ITEMS project

ITEMS project has been presented at the Nordic Geogebra Conference held in Reykjavik,  Iceland August 12th – 14th 2010 http://vefsetur.hi.is/ngg2010/

ITEMS contributed with a 90 minutes workshop presenting the Geometry module as in such teaching sequence most of the developed simulations are geogebra files. Workshop participants included Markus Hohenwarter (Geogebra creator), he congratulated ITEMS for the use we do of Geogebra in the Geometry module. Participants posted useful discussions about using together Moodle and Geogebra. Following some suggestions ITEMS geometry simulations are now ready to download at Geogebra site in this link

As every year SIRIKT  Conference  is the place for meeting all Slovenian teachers interested in using ICT tools in the classroom. This year  ITEMS project group was well represented by the presence of Bernat Martinez (ITEMS coordinator), Agueda Gras-Velazquez (EUN) and Breda Policar (Gimnazija Poljane). ITEMS project have been accepted with enthusiasm by Slovenian teachers. Here you can find Bernat’s presentation  at https://vox.arnes.si/p31816867/ and the workshop on Teaching Geometry online using ITEMS elearning module at https://vox.arnes.si/p77622448/.

On December 2, Agueda Gras-Velazquez attended on behalf of the Items project the pre-Educa Berlin seminar: “The Moodle Experience: Moodle in Practice and New Developments”

First of all, it was an excellent chance to meet other people using Moodle like Armin Talić from idego in Bosnia-Herzegovia or from even further away Theresa Koroivulaono from The University of the South Pacific, in Fij, or Jan Beniest from the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya. Additionally,  presentations on how are the Italian Guardia di Finanza or the Welsh schools using Moodle, and about Moodle sister projects like Mahara or MoOdalis, provided a lot of food for thought. Other things that could be worth looking at are a paper from M. David Merrill on First Principles of Instruction or the discussion on Blended learning and eLearning from Hans de Zwart.

But the best part was Martin Dougiamas’s presentation of Moodle 2.0: new features, options, etc. coming up. For the Items project, the coolest new feature will be the Moodle Community Hub where they want to host Moodle courses available to anyone. Teachers will be able to search among the courses available for those fitting their interests and use them in their own Moodle platforms, which is exactly the idea of the Items project!

The teacher training at NiLS started on 24.11.2009

On 24.11.2009 the teacher training for the ITEMS course “Einführung in Funktionen (Klasse 6)” (Introduction into functions) started. The teachers where introduced into the goals and concepts of the ITEMS project. Then the teachers enrolled in the ITEMS teacher training course. This course is used in the next time to give teachers help when they start to teach the real course.
Every teacher got a copy of the course and was enrolled as a teacher in his course, which he will give in the near future.
At the end of course, a short questionnaire gave feedback about the impression the course made.
All teachers where very much convinced about the usefulness of the training session and the use of Moodle in general and the presented ITEMS course.
All teachers wanted more ITEMS courses like this.
Most teachers expected a positive reaction of the children. On the other hand, the teachers think that the needed  IT competences of the children are at high level for the age group. The same holds for the teachers. No wonder that most teachers urgently wanted more training to use Moodle.
After having practised the courses, the teachers will come back and fill in the next questionnaire reporting about their results.