Alfredo Soeiro

Carme Royo

Francesca Uras

Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto

MODERN PROJECT - USEFUL TOOLKIT DEMONSTRATION TO EVALUATE AND USE DIGITAL TOOLS IN EDUCATIONAL SCENARIOS Alfredo Soeiro, Universidade Porto, Carme Royo, EUCEN, Francesca Uras, EUCEN Project Goals The MODERN project aims to help you teach more effectively through incorporating new digital learning tools into your day to day teaching delivery. It is expected MODERN will be a key resource in teacher and trainers´ professional development. It has been identified, assessed and categorised the latest and best digital learning tools. This is a project with a website that has actually had real educators looking at and rating every tool. Want to find the best tools for creating courses? Done! Want to find the best tool for testing students? Done! Want to find the best tools for project work? Done! In fact, the unique 10 category classification system makes it easy for anyone to find the best tool for the learning objective that anyone wants to achieve. MODERN has been funded by the European Commission under the ERASMUS+ Programme, so there are no adverts, no sponsors to please, the project is objective and concrete. The project is solely interested in pedagogic potential, not “gimmicks” or commercial gain. By engaging with the project anyone will learn intuitive powerful tools for engaging students, understand the pedagogic potential of digital learning tools, be motivated to incorporate some of these new tools into your teaching practice and increase own digital literacy. MODERN aims to increase the ability and motivation of teachers, trainers and lecturers to use digital learning resources as a means to more effective, relevant teaching, thereby causing a positive impact in students, learners and trainees. Project Methodology The project tried to achieve the above goals by providing educators with a convenient and highly usable set of innovative tools which they can use to engage their students on mobile devices, offering clear guidelines on which tool offers the best solutions to achieving pedagogical objectives and presenting project toolkit in a highly attractive manner and user friendly format. Smart phones and tablets have revolutionised the way one lives and works, but not yet in many cases the one teaches students in vocational training or higher education. There are fantastic opportunities however for interactive, student-led learning inside and outside the classroom via these powerful mobile phones. It is known that digital and mobile resources are proven to increase adult learner engagement and information retention. They’re also well suited to “hard to reach” learners or those who direct their own learning activities “on the go”. Yet only one in five students are taught by digitally confident and supportive teachers. So the project tries to address these issues and newcomers are invited to explore the project site, to take a learning module, to try out a learning tool and to become more digitally confident and capable. The project has developed four resources to help you learn and introduce new digital tools and innovative practice into the teaching and training delivery. Each of the resources is stand alone, but together it is considered they form a holistic package which leads teachers and trainers from the broad objective (Audit of learning tools) to a quite specific output (Online training course). First output is the Audit of Learning Tools. In this report it has been identified, assessed and categorised the latest and best digital learning tools. Since there are endless lists of learning tools out there this project has actually had real educators looking at and rating every tool. Since it is a subjective assessment the option was to have the task led and undertaken by a capable and known university. The second output is the Pedagogic Assessment of the considered as top twenty-five tools. Again the project has categorised the tools in with the ten category classification system. This report presents a more detailed analysis of the pedagogic potential of the tools that were considered most useful. Each assessment is no more than three pages long and provides all the essential information needed to decide if this is a tool that might be useful in a teaching or training activity. Then anyone can learn how to use it, in less than one hour, with the third output called Toolkit! The Toolkit is the third output. It is an online platform designed to teach and train about the top twenty-five. It follows a four step process: read the pedagogic report, watch the introductory video, view some examples of the impact of the tool in real life learning environments and then learn the tool itself. It is hoped to encourage anyone interested to try one or two of the tools initially, to gauge the impact and then to learn some more tools. The Toolkit is online since December 2016. The fourth output is an Online Training Course to help anyone learn some of these new and innovative teaching digital techniques. It has five modules: Introduction to innovative teaching; The Flipped Classroom teaching model; Collaborative learning spaces and Peer connections; Project based learning; E-learning trends. The relevant aspect of this online training course is that the five modules have been developed using eight of the considered top twenty-five learning tools. Therefore, while taking the modules anyone will gain new knowledge about these tools and also experiment the learning experience of some of these learning tools. It is hoped that the online course will further encourage anyone to implement these tools in their teaching and training delivery.  

MODERN PROJECT - USEFUL TOOLKIT DEMONSTRATION TO EVALUATE AND USE DIGITAL TOOLS IN EDUCATIONAL SCENARIOS

https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/bitstream/10216/105199/4/199362.pdf

MODERN PROJECT - USEFUL TOOLKIT DEMONSTRATION TO EVALUATE AND USE DIGITAL TOOLS IN EDUCATIONAL SCENARIOS

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Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto