blogging from the boat…
May 22nd, 2008 by Cristina Costa
it’s a journey into knowing.
I am at the digifolio seminar and blogging from the boat! connection: slooooooooooooooooow.
I wanted to twit live but there is no wireless and I’am not a mo-blogger YET .-(. BUt I am learning and micro-reflecting on the go. I jotted down some key ideas during today’s presentations, which I am now transcribing on to here.
I need you to help me develop them. Your comments are therefore invaluable. I want and need to ‘pick’ your brain while I show you what’s going on in mine too.
Keynote speakers said teachers think that if they could turn off cell phones completely in schools the problems would be solved, and then he asked: would it be solved?
hmmm…. I immediatelly thought: is it really a problem? and if so, to whom?
I liked one of the keynote speaker’s remarks: To forbid our youngsters to use mobiles in schools is like having forbidden the older generations to use encyclopedias when they were in school. Cool thought, I wrote. That was for me the highlight of the 1st keynote. ,-)
On Maths eportfolios:
The speaker concludes students liked it better than regular assessment strategies. It was a fairer assessment, they said, because teachers were evaluating what they knew, not what they didn’t know. Listen to the kids, I say! It’s not about looking at failure, it is about emphasizing their strong areas and working with them on their weak ones.
They also reported they liked eportfolios because they were sharing it with others. Cool or what?
Then I got bored!!!!!!!!!!! Because someone was reading their presentation. I wrote” A prof. who reads and gives me data in percentage is not able to keep me focused for long. Maybe 2 minutes…maybe even less.
Another presenter starts by saying she is very interested in the results. I think to myself: I would like to focus more on the process. That is what I aspire people I work with will do too. The path we have to walk is far more important than the destination we have to reach.
Next presentation focuses on eportfolios and PLEs. My first note: I like it already :-).
They say: with web 2.0 tools, like netvibes, etc students can keep their digifolios even after they leave Uni. (And I am here thinking: just what I believe in….THANK YOU, it will make my presentation easier, although I think it might seem to be too “out of the box” to some of the seminar delegates…according to what I have seen so far. They will think I am a nut case…well, I guess I am. Even the color and layout of my slides stnad out when compared with theirs…so academic and so structured. Mine looks like this. Colourful. Happy. Active. Pictorical. As learning should be, I would assume…
Last presentation is about eportfolio tool developed for Moodle by Portuguese Institut. I think I like it. I need to check it in more detail though. You can do it here: http://eportefolio.ese.ipsantarem/pt/repe_en
Will blog more tomorrow.
Can’t wait for your comments. Loads of them! 😀
it seem to be quite vague and ineffective… to be honest …and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray … the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself…it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context! 
