the learning time, would lead the students to give meaning to the use of ICT
tools, hence possibly inducing a deeper operational understanding. The students were
therefore expected to learn by:
− developing a product;
− applying different technological tools, under teacher guidance;
− experimenting different presentation means (images, texts and formats);
− selecting tools and means most suitable to express what they had in mind.

This overall activity was segmented in various micro-tasks: (a) understanding the concept of
social communication; (b) observing and analysing social advertising campaigns 4 ; (c) choosing
an issue on which they felt worth calling people’s attention and figuring out related positive
contents to sensitize people on; (d) practising and getting acquainted with a presentation
software; (e) writing and formatting texts in the form of an advertisement (e.g., aiming at
catching the readers’ attention); (f) selecting appropriate images and handling them with the
help of graphics and photo editing software; (f) assembling the elaboration.

The technological tools used for realization were: a presentation program (i.e., allowing the
insertion of text and images in the same page), a digital camera, a scanner to capture drawings
and images that were not in digital format, a browser to look for pictures on the web, and a
graphic program to edit images.

A small group of 10 students (6th and 7th grade) was involved in the course, half of which with
cognitive difficulties or socio-cultural problems. It was therefore decided to let the students free
to work individually or to collaborate in small groups, according to their preferences and
learning needs. Some negotiation within the whole group was carried out in the initial planning
phase, so as to grant uniformity to the global output. At the beginning, the teacher directed the

4
http://www.pubblicitaprogresso.it/


lessons and scaffolded the work; then her intervention progressively faded so as to allow the
students to shape their own path and feel directly responsible for their choices and results.

For the students this experience was different from a traditional school task and hence
accepted it with pleasure, feeling proud to have the chance to suggest personal messages to
their school mates and teachers.
The outcomes of the activity were very satisfactory. The students learned to use the
technological tools provided and managed to choose a suitable issue, creating positive
messages and expressive representations to convey them. They appreciated both the freedom
to choose themes that were important for them and the chance to work in groups of non-
predetermined size. The teacher, on her side, could reap the rewards of her efforts aimed at
increasing her students’ skills to collaborate and to manage their learning time. Thanks to the
very precise scaffolding that the teacher had applied in the previous months, the backfire
dynamics that could have been triggered by the granted freedom did not occur; on the contrary,
the students made a good use of the trust gained, and this increased their motivation and self-
esteem, with a positive effect on their general attitude towards school.

A variety of themes were chosen by the students, according to their sensitivity, interests and
personal experiences. For example, the daughter of a smoker with lung cancer made an
advertisement against smoke; two students – after the renewal of the classrooms’ doors and the
change of their opening side - warned their mates to be careful while walking in the hallway;
and a boy who had been reprimanded for swinging on his chair during the morning lessons
made a funny poster aiming at discouraging such a practice (see Fig. 1). In this last case, the
student arranged to take a picture of a class mate pretending to have tumbled down, which
provided an opportunity to reflect on how easy it can be to make constructed situations seem
real.

Figure 1. Two of the posters realized by the students for the non-profit advertising activity: the
one on the left warns to mind the doors (“Mind the doors, or you will lose your chin!”); the one
on the right invites the readers not to swing on the chairs (“If you swing you will tumble down”).

The ICT tools used were simple and widely diffused, available as free software, hence likely at
disposal in all schools. Nevertheless, they appear essential for the good realization of the task:
in a traditional setting it would be much more difficult and time consuming to make graphical
compositions, and to repeatedly (fast and free) take pictures or try different text styles and
colours up to obtain satisfactory outcomes, hence missing the possibility to call students’
attention on multimedia communication and voiding the activity of an important learning aim.

This short lab task was one of several steps planned by the teacher to meet specific contextual
needs. The described activity, however, is not the only possible way to exploit such a task in a
school context: it could, for instance, be carried out as a preliminary step to develop an analysis


of public communication campaigns (Rice and Atkin, 2000), or to reflect on the marketing
strategies addressed to teen-agers (Apple, Kenway and Singh, 2005).

2.2 A multimedia laboratory for language learning

The second of the considered materials includes a compound set of activities realized in a
multimedia lab for language learning over a period of about six months. This was an optional
opportunity offered by a junior high school to improve students’ competence in the two foreign
languages they were studying (English and French), while practising with the use of ICT tools.
This lab had been traditionally run by assigning drill-and-practice, grammatical and lexical
exercises on CDs, complemented by shared meta-linguistic reflection under teacher’s
guidance. When a new teacher of French got in charge of the lab, she decided to innovate the
activity by changing the pedagogical approach and by introducing a meaningful use of the
Internet.

The chosen approach was task-based learning. Following this line, the teacher planned as
macro-task the realization by the students of a bilingual web site for the lab, to be included in
the school web site. This would contain linguistic activities of various kinds (micro-tasks)
designed and implemented by the students; publication on the web would allow to share them
with school mates and potentially with any peer around the world interested in practising with
French and English.

The students who had volunteered to take part in this bilingual lab were divided into two groups,
according to the grade (nine 6-graders in Group 1, ten 7- and 8-graders in Group 2). Within
each group, smaller working groups were formed, with 2 or 3 members each, for the execution
of the various activities; subgroup composition changed over the time, based on the exercises
that the students wished to develop. The two main groups worked usually separately, except for
an initial joint brainstorming to spot activities of common interest, and a planning meeting to
negotiate the appearance and organization of the web site.

The activities were chosen so as to meet students’ interests (games, videos, music) and entail
the practice of several language-related skills. The English teacher got involved as well; hence
it was possible to realize activities in the two languages in parallel. Skills that received particular
attention were: oral production, which usually does not receive enough space in classroom
work; written comprehension, by retrieving and using authentic sites in foreign languages; and
translation between English and French without passing through Italian, so as to break the
expressive dependence from the mother language. The lab was run in parallel to the regular
language classes; it involved the same content knowledge but developed independently of
them.

The CDs used in the previous years became a source of inspiration for contents to be
addressed (lexical and grammatical structures) as well as for types of exercises to develop
(crossword puzzles, matching, selection and fill the gap exercises, mixed-up texts, etc.). All the
exercises were designed by the students, who implemented them by means of some authoring
environments 5 . This non-standard way to use the CDs allowed the teachers to avoid some of
their limitations for classroom work, (i.e., orientation to individual work, mostly drill-and-practice
exercises, frequent technical problems; see Lupi, 2009).

The students, moreover, scripted and realized some short videos, where two or three of them
were having a conversation in foreign language. These videos also served as basis for
listening-comprehension exercises (see, Fig. 2).

5
HotPotatoes, http://hotpot.uvic.ca/, a commercial software which is granted for free to publicly funded educational
institution, and Virtual Training Studio (VTS), http://virtual-training-studio.en.softonic.com/, a free multimedia
authoring environment. Both programs allow one to save the products created in html format. While HotPotatoes
proved very simple and straightforward to use, VTS resulted difficult to understand and source of technical problems.


Figure 2. An exercise realized by the students: a video where they are playing a short
conversation, and related listening-comprehension exercises.

Other realizations were: the construction of two blogs (in English and French respectively) to
exchange opinions with peers around the world (see, Fig.3), some pages presenting their
evaluation of game sites (in French or English) retrieved from the web (see, Fig. 4), and sets of
questions on well known movies (e.g., Harry Potter’s) and Francophone or Anglophone singers
that they liked.

Figure 3. An exercise realized by the students: blogs in English and French.


Figure 4. An exercise realized by the students: evaluation page of linguistic games in French.

All these productions, together with a self-presentation of the participants, were then assembled
in a web site 6 designed by the students (see, Fig. 5). The html for the introductory pages was
prepared by the teacher, in order to save time, while the activity pages had been saved by the
students in html format and were ready to be linked and used.

Figure 5. The home page of the Lab’s web site.

The simplification of the implementation phase allowed the students to dedicate almost all the
time at disposal to the preparation of the language-related activities, leaving to the site-related
tasks (preparation of the figures and assembling of the web site) only the last two classes. The
most time consuming activity was, obviously, the preparation of the videos and related
exercises, which required about three months, since it entailed scripting the scenes, expressing
them in the two languages, preparing to play them by learning the text and practising the
correct pronunciation, recording (often more than once, so as to obtain satisfactory videos
without editing), preparing the related questions. The grammatical and lexical exercises, which
were worked out mainly by Group 1 (the beginners), absorbed a couple of months, as they
required the choice of grammatical structures and vocabulary to practise, as well as their
appropriation and re-use. Only slightly less time consuming was the evaluation of game sites,
which entailed trying the different games; this activity was carried out only by Group 2, as it

6
It is still at disposal in the school web site http://www.lucacambiaso.it/sito_scuola_definitivo/. Unfortunately this lab
activity was discontinued from the next school years for bureaucratic reasons.


requires a language knowledge that the beginners did not have yet. Less time consuming
(about a month) were the exercises based on sets of questions, since these are conceptually
simpler tasks. Non all students worked on everything, but only a choice of activities, as shown
in Table 1.

Table 1. The activities carried out in the bilingual multimedia lab
realizations specific activities working mode
Bilingual exercises with Hot - crossword puzzles 4 groups of 2-3
Group 1 Potatoes based on the - quizzes (multiple choice exercises) students
previously used CDs - association exercises
- filling the gap exercises
- mixed-up texts
- cloze exercises
Short videos with VTS, - 4 short videos in French 4 groups of 2-3
scripted and played by the - 4 short video in English students
students with
comprehension questions
Creation of 2 blogs - blog in French on “Le web 2 groups, one
Group 2 Pédagogique”7 for each blog
- blog in English on Blog.com 8
Evaluation documents on - 5 documents commenting web site that 5 groups of 2-3
games and languages offer games for language learning students
Various activities with VTS - multiple choice questions on image 5 groups of 2-3
descriptions students
- quiz on Harry Potter’s movie
- quiz on an American singer and
comprehension questions on a French
song
- videos in French and English with
understanding questions

All the ICT tools were used to support the execution of operations that otherwise would have
been more complicated or impossible. The available educational software was used in non-
standard way (i.e., as a source of inspiration for individual production rather than as a study
means), hence motivating and stimulating creativity. This is an important point, because
creativity is increasingly recognized as an essential life skill that can help us cope with the
complexity and uncertainty of our rapidly changing world (Craft et al., 2008).

Using the Internet allowed the students to get in touch with authentic documents, which is very
important in language learning. Publishing the work on the web, moreover, resulted essential to
grant a real audience. Internet is a window on the world that may be useful not only to
communicate or to retrieve information, but also to propose one’s work to the outside. Besides
motivating the students, this helped them to become aware that languages are tools to
communicate with real people, not simply school subjects, with a positive influence on the
overall learning.

The realization of this task was a success, as the students worked with pleasure and high
engagement throughout the months and produced rich, pleasant and varied artefacts. No major
difficulties were met. All linguistic skills were put into play as expected, and this led to a steady
improvement of students’ language competence. A group was even able to improvise while
recording a video, which is quite an achievement for novice language speakers. ICT skills were
also improved, as a side effect of using a variety of tools (text and presentation editors, two
authoring environments, browser for web surfing and blog creation). This success was certainly
favoured by the small size of the work groups, which allowed a wide differentiation of the
activities, as well as matching students’ activities and preferences as much as possible.

7
http://lewebpedagogique.com/
8
http://blog.com/?affiliate=poweredby


Finally, the whole activity was much valued by other teachers and the students’ families, who
posted appreciation sentences in the visitors’ book provided in the web site; for example:
“Splendid. Congratulations to you and your teachers” (the school principal); “You are very
capable and active; go on like that” (a mother); “I am very proud of the work of these kids, one
of which is my grandson” (a grandmother).

3 Discussion and conclusion
Though different as concerns length, content knowledge addressed, kinds of activity proposed
and ICT tools used, the described examples show several common features. In both cases:
− the students were asked to build a concrete product which was meaningful against their
interests and experience;
− they needed to coordinate with peers for the construction of a joint output;
− they had a good amount of freedom in steering the activity, which led them to feel
protagonists and responsible for their outcomes;
− they were requested to use creativity, but were also helped in it by being suggested
meaningful examples as starting points to be re-elaborated and transformed;
− they were not working for their teacher, but for an audience larger than their class. This
made the tasks real and motivated students’ commitment because a real public was
potentially viewing and judging their work;
− the products’ realization required creativity; this can be positive for learning in that the
creative pleasure appears to support both its cognition and motivation;
− several simple and freely available ICT tools were used, not as gadgets to make the
activity more pleasant, but instrumentally to accomplish some cognitively meaningful
tasks, and were always crucial to realize them;
− the designed activities can be easily adapted to different educational situations and
become part of a compound learning path, because their strength does not rely on a
particular tool or content addressed, but on the educational ideas behind them.

The success of the two described activities is mainly due to the fact that a suitable methodology
was chosen and carefully implemented. The tasks were meaningful in relation to both students’
interests and content learning; they not only included meaningful activities to carry out, but also
entailed a number of choices by the students, which made them feel responsible for the
outcomes of their work. The presence of a macro-task proved crucial in giving a unitary
meaning to the micro-tasks developed and in keeping up attention and motivation throughout
the activities. Moreover, the tasks were engaging because they involved student’s choices,
were addressed to a public outside the classroom, entailed the realization of a concrete,
meaningful product and put into play important cognitive activities.

What is innovative in these examples? Task-based learning is not a novelty, as it has been
around for over a decade, and it is widely referred to, especially in the field of language
learning. Nor can any of the ICT tools used be considered new and highly innovative.
Nevertheless, both described activities show novelty aspects because of the way tools and
methodology were used. In both cases, the assigned macro-task was different from the typical
examples of ICT-based macro-tasks mentioned in the literature, such as microworlds,
webquests, simulations and problem situations (Guichon, 2006; Narcy-Combes, 2005).

These examples are well representative of the possible impact of the materials collected in the
Efelcren project as source of ideas. Their different lengths highlight that creative tasks can be
developed in different ways, and not always it is necessary to have much time at disposal to
carry out a rich and stimulating activity. The simplicity of the technological tools used underline
that inventive tasks may not require new tools and may not be difficult nor expensive to realize.
To this end, it is important that teachers use creativity in their pedagogical planning and look at
usual tools with different eyes.


References

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politics, New York: Peter Lang.
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Educational Materials. In Nejdl, W. & Tochtermann, K. (eds.), Innovative Approaches for Learning and
Knowledge Sharing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4227, Berlin: Springer, 61-73.
Craft, A., Cremin, T. & Burnard, P. (2008). Creative learning 3-11. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guichon, N. (2006). Langues et TICE- Méthodologie de conception multimedia. Paris, Ophrys.
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Ryan, R. M, & Deci E. L.(2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social
development, and well-being. American Psychologist. 55(1), 68-78.
Skehan, P. (1996). A Framework for the Implementation of Task-based Instruction. Applied Linguistics,
17(11), 38-62.
van Weert, T. J. & Pilot, A. (2003). Task-Based Team Learning with ICT, Design and Development of
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Authors

Manuela Delfino
Researcher
CNR, Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, Italia

Giuliana Dettori
Researcher
CNR, Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, Italia

Valentina Lupi
Teacher
Scuola Secondaria di I Grado “Don Milani-Colombo” & Università di Genova, Italia

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Task-based learning and ICT: creative activities in the context of a European project

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Task-based learning and ICT: creative activities in the context of a European project