Alexandra Okada, Friday 23 May 2014

Dante Alighieri is one of the best schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil, built more than a hundred years ago by Italian immigrants. Currently, it has more than 4,200 students, 115 classrooms, and 5 buildings. Its aims are to connect Brazilian and Italian culture, as well as to promote ethical and educational values through innovative pedagogical approaches, high-quality teaching, and new technologies.

Science teachers have been using Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) applied to Middle and Secondary school for eight years. All students from 11 to 16 years of age are guided to create their IBL projects for developing their scientific reasoning as part of their formal curriculum. Students who are very interested in science can also participate in extracurricular activities entitled the “Young Scientists Program” to develop more complex projects in partnership with researchers and science centres.

Over the last five years, more than 100 inquiry projects developed by Dante Alighieri’s students were awarded in several exhibitions and international fairs. These included Intel ISEF, Febrace, and other events in Europe and the USA. Students’ comments and outcomes show that the IBL approach has been changing students’ lives.

Sandra Maria Rudella Tonidandel, Science Coordinator, Miriam Brito Guimaraes, Science teacher, and Valdenice Minatel, Educational Technology coordinator, will be collaborating with the weSPOT Project by investigating the use of the weSPOT environment with Dante Alighieri’s students. The first pilot will include around 30 students from two classrooms. Sandra Tonidandel and Miriam Guimaraes are very interested in weSPOT for promoting more collaboration between participants. Furthermore, it will help investigate how weSPOT can facilitate students and teachers to organise, visualise, and access their inquiry projects. Valdenice Minatel is focused on the uses of weSPOT and mobile interfaces.

During the meeting at Dante Alighieri School in the second week of May, Alexandra Okada, Sandra Tonidandel, and Miriam Guimaraes discussed weSPOT features and how students and teachers can include weSPOT in their inquiry projects. Although the school has already been using Moodle, mobile interfaces, and creating Open Educational Resources during their inquiry projects, they started to visualise the potential benefits of weSPOT. “Participants will be more aware of the inquiry workflow and its phases. This will be very useful for teachers’ training as well” (mentioned Guimaraes). After running the first pilot with 60 students, the Dante Alighieri team would like to implement an inquiry project at scale with several students to obtain more data and develop collaborative research on the uses of a social open and mobile collaborative inquiry environment for developing scientific literacy.

Alexandra Okada, Tuesday 20 May 2014

The 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference (PSCT 2014), held in Salvador – Brazil, is one of the most important events in Science Communication. Ale Okada, Sonia Pinto and Silvar Ribeiro presented a case study about weSPOT for promoting scientific literacy through collaborative inquiry.

The PCST 2014 conference aims to raise more inclusive strategies, improve citizenship through public engagement and to discuss new models and practices for communication and participation. Okada, Pinto and Ribeiro introduced collaborative open research, with the aim of addressing these three issues by creating a framework for applying “co-inquiry” – collaborative open inquiry to scaffold citizens’ scientific skills through digital technologies.

The first pilot, which focuses on collaborative research on biodiversity, was organised by The Open University (OU) through the European project “weSPOT” for inquiry based learning, as well as the Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB), coordinator of the “Telecentros.BR”training programme for Digital Inclusion.

weSPOT is a working environment with social, personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning (IBL) in formal, non-formal and informal contexts.
The Telecentros.BR training programme (2013-2014) is a non-credit online course supported by the Brazil Government. The participants are over 2,500 young educators in diverse areas with low access to digital technology. The role of these young educators is to promote better use of ICT and support the Telecentro.BR’s projects, created by the local communities who do have limited access to the internet with the exception of the Telecentro.BR’s buildings.

Public Communication of Science and Technology aims to include particularly low income people who have no access to education and to science materials; people who live in remote areas and have no access to science spaces and science goods; immigrants who have difficulty in understanding the language and the cultural context; disabled people, etc.

“Scientific Literacy through Co-Inquiry” would like to bring diverse participants together from local communities, schools and universities- including learners, educators and families to develop a collaborative investigation through weSPOT.

Related Links:

• PSCT 2014 Conference
• PSCT 2014 Abstract