Reflection of the IP

This was the most valuable experience. I was amazed by these young students/teachers, so creative and commited. Even if most of them will eventually loose their enthusiasm when they start working in schools, it's very impressive their will to make things different and change school. They're quite well prepared and I'm sure they will be awsome teachers.

I learned quite a lot on apps and tablets and a lot of other stuff. It's also a fact that we (the less young teachers) have to start leaving for the students the task of building their own learning, let them fail and learn from failure, instead of "offering them knowledge". The new generations of students have different ways of learning, they are not anymore passive recipients, they have to be engaged in order to keep motivation. "Technology can improve a lesson or destroy a lesson." (Strod, E., 2014). That's a huge task for teachers, to find suitable ways to improve their lessons using technology, but it's also sure that it is a defying task and may produce amazing results and be most rewarding.

In our Portugal country evening we proposed the Secret's Friend Game and I got the nicest message from Prof. Carmen, from Romania, and a piece of Romanian pottery from the city of Korond. Thank you Carmen, I loved your gift and your message!

In the end, these were the most amazing two weeks, somehow we managed to work it all out, complete all tasks, visit Salzburg, Vienna and Linz, quite well. I loved Austria and I'm very thankfull for this opportunity. I will certainly take a lot of new things home.

Since I love travelling and meet new people and new cultures, it was fantastic to learn about all the countries envolved and country evenings were very funny and enlightening.

Thank you all and we'll "see" each other around, after all, we're only a click away :). These two weeks will stay forever in my memories.

Reflection of the day - 18.07.2014

Liva Goba: Innovation in Education

Carmen's presentation was very cool, about menthal health, psychological disorders and online apps and help. He had some group work trying to find out some characteristics of our personality. 

These were my group mates: Berta and Lavinia. 

 In Inguna's presentation we had some fun, made some group games and I liked specially the comic strips.

Emma and Brigitta came today and talked us about strategies to promote skills in children with dyslexia. Many useful tips, that's for sure.

Reflection of the day - 17.07.2014

Dreaminf of producing film? You've got 72 hours - video competition for educacional purposes presented by Christian

Professor Petra Bauer, University of Mainz, Germany presented the international cooperation between courses in higher education in which her University was involved. Then asked for suggestions to promote further cooperation programs.

Wilke Held talked us about a project based learning for Political Education. It was quite interesting the way he proposed the topic's approach where the pupils have to manage life in a village anda learn how to live together and how to make political decisions and why. Very interesting really.

Jennifer Hoff

Marie-Christine Hensel

Jennifer Hoff: Chances and Limits of the Usage of the Interactive Whiteboard in Language Teaching. She gave some examples of interactiv whiteboard exercises.

Marie-Christine Hensel: More Transparency I = More Motivation? She presented TeacherTool is an app for Apple devices that can be used as a notebook for teachers to aggregate information about their pupils' everyday performance and personnal data.

Tobias Bahert: More Transparency II - Tobias explained and exemplified motivation through gamification. Here's an interesting concept:

Challenging Tasks+Feedback=Motivation.

Reflection of the day - 16 - 07 - 2014

It's time for Kaspars Kiris, the teacher from Latvia University: Learning databases using digital gradebook. He presented us a platform which is used in schools in Latvia: Mykoob. He previously created profiles for all of us and we got into the platform and explored it. It's a platform to use for interaction pupil/teacher pupil/pupil teachers/families families/school, kinda like Edmodo and others.

Daiga challenged us to Learning how to Learn, by assingning us a group work to come up with a practical activity which foster the development of learning to learn skills in the 21st century. Our group - Niklas, Edgar, Vera and myself - designed an activity for 4th graders, where they should create a comic book on sustainability in group work. We tried to define which are the learning to learn skills and we came up with Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Communication and those were the skills that we thought would be fostered with the activity we created. These are the notes we took for our presentation:

-Small children 4th grade 10-11 years old

-4 C´s: Creativity, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Communication

-Comic

Project week: Sustainability

-Presenting the problem with a Video (Multimedia Tools)

-Encourage them that they can change the situation if they work together

-Put them in Groups

-Do a mindstoarming: What do you know about sustainability, if you think about environment, what do you do?Tell about your experiences

-Present the Tool Comic Life 

-Create a Comic about sustainability 

-Present the comic to your family at the end of the week

Teacher: The enabler, giving the framework and help them to realize their project

Ausma Asnāte Dukure gave us some tips on How to make a good presentation. She came up with some fine tips and scientific explanations on why doing things this way and not the other way. The following discussion was very consensual, because we all recognize bad presentations.

Jānis Trukšāns - DeviantArt: An assistant in young artist education. I loved to watch Janis' enthusiasm while talking about art and making his presentation. We could see a different Janis, more communicative and really passionate by art. Top activity when he asked us to draw some sketches of himself. This guy is gonna be famous, some day, so I must keep the photos of him real carefully :)

These are my sketches, if you can believe it:

And then it was time to hear Edgars Karkovskis: Web based tools for modern schools. K9 Web Protection is a useful tool to block undesired websites at school. Edgars presented us Google PowerPoint and some other interesting tools.

And now let's get ready for the Portuguese Country evening! I'll come back later with fresh news! See you later!

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Hi, I'm back from country evening. I think it went quite well, people were in a good mood, we had a lot of fun.

Our evening was shared with Ltavia. They also did a great job entertaining the group.
We did the washing in no time with everybody's help.
But now I'm so tired that today there are no photos. Only tomorrow, if I find the time and the photos.

See you tomorrow!

Reflection of the day - 15.07.2014

Today we had a video conference with Martin Ebner about Technology Enhanced Learning anda LMS. Afterwards, we had small groups discussions and presentations about issues raised by Martin's presentation about the Future of Education.

My group was formed by Kaspars, Janis and Allina and reflected and presented on the advantages and disadvantages of Holograms in Education.


For this topic I suggest you to watch the video below. Just amazing, I want to live at that time:

Carlos presentation was about Robotics in Education. Carlos showed us some very nice graphics illustrating 

PjBL - Projecto Based Learning versus PBL - Problem Based Learning.

I also liked the graphic on the 4 Cs of 21st century teacher:

• Critical thinker - Solving problems
• Communicator - Understanding and communicating ideas
• Collaborator - Working with others
• Creator - producing high quality work

For the second part of his presentation, Carlos talked about Robotics in Education using Lego Mindstorm.Tim and Niklas added a video of their own, assembling and programming a robot with a group of students and then showed us the robot in action.

And then it was time for the Portuguese teacher, Glória Bastos, to make her presentation on Online Learning Environments in Higher Education. She explained the pedagogical model which is used in Portuguese Open University. The presentation raised some questions on the backchannel, some of them were answered by us, the Portuguese students and teacher Glória answered the other ones at the end. It is quite natural that all these questions were raised, because the participants are not online students like we are and they are not familiar to this learning model. We tried to enlightened them :)

PS: Late in the evening we decided to go up at Ars Eletronica Center and see the view from the bar upstairs.
Which are the odds of finding someone from our hometown??? Do you know this girl?
How funny could this be? LOLOLOLOL

Reflection of the day - 14.07.2014

After a tiring day visiting Vienna - a fascinating city - we started the day with the Romanian student Sabina Teodorescu presenting Assistive technologies for children with dyslexia. She presented some tools to work with these students.

And then it was the time of Portuguese Team, yehey! Starting with...

...me. So here's my Prezi presentation on OERs:

The presentation started with the "Beginner's Test":

Participants were asked about their knowledge on this topic.

Then the presentation shared some  information on Open Education, Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons Licenses. After questions and some discussion the participants had another questionnaire to test their understanding of the subject:

The results of both questionnaires were shown in the charts:

BEGGINER'S TEST RESULTS:

1. How often do you surf the web looking for educational resources? [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	1	4%
Seldom	0	0%
Sometimes	5	18%
Often	15	54%
Very often	7	25%

2. Do you always pay attention to copyright? [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	7	25%
Seldom	5	18%
Sometimes	5	18%
Often	7	25%
Very often	4	14%

3. Do you share resources you find on the web? [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	2	7%
Seldom	8	28%
Sometimes	11	38%
Often	7	24%
Very often	1	3%

4. Do you use for yourself the content you find on the web? (just as you find it) [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	1	4%
Seldom	3	12%
Sometimes	7	28%
Often	12	48%
Very often	2	8%

5. Do you adapt the content you find to your needs? [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	2	7%
Seldom	3	11%
Sometimes	4	15%
Often	15	56%
Very often	3	11%

6. Do you share educational resources produced or adapted by you? [1. Please answer to every question.]

Never	3	11%
Seldom	10	36%
Sometimes	8	29%
Often	6	21%
Very often	1	4%

2. How important do you find to have resources freely available?

1	0	0%
2	1	3%
3	1	3%
4	9	30%
5	19	63%

3. Do you know Common Creative Licenses?

Yes	11	37%
No	19	63%

4. Do you know Open Educational Resources Organization?

Yes	7	23%
No	23	77%

EXPERT'S TEXT RESULTS:

1. Check the image:

What kind of license does the image above attribute?

Personnal, sharing not allowed	8	29%
Share allowed with authoring identification	20	71%
Share only to friends	0	0%

2. Check the image:

What kind of license does the image above attribute?

Share allowed only under feedback	3	11%
Please send feedback	6	21%
Share alike	19	68%

3. Check the image:

What kind of license does the image above attribute?

Free of charge	8	29%
Not bought	0	0%
Allowed only for non commercial purposes	20	71%

4. What does OER mean?

Open Educational Resources	28	100%
Open Education Room	0	0%
Other Educational Resources	0	0%

5. The main purpose of Open Education is:

Education for all	24	86%
Free of charge	4	14%
Education without teachers	0	0%

Some participants were surprised to learn about Creative Commons. Most of them didn´t know them, as shown in the charts. The Portuguese Team agreed to ask for feedback of our presentations, so we had still another questionnaire for the participants to answer: The results were as follows: Useful [1. The topic was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 3 12% 4 7 27% 5 14 54% Relevant [1. The topic was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 0 0% 4 10 38% 5 14 54% Interesting [1. The topic was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 1 4% 4 11 42% 5 12 46% Applicable [1. The topic was:] 1 2 8% 2 0 0% 3 2 8% 4 8 31% 5 14 54% Adequate [2. The methodology was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 4 15% 4 6 23% 5 14 54% Engaging [2. The methodology was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 3 12% 4 7 27% 5 14 54% Dynamic [2. The methodology was:] 1 1 4% 2 1 4% 3 3 12% 4 9 35% 5 12 46% 3. Did you feel motivated to participate in the activities? 1 0 0% 2 0 0% 3 4 15% 4 9 35% 5 13 50% 4. The presenter was effective in answering the questions submitted by the audience? 1 0 0% 2 0 0% 3 3 12% 4 7 27% 5 16 62% If you like, you may leave a comment here. Thank you! Thank you! That was an important point to make, because via google, one can find quite a lot, but we don't pay that much attention to copyright. I would treat it more appropriately, if i would now more about the application. i liked your presentation very much, and i think that authorising is very important, and actually u made me think about this stuff, and in my opinion it is also matter of respecting others thoughts and ideas, they are there to motivate and not just to copy and get benefit of it Thank you for this very important topic. I was missing it all the time Very useful your presentation Nice to meet you! :) It was a good overview. Although I was missing some disadvantages or risk which could be opened up for discussion. Thanks! It was very actual and useful Great presentation about a topic that everyone knows about, but no one wants to speak about! Well done, I got to know a lot of things during the presentation and try to use the information in the future! :) Thank you, Cristina, for sharing what you know with us. The presentation was very interesting and had a great methodology, I really liked the way your presentation proceeded with your tests and then ended with this feedback.I also liked the discussion after the presentation. Thank you, Cristina :) I got some impulses to share more of my work. I often be afraid to share because of the use of open sources and websides and i don´t want to be called on order The presentation was appropriate to the theme of Psst 2014? 1 0 0% 2 0 0% 3 1 4% 4 6 23% 5 19 73% I felt good about my presentation and about all the comments and general feedback from other participants. Thank you for your attention! So, the work continued with Berta's presentation about the use of Web 2.0 tools on the teaching of languages, a case study. Very interesting because it showed the teachers view and how some tools can be used and also how they shouldn't be used, like in the case of Second Life, that she described. After lunch, Dilaila described her study on the teaching of Mathematics and the use of laptop Magalhães in elementary schools. Also very interesting. And then it was time to... dance! Bela showed us how she uses technological tools in her dance classes and even got us to dance some basic steps (sorry, no photos...), of course, but which were great to engage the audience, with all her enthusiasm. So we got another great day with excellent presentations and the teacher's point of view, which was kindda missing. Congratulations to all!