EDULABS – THE AGIRE PROJECT: OBJECTIVES, MONITORING AND EXPECTATIONS

Year 2015, Volume: 2 , 198 - 209, 01.09.2015

Lúcia Pombo Vânia Carlos Maria João Loureıro

Abstract

The AGIRE project is a partnership between
the University of Aveiro, a consortium comprising 26 companies related to
teaching and learning, and one School Grouping, with the financial support of
QREN. The project is embedded into the Edulab concept (school laboratories with
technological equipments, as tablets, laptops, whiteboards, and educational
materials such as eBooks and learning platforms) to promote the adoption of
innovative teaching practices.

 

The project stems from identified contextual
needs and aims to monitor the project implementation within an interventional
perspective, concerning educational innovation with the use of digital
technologies. The goal is to promote teachers’ and students’ digital literacy,
by developing Teacher Training Courses (TTC) and taking advantage from the
school technology environment on a pedagogical level. After attending a
short-term (15 hours) technological TTC, a 64-hour TTC involving 13 teachers of
Basic Education during the current school year is being conducted. The TTC, developed
in a blended learning environment, follows the flipped classroom methodology
comprising autonomous tasks for consulting multimedia resources at a distance
and face-to-face sessions for discussion, reflection and collaborative work.
This fits into a design-based methodology (Parker, 2011), allowing the analysis
of the intervention outcomes and it’s successively refinement towards a
solution, following the phases: i) Analyze the problem; ii) Design and develop
potential solutions; iii) Implement and evaluate; and iv) Reflect and report. A
set of data collection instruments developed under this project allowed its
monitoring, as well as the redefinition of the TTC and its previewed
activities. For example, the questionnaire on the trainee teachers’ digital
literacy, the grid to monitor the strategies implemented in classrooms, as well
as the autonomous work tasks allowed each teacher to position its practice at
the level of technology integration and to raise his/her expectations towards
the educational technologies.

Keywords

Edulabs, ICT in education, teacher training, collaborative learning, flipped classroom

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