EN DE

Online cooperation in your river project

Free your River is an ambitious project, which includes several phases. In any phase, your group can cooperate with other learning groups from your country or other countries. Incentives for cooperation may arise easily when several schools at the same river at the same time. A good example of this kind of cooperation is the project "Schools for a living Elbe", comprising 170 German and 20 Czech schools (BOSLER/LEHMANN 2002).

The web methods provided here help you develop cooperations. The main part of cooperations will run via the internet. Physical meetings of groups from different schools would be nice, but they are not a necessary part of the FyR project mainly due to lack of financial capacity. Schools can however, try by to raise their own funds for exchange teachers and pupils though programmes such as the EC Comenius programme.

Free your River has been planned under the vision that groups of learners (teachers along with their pupils) will work through the complete program. Nevertheless, FyR offers the flexibility for these groups to decide their level of participation according to their own goals. This means that some groups with a strong focus on the FyR program may work through the whole program, whereas others such as those working on the local agenda 21 may only briefly interact with their river. Therefore, the work of a group is described here only in an ideal manner, and the web methods are to be taken as examples to select from. Decisions related to goals, choice of investigation methods, nature and extent of practical actions, nature and extent of cooperation with groups from other schools, and the evaluation of their results/achievements/performances are all done locally by learning groups.

In the Didactical guidelines, you can find our idea of a river project, but here you can read how to integrate the online cooperation in the several phases of such a project.