The development of this curricular material is done using a new technology called Wiki. Wiki is a collaborative website whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it: in this case all interested teachers can contribute to it.
Moreover Wiki itself allows teachers to communicate online with each other, exchanging
suggestions and informations.
Right now the site contains around one hundred simulations but has been built in such a way that can grow easily to contain up to a few hundred simulations.
All the accumulated material can also be used offline without access to Internet, which is a big advantage considering that in our region many schools have poor Internet connections.
This offline use can be done by downloading the online material to a cd-rom. Altough this can be done directly in schools by interested teachers, we preferred to start by creating a few hundred cd-roms and giving them free of charge to teachers during a short three-hours course that we organize from time to time.
This course is done in a computer lab similar to what almost all schools already have. We show teachers how to use the cd-rom and how to contribute to the creation of the curricular units. This approach has been successful in disseminating the use of valuable Internet resources that were difficult to use and often completely unknown before, at least in the schools in our region.
The portal has been created to last and grow for many years with minimum effort needed for its maintenance. The original material developed is freely available for non commercial use, so we expect that, when our project will be known elsewhere in Italy, teachers from other regions will start to use it and collaborate to it.
The address of Fisica 2005 is: http://www.ba.infn.it/%7efisi2005/