The environment is easily customised by teachers without specialist IT knowledge, and provides a repository that enables teachers to re-use and share content.

"We addressed the 'school of tomorrow' - specifically the tools, content and instruments for teaching ten to fourteen year old pupils," says Gerard Queen of Learning and Teaching Scotland in Glasgow. "We developed a virtual school, a 3D Web-based front-end that resembles the typical locations in a school. So you have classrooms, a staff room for teachers, the learning resource library, etc., etc."

Funded under the European Commission's IST programme, some 150 children in 12 schools across Europe were involved with the project. ITALES developed authoring tools to let teachers create their own content, tools to let them manage this content as online courses for their learners and tele-presence tools for communication among teachers and learners. The final ITALES environment was piloted with schools in Scotland (secondary), Italy (primary and lower secondary) and Spain (primary and secondary).

From the teacher's perspective, ITALES provides a collection of authoring tools that they can use to prepare their own learning content. What makes the environment so useful, says Gerard, is that teachers can construct courses and course modules easily without having to call on IT support staff. "Teachers can customise each classroom for their pupils, then tell them what modules, for example maths, chemistry, etc., to follow. Access is password-protected and sensitive to the type of user - teacher, learner or guest. This means that, for example, learners do not have access to the teachers' staff room."

Overall feedback on the ITALES application, as given by both teachers and learners, was very encouraging. As well as structured evaluation data, typically in the form of questionnaires, the project also collected some useful anecdotal evidence. For example, one teacher said "I became comfortable using ITALES in a relatively short space of time although my pupils took to the 3D environment even quicker than me."

ITALES was completed at the end of June 2004 and, says Gerard, "Some partners, to varying degrees, are exploiting the results and tools of the project." For example, EPTRON of Madrid in Spain developed the ITALES 3D Web-based user interface. It is using ITALES as a basis for future developments of other 3D environments for education and training applications. As another example, the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (a research institute of the Limburg University Centre in Belgium) is further exploiting the authoring tool that it developed for the project.

ITALES is a School of Tomorrow (SoT) project which was part of VALNET, an ambitious scheme to validate five IST School of Tomorrow projects in 200 schools in 16 countries and integrate them with findings for the other seven SoT projects.

The final validation report of ITALES can be downloaded here:
http://www.eun.org/insight-pdf/valnet/ValNet_ITALES_final_report.pdf

You can also download the full version of the ITALES Brochure here:
http://www.itales.ltscotland.org.uk/publicdocs/ITALES_Brochure(Final).pdf