Classics Teaching Through ICT Experience to ICT Manual for Classics Teachers

Background

What is CIRCE? It is the research of the intersection between Information and Communication Technology and Latin & Ancient Greek or Classic Civilizations, fruit of year by year studies in ICT (there is a very long list of authors) and experimentations in schools all over Europe and it could give an answer to many questions, from pedagogical to technical issues, as teachers directly involved could implement step by step their daily work with classrooms. ICT revolution did get all over in our life, in the educational world too the impact has been very important (Salomon & Perkins, 1991), transforming methodologies in teaching and approaches in learning. Computers did create a new interaction system between educational partners, teachers and learners (Jonassen, 1995). So traditional educational systems all over Europe have been changed and innovated in recent years so quickly through Information and Communication Technology (Calvani, 2000). The life of Classic Languages & Cultures has been unchanged a very long time because there were matters left too long apart from technological progress and the problem was due to the secular unchanged transmission of contents, generation by generation, going exclusively round the paper books through three phases of work: reading, translating, and studying to memory. In this chapter, we cannot write all of the history of ICT development in educational world of course, but we will cite some representative articles.

Morgan (1999) in Derby Grammar School did implement ICT in his teacher work about Ancient Greek. His purpose was to stimulate and improve students’ learning. This experience such as other CIRCE partners works and studies want to show what and how in Classics teaching too Information and Communication Technology can completely be used by all Classics Teachers. Midoro, Olimpo, and Persico (1996) did show in their studies the important evolution of teacher role and student profile in this scenario, as perfectly described and analyzed by many of other ICT and Didactics specialists, such as Calvani (1994, 1995, 1998), Kumar and Smart (2004), Taylor (1980), Varani (2002), and Varisco (1998), citing some of them.

After we have considered these details, we hope that CIRCE Manual (4 Chapters, 109 pages) and CIRCE Web site can be time by time a “compendium” of all theories and practices in ICT & classics.