UnderstandIT: A community of practice of teachers for VET education

Social Networks are among the most popular achievements of Web 2.0. As a matter of fact, the Internet is full of social communities like Facebook or Twitter or others, which are used not only by teenagers but also by older users to share experiences, information and opinions. The expression Social Network allows for a wide interpretation, coming from the research in social and behavioral sciences. It also lends itself to encompass a kind of more thematically vertical communities, namely Communities of Practice, where groups of people interested to learn a particular practice are supported in achieving this goal thanks to the professional relationships with expert peers. The community network evolves with time, as novice users become experts in turn, and new communication protocols arise. We start from the consideration that most high school students nowadays use Web 2.0 instruments and tools for chatting, streaming or posting messages. An interesting challenge is the possibility for teachers the use of the same instruments and tools to enhance their daily work. To this aim, we present a first study of a Community of Practice of teachers, involved in Vocational Education and Training (VET), aiming at learning the use of Web 2.0 tools and applications to support the learning process of their pupils. In practice, we propose to use Web 2.0 to learn to teach through Web 2.0. As a platform we used the web application ELGG, that is an open source social network engine thanks to which we built a social environment where a sample of VET teachers participated to several social activities. A first evaluation of effectiveness of such an approach is encouraging. Copyright © 2014 SCITEPRESS.