Digitally Competent Educators, Sandra Bettencourt: A New Perspective on Education Practices

Registration is open for Digitally Competent Educators courses. DCE studies boost the digital pedagogical competences of experts working on all levels and fields within education. The covid-19 pandemic has increased the need for educators to master the digital world.
Digitally Competent Educators, Sandra Bettencourt: A New Perspective on Education Practices
Digitally Competent Educators provides essential skills for tomorrow's education experts

"The Digitally Competent Educators course was one of the most invigorating training programmes for me in terms of personal and professional learning," tells Sandra Bettencourt, teacher and teacher librarian from Portugal.

Sandra completed the studies through the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, one of JYUOpen's partner universities in Digitally Competent Educators and the organiser of Module 3 of DCE.

"We worked on issues such as the flipped classroom. This is something that only recently has begun to be talked about in the Portuguese Action Plan for the Digital Development of Schools (Plano de Ação para o Desenvolvimento Digital das Escolas – PADDE)," Sandra explains.

Lessons learned in her Digitally Competent Educators studies proved helpful to Sandra and her work community in the past two years.

There were so many tools, all of them so useful, that when the first pandemic lockdown took place, I felt more confident and able to encourage my colleagues

"There were so many tools, all of them so useful, that when the first pandemic lockdown took place, I felt more confident and able to encourage my colleagues to try new methodologies for carrying out distance learning classes, for developing projects through collaborative digital work, and for carrying out formative assessment throughout the teaching and learning process."sandra bettencourt.JPG

"It was also an open window to the world, because the intersection between universities and students from different countries led me to put my practices into perspective and to find tools to improve and grow."

"I also recall all the "new" evaluation practices presented in a recent project by the Portuguese Ministry of Education (the Monitoring, Follow-up and Research in Pedagogical Evaluation project – Monitorização, Acompanhamento e Investigação em Avaliação Pedagógica – MAIA) that include the concept of assessment rubrics – and in Module 3 of the DCE (developed by Universidade Aberta) we had already learnt and experienced different tools that help us create these rubrics!"

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