Web sites on mobile devices: speech organization through responsive web design

Using and teaching Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at school is becoming more and more important. On the one hand, ICTs allow schooling methodologies and contents to keep up to date; on the other hand, the young are fascinated by such instruments and their adoption at school would increase interest and participation to learning activities. In this way, the grave problem of school abandonment could also be better fought. The idea is to teach students an open source and general purpose software for presenting their homework; several types of software can be used, since there is no international standard adopted yet for the school. In this context, the most general and diffused methods can be applied, such as hypertexts over the Internet. The specific, very important tool considered here is web design, used to help the students organize contents and speeches. More precisely, responsive web technologies are used, where sites are scaled to distinct devices and screen dimensions (from 15 inches down to 5). Students are invited to organize contents according to the room available, choose the most important issues and present them gradually and properly. Using this technology, students are led to: (i) tailor presentation style and contents to heterogeneous device; (ii) strengthen their language in use and (iii) adapt their expressing capabilities to different media and contexts. This work was inspired by the INS Project, which is discussed first; considerations about responsive technologies and the proposed method follow.