Development of Educational SharePoint portal for coding students

The project will explain what is SharePoint, why is used and who does use it. It will also expose some alternatives, compare them to SharePoint and expose the pros and cons. The main objective of this project will be developing an educational SharePoint portal. Using this portal, coding students will be able to share their solutions to different exercises, vote the best solutions and comment them. This portal will be developed using only software and servers obtained legally without any cost. As can be seen in this project, this will mean that all the coding will be at the client side. This project will use mainly SharePoint, ASP, HTML, CSS and JS. Some third party libraries with creative commons will be also used. This project also pretends to set the bases to expand this portal to other subjects to create a more collaborative studying environment in a future. Finally, an approximation of how much could the development of a portal with these characteristics cost

Technology-enhanced Personalised Learning: Untangling the Evidence

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the practical implementation actually works: Even in countries such as the U.S., which lead the way in using techology in classroom settings, hardly any evaluation studies have been done to prove the effectiveness of technology-enhanced personalised learning. In the light of the above, the authors make recommendations for actions to be taken in Germany to make best use of the potential of technology in providing individual support and guidance to students

Criminal intent or cognitive dissonance: how does student self plagiarism fit into academic integrity?

The discourse of plagiarism is speckled with punitive terms not out of place in a police officer's notes: detection, prevention, misconduct, rules, regulations, conventions, transgression, consequences, deter, trap, etc. This crime and punishment paradigm tends to be the norm in academic settings. The learning and teaching paradigm assumes that students are not filled with criminal intent, but rather are confused by the novel academic culture and its values. The discourse of learning and teaching includes: development, guidance, acknowledge, scholarly practice, communicate, familiarity, culture. Depending on the paradigm adopted, universities, teachers, and students will either focus on policies, punishments, and ways to cheat the system or on program design, assessments, and assimilating the values of academia. Self plagiarism is a pivotal issue that polarises these two paradigms. Viewed from a crime and punishment paradigm, self plagiarism is an intentional act of evading the required workload for a course by re-using previous work. Within a learning and teaching paradigm, self plagiarism is an oxymoron. We would like to explore the differences between these two paradigms by using self plagiarism as a focal point

Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children's Software

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning This chapter draws on ethnographic material to consider the cultural politics and recent history of children's software and reflects on how this past can inform our current efforts to mobilize games for learning. The analysis uses a concept of genre as a way of making linkages across the distributed but interconnected circuit of everyday play, software content, and industry context. Organized through three genres in children's software -- academic, entertainment, and construction -- the body of the chapter describes how these genres play out within a production and advertising context, in the design of particular software titles, and at sites of play in after-school computer centers where the fieldwork was conducted

Open educational resources : conversations in cyberspace

172 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEducation systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies. The Open Educational Resources movement offers one solution for extending the reach of education and expanding learning opportunities. The goal of the movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through openly and freely available online high-quality content. Over the course of two years, the international community came together in a series of online discussion forums to discuss the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential. This publication makes the background papers and reports from those discussions available in print.--Publisher's description.A first forum : presenting the open educational resources (OER) movement. Open educational resources : an introductory note / Sally Johnstone -- Providing OER and related issues : an introductory note / Anne Margulies, ... [et al.] -- Using OER and related issues : in introductory note / Mohammed-Nabil Sabry, ... [et al.] -- Discussion highlights / Paul Albright -- Ongoing discussion. A research agenda for OER : discussion highlights / Kim Tucker and Peter Bateman -- A 'do-it-yourself' resource for OER : discussion highlights / Boris Vukovic -- Free and open source software (FOSS) and OER -- A second forum : discussing the OECD study of OER. Mapping procedures and users / Jan Hylén -- Why individuals and institutions share and use OER / Jan Hylén -- Discussion highlights / Alexa Joyce -- Priorities for action. Open educational resources : the way forward / Susan D'Antoni

Concept mapping, mind mapping argument mapping: What are the differences and do they matter?

In recent years, academics and educators have begun to use software mapping tools for a number of education-related purposes. Typically, the tools are used to help impart critical and analytical skills to students, to enable students to see relationships between concepts, and also as a method of assessment. The common feature of all these tools is the use of diagrammatic relationships of various kinds in preference to written or verbal descriptions. Pictures and structured diagrams are thought to be more comprehensible than just words, and a clearer way to illustrate understanding of complex topics. Variants of these tools are available under different names: “concept mapping”, “mind mapping” and “argument mapping”. Sometimes these terms are used synonymously. However, as this paper will demonstrate, there are clear differences in each of these mapping tools. This paper offers an outline of the various types of tool available and their advantages and disadvantages. It argues that the choice of mapping tool largely depends on the purpose or aim for which the tool is used and that the tools may well be converging to offer educators as yet unrealised and potentially complementary functions

How can I use Irish language e-portfolios in the assessment for learning approach in my primary classroom?

This paper investigates the process of assessment for learning (AfL) in the primary school Irish language classroom. Electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) are used as a tool in assessment for learning with eight of my second class pupils in an urban primary school in North Dublin. This research was carried out as part of the Master of Science in Education and Training Management (e-learning strand) at Dublin City University and was supervised by Dr. Margaret Farren. Some strategies from the literature served as a solid basis from which to develop a framework to organise my own investigation. My action research enquiry is strengthened by the values I hold for my pupils and for my own professional practice, which include the value of self-evaluation, freedom to create in language-learning using technology and the ability to ‘share learning’ with a peer. Several strategies emerge through the enquiry, which improve with reflection, planning and redrafting. My introduction to the practicalities of implementing electronic portfolios involve identifying appropriate software, dealing with technical difficulties and adapting the portfolios to meet the needs of my pupils. Through the process of critical questioning and action reflection cycles my own professional practice has developed. By seeking to create a living educational theory, I hope these changes have impacted positively on my pupils’ learning and involved me in deeper reflection of my own teaching

Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design

Can we apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context? More specifically can we use this as a means of shifting teaching practice to a culture of sharing learning ideas and designs? This paper describes a new social networking site, Cloudworks, which aims to provide a mechanism for sharing, discussing and finding learning and teaching ideas and designs. We describe the development of the site and the key associated concepts, 'clouds' and 'cloudscapes'. We provide a summary of recent activities and plans for the future. We conclude by describing the underpinning theoretical perspectives we have drawn on in the development of the site and in particular the notion of 'social objects' in social networking and a framework for 'sociality' for transforming user practice online

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants