Today, new and emerging web technologies are connecting young people in ways that were never before possible. Through personal blogs, social networking sites, multimedia creation and sharing, bookmark sharing, content syndication and aggregation, and other significant Web 2.0 tools that encourage communication and participation, students’ worlds are becoming ever more networked and engaging, creating environments for learning and collaboration in the publishing of creative materials. Consequently, there is much interest in how such informal, out-of-school activities can be relevant and inspiring to more familiar in-school curricula.

Web 2.0, as a networked platform of learning opportunities, allows us to re-envision what we do in our schools rather than risk a growing gap between students’ lives in and out of the classroom. At the core of this challenge is how well we realize the potential of these technologies in educators’ professional and personal learning practices.

In order to make the most of globalization and exposure, the EEI seeks to leverage Web 2.0 technologies in the education process, and to better understand the pedagogies and literacies required to help both students and teachers adopt these technologies in a fruitful, ethical and safe way. The EEI is empowering educators through training courses that allow them to experience the transformative potential of social web tools to build learning communities and re-envision their personal learning practices.

The EEI, however, does not embrace Web 2.0 with a view solely to imposing a group of new applications, but rather with the aim of promoting practices that leverage these applications to support work and learning in powerful, paradigm-shifting ways. The merits of adopting Web 2.0 tools and activities in the education process are clear. They promise to broaden accessibility to learning, raise the general level of computer skills through the use of web tools, encourage innovative ways of learning, promote self-directed learning activities and skills, foster motivation, participation and collaboration, facilitate the personalization of learning, boost learning results, improve learning management and provide greater peer support for learning.

The Egyptian education system is no stranger to new technologies. ICT-enabled Smart Schools have been using a learning management system (LMS) for some time now, which is a great step forward. But LMSs tend to focus more on education process administration – i.e. students, enrollment, classrooms, teachers and assignments – than on “learning” itself. This gap clearly needs to be filled by more tools to promote student engagement, collaboration and participation, and here the use of Web 2.0 offers a perfect complement to LMSs.