Demonstration Sessions

To improve basic skills among the adult population in functional literacy, functional numeracy and digital competence, the state-owned Norwegian agency Vox has designed several e-learning tools. One of these, MathsAid, serves as an interactive learning platform for training numeracy skills. The objective is to give adults an opportunity to refresh their own maths skills through interactive tasks with topics from work and everyday life, lifestyle and travelling.

MathsAid is made for adults who need to improve or refresh their numeracy skills. There is also an objective to provide parents with a tool that enables them to understand everyday maths and to talk about maths with their children. MathsAid is available for free on the Internet at www.vox.no/mathsaid.

Every MathsAid product includes tutorials and self-tests. Free access to MathsAid on the Internet makes the tool easily available to the general public, as well as for teachers and trainers.

For many years, presenter Anne Nes Gustavsen has been working as a teacher of mathematics in adult education. Anna has played an essential role in developing the numeracy part of the framework. This presentation will take place in the session DEM63, on November 30th, 14:30 - 16:00.

Giuseppe Chiazzese, Institute for Educational Technology, Palermo, will give insight into Gym2Learn - a system aimed to support the training of meta-cognitive strategies for students' on-line text comprehension.

In particular, the features of the system are used in two different phases: training with the meta-cognition tools in a training phase and using them during learning activities in an executive phase.

The training phase consists of a series of practical exercises with hypertext pages, with which students begin to familiarise themselves with the use and control of some cognitive strategies for understanding hypertexts (e.g. recalling previous knowledge, constructing hypotheses, identifying the most important parts of texts, etc.).

During the executive phase, students can surf freely through websites proposed by teachers or selected independently and use the system support to apply meta-cognitive strategies.

Every time students use a specific tool, documents synthesising their work done on hypertexts are dynamically produced. Afterwards, these documents can be modified to create supports for revising topics studied and for memorising them better.

Furthermore, the data and documents produced by each student by means of the system are useful for teachers to monitor the work done both at procedural and content level.

The time of the session – DEM 11 - is Thursday, November 29, 12:00 – 13:30.

So don’t miss the demo sessions!

DEM11: Thursday, November 29, 12:00 - 13:30

DEM37: Thursday, November 29, 16:30 - 17:30

DEM63: Friday, November 30, 14:30 - 16:00

 

November 12, 2007

 

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