The WEIWE(R)BE project aims to promote strategies to develop information literacy skills, within curricular and school libraries practices, by training both students and teachers in and with ICT, as well as sustainable digital contents (OER).
Beneficiaries
School communities – school principals, teachers, librarian teachers, inter-municipal Coordinators of School Libraries, pupils/students and their families
The key benefits are improving ICT literacies and social skills through the use of digital tools; strengthening communication and other soft skills by participating in a learning, teaching and training community, in which typically our primary beneficiaries have come to become regularly involved in due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The participants have been having the chance to follow an innovative and unique training, at least in the Portuguese context, and in some cases are also benefiting from the use of certain technological services that are now generally provided by their educational organizations and/or the partner entities of the WEIWE(R)BE project.
Description
The WEIWE(R)BE project emerges to overcome the weaknesses witnessed in different educational levels, from basic to secondary school, in the information literacy and digital skills of the pupils/students.
Therefore, the project's objectives are the following:
to empower pupils/students for critical and reflective reading, when accessing various sources of information and in the analysis of Web content, namely Wikipedia articles, understood as Open Educational Resources;
to assume information literacy as a key requirement and competence for learning, and an essential asset in the networked society;
to trigger a change in the information behavior within learning and research processes.
Partnership
LE@D (UID 4372/FCT) - Laboratório de Educação a Distância e eLearning da Universidade Aberta (Portugal)
WEIWER® - International Academic Network “Wikis, Education & Research”
RBE - School Library Network of the Ministry of Education (Portugal)
The WEIWER® Network co-organized the 1st WEIWE(R)BE Session, which took place on June 3, 2020, and was attended by the Deputy Secretary of State and Education, the Dean of the Open University Portugal, the Coordinator of the School Libraries Network and the Coordinator of LE@D, Laboratory of Distance Education and eLearning (UID4372 / FCT).
With an audience of 175 participants, the pupils from the participating schools made known the work they developed during this school year with their teachers, librarian teachers and Inter-Municipal Coordinators of the School Libraries. Considering the quality of the work presented and the level of involvement evidenced, the directors of the Schools/School Groups who attended the session said that the project should continue.
The WEIWE(R)BE project, which took place throughout the academic year 2019/2020, is coordinated by Teresa Cardoso, Filomena Pestana (International Academic Network WEIWER®, LE@D, UAb) and the team of the School Libraries Network Office, with the aim of promoting strategies to develop information literacy skills, among others, in secondary school pupils, considering different resources, including Wikipedia.
The project WEIWE(R)BE was nominated for the WSIS PRIZES 2022 awards, promoted by the World Summit on the Information Society Forum (WSIS), an annual conference in Geneva, Switzerland, organized by the United Nations. WSIS PRIZES is an international competition aimed at identifying projects that are good practices and that can be broaden to other countries.
