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- Enhancing critical thinking through jamboard: an active learning experience in higher educationPublication . Silva, Elisabete MendesIn a time where abundant information travels fast through the wide array of media and social networks available, it is of paramount importance to be able to distinguish trustworthy news from fake news, and to take critical positions to understand and face the changing world we live in. As such, critical thinking is perhaps one of the most challenging skills to be enhanced in the current higher education setting. The learner’s profile has changed over the last two decades with the widespread implementation of digital technologies which deeply affected the students’ needs. It is then no surprise that education stakeholders and decisionmakers have given priority to the fostering of the 21st century skills, namely the 4 Cs in education: communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking, in addition to digital skills (Vuorikari et al., 2022), only to name a few. Active learning-based methodology, though not new (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Michael, 2006; Bromley, 2013), reveals to be effective as it focuses on a student-centered approach and on collaborative input. This paper aims to address the importance of active learning in the current higher education context by describing a teaching and learning experience based on this learning methodology. The experience intended to enhance students’ critical thinking within a rather theoretical subject, English culture II, taught to 1st year students of the bachelor’s degree in Foreign Languages: English and Spanish, by means of an interactive and more engaging digital tool: jamboard. Students were presented with active slides guiding them during the performance of the stipulated tasks. By providing students with content and meaning, they were able to evaluate ideas and add value to them by putting forth critical reasoning about the issues discussed, namely the Civil wars in the 17th century in England and the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Overall, the results, based on a qualitative assessment, showed that the teacher has been merely a facilitator and students have been actively engaged in the learning process and have been able to reflect on issues from past times that have had implications in our present, hence enhancing critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and digital skills.
- QuILL: Quality in Language LearningPublication . Silva, Elisabete Mendes; Chumbo, Isabel; Gonçalves, Vitor; Martins, Cláudia; Dotras Bravo, Alexia; Alves, Ana M.The European project QuILL – Quality in Language Learning – is coordinated by Pixel-Italy in cooperation with the project applicant and scientific coordinator, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), Portugal, and funded by the Erasmus+ programme, KA2 – Strategic Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness. It intends to provide language teachers, language learners and education stakeholders with quality open educational teaching resources (OER), based on quality criteria validated in real teaching and learning contexts. It also aims to train language teachers with relevant digital tools, information and methodologies that will support them in their teaching. The QuILL project underlies three major intellectual outputs: 1. the creation of a database of on-line open educational resources (OER) for language teaching and learning of/in 18 European languages for specific purposes (LSP); 2. the creation of an on-line training package for the identification, use and creation of ICT-based language teaching sources for teaching languages at higher education level; and 3. the creation of a publication analysing the technological potential for language learning in European higher education systems. This paper aims to present the QuILL project, highlighting the three intellectual outputs that seven higher education institutions, members of the project’s consortium, will develop for two years. We shall also focus on the intended project’s results, beneficial not only to the higher education community, but also to everybody who wants to learn LSP in a more autonomous way.
- The QuILL project: digital technology and languages for specific purposes in HEPublication . Silva, Elisabete Mendes; Chumbo, Isabel; Gonçalves, Vitor; Martins, Cláudia; Dotras Bravo, Alexia; Alves, Ana M.The European project QuILL – Quality in Language Learning – coordinated by Pixel-Italy in cooperation with the project applicant and scientific coordinator, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), Portugal, was approved within the Erasmus+ programme call KA2 – Strategic Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness and it includes 5 other European partners. Its overall aim is to foster digital education promptness in the context of higher education. On the one hand, it intends to provide higher education lecturers teaching languages for specific purposes with digital technologies-based teaching resources to make them aware of the potentialities available online and freely accessible, supporting them in their teaching. At the same time, language lecturers develop their and the students’ digital competence. On the other, education stakeholders will also be called for action due to their strategic and active role in implementing major changes in the education area. By showcasing the QuILL portal, where 360 resources assessed and validated are already available, we shall present the results achieved so far as well as explain the other two intellectual outputs of the project. Lecturers who tested the resources have already proven the relevance of the project in the field of not only LSP but also as a means to guide and teach autonomous learners wanting to improve their language skills in the 18 languages the project focuses on.
- The QuILL project: embracing digital technology in LSP teaching in Higher EducationPublication . Silva, Elisabete Mendes; Chumbo, Isabel; Gonçalves, Vitor; Martins, Cláudia; Dotras Bravo, Alexia; Alves, Ana M.Digital education readiness has been much promoted by the European Union through the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (Redecker, 2017) and education stakeholders, whose aim is to foster the improvement of digital competences of both teachers and students within the education area. The European project QuILL – Quality in Language Learning, approved in the scope of the call ‘Strategic Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness’, embraces the challenge of providing higher education lecturers and students with digital technology-based teaching resources supporting them in their teaching and learning. With more than 360 teaching and learning resources available on the QuILL portal, the higher education (HE) lecturers are offered a plethora of open educational online resources (OER) for 18 European languages focusing on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). These have been tested and validated in real-case teaching scenarios allowing thus the teachers to use or adapt the resources suggested as well as the methodologies provided as guidelines. The aim of this paper is to showcase some of these resources and demonstrate how digital tools and resources account for more innovative methodologies when teaching LSP, following Arnó (2012). Moreover, we shall also focus on the project’s second Intellectual Output (IO2) which consists in the creation of an e-learning based package addressed to higher education LSP lecturers specifically aimed to guide them in innovating their language teaching methodologies through the effective use of quality digital based OER teaching sources. Three different modules comprise this package addressing the identification, use and creation of quality digital based language teaching source. We shall provide results that attest the impact and effectiveness of this e-learning based package by means of case studies on the three modules and the results of interactive tests assessing lecturers’ knowledge on the main aspects focused on in the e-learning package.