weSPOT at NSTA Conference 2014 - 30,000 attendees

Alexandra Okada, Wednesday 30 April 2014 | Annotate📷

The NSTA conference is one of the most important events in Science Education in the EUA, which offers the latest in science content, teaching strategy, and research to enhance and expand the professional growth of science educators.  This event attracts over 30,000 attendees annually.

Ale Okada and Tony Sherborne from Sheffield Hallam University run a workshop together entitled Authentic Enquiry: Raise Motivation and Results with Real Science. Our aim was to discuss with teachers how to turn traditional topics into scientific adventures that inspire students, instil scientific thinking, and improve test scores. This was based on a highly successful UK middle school curriculum Science UPd8 project sponsored by the Association for Science Education in the UK.

During this workshop science teachers were also introduced to two European Projects in Enquiry based Learning: TEMI – Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated website: http://www.teachingmysteries.eu/ weSPOT – Working Environment with Social and Personal Open Tools for Enquiry based learning website: http://portal.ou.nl/web/wespot

Five key features of  WeSPOT were presented : 1. Social networking    2. Enquiry workflow 3. Mobile data collection 4. Learning  Analytics 5. Knowledge Maps

NSTA 2014 was held in Boston on  the first week of April. Workshops were organised across four strands:

• Science and Literacy: A Symbiotic Relationship

• Teaching Elementary Science with Confidence

• Leading from the Classroom

• Engineering and Science: Technological Partners

There were an impressive number of science educators who participated in numerous hands-on workshops and presentations including the Boston Museum of Science, which provided free admittance to conference attendees. NSTA is a great opportunity for science teachers to be inspired whether it is by speakers for promoting innovative learning in their classroom, or though obtaining new professional learning resources, new strategies and technologies from countless workshops, special programs and sessions.  This impressive science event lets you gain an in-depth look into particular areas of interest and science discipline.   Related Links:

• NSTA

The secretary of Digital Inclusion of Brazil Government & the head of Open Education Consortium

Alexandra Okada, Monday 06 January 2014 |

Ligia Puppato, the Secretary of Digital Inclusion of Brazil Government visited the Open University to get a clear picture of the future of Knowledge Media Technologies particularly applied to open education and smart cities.  She also participated in the webinar held in KMi podium to launch the 3rd edition of the book  “Open Education Resources and Social Networks” with Peter Scott the director of KMi and the book editor Ale Okada.

This webinar was opened by Larry Cooperman, the president of Open Education Consortium from California and  Danilo Mendonca OEC Brazilian member. There were also several co-authors of the book from different areas in Brazil and some attendees from “Telecentros”, which are ICT centres installed in remote areas, part of Brazil Government strategies for promoting Digital Inclusion.

During her talk, Ligia congratulated all the participants in the book and highlighted Online Education as a key strategy for opening up formal, informal and non-formal learning in Brazil - a country that has continental dimensions with many social differences and diversity among the regions. “Our challenge today, with so many projects being conducted, is to include people digitally, but mainly that they can have a sense of ownership of these technologies through open education”.

Larry Cooperman emphasised some key issues for a “Global open education infrastructure, and if we can achieve this, we can reduce the cost of the university education, we can spread higher education, and for that matter K-12, to new populations that haven't had access - and that ultimately is the social goal behind all of the work that is reflected in the OER and Social Networks book”

The OER and Social Network Book is available at oer.kmi.open.ac.uk. It was also published by EDUEMA in Brazil. Five hundred copies printed in colour were distributed free.

Best Paper, Keynote and the OER Social networks launch

Alexandra Okada, Monday 09 December 2013

…. The best paper award of the III LUSO Brazilian Conference on Distance Education and eLearning goes to ...

Alexandra Okada, Antonio Serra, Silvar Ribeiro and Sonia Pinto, authors of  “ Key Competences for co-learning and co-inquiry in the Digital Age”

This paper presents an exploratory investigation in development with preliminary results on "Key Competences for XXI Century Education in the Digital Age." The method applied was cyber-ethnography with asynchronous observation (forum and wiki) and synchronous discussions (webconference) for analysing skills and competences developed during the process of co-inquiry and co-learning in two online environments. This study involves researchers from the UK, Brazil, Portugal and Spain.

They initiated their interactions in the portal Encuentro.Educared of the "International Meeting on Education 2012-2013", organized by the company Telefónica and also in the inquiry environment weSPOT (Working Environment with Social Personal and Open Technologies) funded by the European Commission. As a result of this study, it was observed that the portal led to the development of more explicit digital literacies, possibly because it was a simpler interface and familiar (forum). And in the inquiry environment, participants familiar with digital technologies had more opportunities to develop other skills related to Critical-Creative Thinking and Socio-Scientific Reasoning.

During this event, Ale Okada and COLEARN -  open research network launched the 2nd edition of the book Open Educational resources and Social Networks with Carlos Teatine the Director of Distance Education of Brazil Government.

Ale Okada was the keynote who presented "Key competences in open, personal and massive environments" describing case studies about OER, PLE and MOOC.