30 May 2025 / 10 House
IN THE NEWS: Enciclomedia
Enciclomedia leaflet
Mexican school children are fast gaining access to 21st. century digital education, thanks to a major new initiative that’s raising eyebrows around the world: the Enciclomedia project has been called ‘the world’s largest interactive classroom project’, and was the subject of a seminar in London at the recent BETT 2007 exhibition. (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
The Guardian called it ‘probably the world’s bravest, most imaginative and ambitious implementation of education technology - putting interactive whiteboards into 165,000 state primary schools by the end of this year...’
The emphasis, however, is less on infrastructure and more on state-of-the-art interactive content: the entire school curriculum has been re-vamped, with the active support of the publisher of the curriculum itself - the Mexican government.
‘We are designing a new learning community in the classroom which includes children and teachers in a dramatically and radically redesigned learning space’, says Raúl Medina Mora, the education consultant behind the project.
From the examples shown by Dr. Medina at the BETT seminar, the aim of bringing the curriculum alive by packing the digitised version full of photo’s, artwork, film, sound and animations is certainly being fulfilled. A huge budget and years of painstaking development certainly helps...
The History section of Enciclomedia for 5th-6th Grades (10-12-year-olds) consists of a series of highly interactive, child-friendly ‘books’: Dr. Medina demonstrated highlights from the ‘Mexican History’ volume, focusing on the counting system of the Maya...
... and on exploring archaeological sites - in this case Tikal in Guatemala - with the aid of dramatic 360-degree panoramic views and atmospheric jungle sounds.
Partnerships between Mexican and British educational technology companies have been at the heart of much of the development of the Enciclomedia project.
Mexicolore hopes to collaborate with ILCE (Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicación Educativa), the developers of Enciclomedia, in trialling the software behind the Aztecs ‘chapter’, in English, by British primary schools delivering the topic for Key Stage 2 in the National Curriculum. Watch this space...!
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Enciclomedia leaflet
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