I've written before about the Reflective Evaluation project. It is a two year European Commission funded project, now drawing to a close, which aimed to produce ICT based resources for facilitating self evaluation activities by teachers. Pretty challenging, huh?
At the outset the project coordinators had the idea that this could be done with a tool developed in Powerpoint. The rest of the partners were not so sure. For many of us Powerpoint had little appeal, in terms of its scriptability and attactivess for users. The coordinators, Ira and Gerald form the University of Flensburg, were fortunately flexible and open to new ideas.
Jen, Chris and myself designed a web 2.0 (ish) tool, allowing teachers and trainers to access and answer multimedia questions designed to stimulate reflection, to see and compare with the answers of others and to create their own tools.
OK, it doesn/t go as far as I would like but there are real challenges getting people for five different countries to share meanings and ideas, and pedagogic limitations in the European Commission demand that the questions should be available in each partner language.
But the best bit of the project has been the multimedia. Despite most partners being traditional academic researchers, with limited computer experience, by this weeks workshop all of them were working together, sharing in creating videos and other multi media artifacts. Its creative and great fun.
Want to have a look? Better still, want to create your own learning materials. All you have to do is go to www.refelctive-evaluation.eu and create yourself an account.
NB We are still editing the help videos so you will have to learn as you go. But if you would like more information please get in touch. And before you ask, of course it is Open Source.