Tiago Tavares - Blog

Facebook Abuse

mrtavares — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:34:05 +0000

I was sending a couple of messages back and forth to a friend of mine (around 20) and all of a sudden I get a message saying that I am “going too fast when sending messages. You must significantly slow down. Further misuse of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled. For further information, please visit our FAQ page.”

What is this all about? If I’m getting messages back.. doesn’t that mean that it’s all good??

Moodle Vs Dokeos

mrtavares — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 01:10:24 +0000

Neste slideshow podem ver algumas imagens paralelas do dokeos e do moodle. O que se consegue imediatamente perceber é que o Moodle é um LMS mais complicado de entender mas também mais poderoso. O dokeos está a ser uma boa surpresa, na medida em que exige poucos conhecimentos dos utilizadores, já que rapidamente percebem como funciona. Caso não haja a exigência de funcionalidades mais avançadas, o dokeos revela-se, de facto, um óptimo LMS.

PowerPoint

mrtavares — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:39:18 +0000

No Colégio das Escravas do Sagrado Coração de Jesus, os alunos do 9º ano criaram alguns PowerPoints. Aqui estão alguns exemplos:

Dispositivos de Rede

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Ligações de rede

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Facebook Down - Total Outage?

mrtavares — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:41:49 +0000

Throughout the whole of Sunday (20th September 2009), I’ve been having some issues accessing my facebook account. I’m from Portugal, so is it just me or is everybody else having the same problem?

From Blog

Citizen Cope - Keep Asking

mrtavares — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:49:06 +0000

Citizen Cope - Keep Asking YouTube

keep askin
how long will my love it last?
always
keep askin how long will my days they pass?
always
keep askin me my love
keep askin help from above
there comes a time and a place when
you kind of mind living, day to day when
country to country and state to state
they all got their leaders who all pushed their weight
another mother lost
another child today
I bet tomorrow that will be yesterday’s
I bet you double there’s some people in rage
on the corner with their voices raising judgment day
keep asking how long will my love it last?
always
keep askin how long will my days they pass?
always
keep askin me my love
keep askin help from above
keep askin me my love
keep askin help from above

Mobile phones in class

mrtavares — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:19:37 +0000

Great idea! Let’s also integrate the mobile phone in class! Cool opportunity to take advantage of all its functionalities and apply them in the educational realm. Just as teachers did with TV a long time ago, right? and the video recorder too, I guess. Although we can’t forget to get to the core of how to use interactive whiteboards… oops, I almost forgot… computers, we have to fit them in somehow. Sheez… let’s sit back and think for a minute here. Do we really need all of this?

Mobile phones and texting implement a very fast paced lifestyle and, although it is true texting has become part of students’ lives, why not consider school a break from that? Why does school have to be the continuation of what seems to be a very shallow form of communication. Why text your classmates when you can actually talk to them? Developing people skills is a fundamental aspect of school, don’t you think? Sure, some might say having a video recorder as inexpensive like that facilitates the creation of videos, but we’re not reinventing the wheel here… we’re actually going back to the introduction of video in class, something that has already been dealt with to some extent - the mobile phone is just a different form factor.

What I think we, as teachers, should be worried about?

Knowledge & Creativity. That’s all there is to it… how to use creativity to build knowledge. Am I oversimplifying??

Windows Vista Last Install

mrtavares — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:30:16 +0000

I couldn’t remember when I had last installed windows vista, the same install I’m writing this post on, so I ran systeminfo.exe to check it out. Apparently I last installed windows vista on the 28th March 2007. If I recall right, the minute it came out I installed it but then I bought a new computer and installed it again…. so… that means 2 years, 3 months and 23 days || 120 weeks and 5 days || 845 days of running it without any kind of problems. The same didn’t happen with my previous windows xp installations. It kind of makes me wonder whether I should install windows 7. What do you think? ;P

From Blog

Blind Technology

mrtavares — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:21:52 +0000

All this excitement around technology in education is making us blind. Let’s picture a school where there is no kind of technology besides electricity, just a blackboard, books, teachers and students. If you’re not blind you’ll probably be able to imagine a school like that and still get excited about creating valuable learning situations for your students.
Podcasting, blogging, facebook, second life, … everything on the web seems to have potential use for learning. So let me tell you this: a “podcast” is our student’s voice, a “blog” is our student’s notebook, “facebook” is our student’s circle of friends and “second life” is where our students live. So, what we see here is a plain and obvious transference from what is real to virtual. Not only don’t we solve the problems that our students have, we also create new ones. I’m not advocating death to technology in the classroom. I’m just saying we should consider to what extent students’ learning would profit from it.
Technology is making us blind in our excitement to use new tools that are not innovative at all. And all we should be wanting is to build knowledge… how is it that we’ve become so blind?

More @ http://www.tiagotavares.eu/blog/

Reflection about writing…

mrtavares — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:31:05 +0000

http://www.tiagotavares.eu/blog/

As an ESL teacher I wonder what kind of impact writing has for students and, above all, what kind of learning they get from our corrections. It seems to me that most of the mistakes in the first composition of the beginning of the term are the same as in the final composition at the end of the school year. Is this a reading / writing / correcting / study problem? All of the latter?

This is part of a longer collaborative text @ http://etherpad.com/aG3NK5UuB9

Meeting about Podcasts - Braga

mrtavares — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:25:48 +0000

Back to the conference.

One of the speakers mentions something interesting. Most of the students that listened to the podcasts the teachers created, wrote the transcript. So, if they did that, what’s the point of podcasts in the first place? In the previous conference I asked Palitha Edirisingha if in his experience there had been requests by students to get the transcripts of the podcasts… he said no. Apparently the study in Portugal showed otherwise.

Adelina Moura
11:48 Mobile Phone - 97,2% of portuguese students from age 10 to 15 has a mobile phone.

She’s rushing through the slides… hard to keep up.

My questions:

to Cristina Aguiar: How did you quantify the number of times students listened to a podcast and how do you know how long they listened to the file?

to Adelina Moura: Students use mobile phones all the time. Shouldn’t the class be considered a break from all that?

There was no time for my questions… next time maybe.