Abstract:

To help overcome learning fragilities that resulted from the emergency distant schooling that took place during the first COVID19 lockdown, in March 2020 the Portuguese Ministry of Education, together with RTP, the Portuguese television broadcast channel, created the EstudoEmCasa (“StudyAtHome”) project. It aimed at creating, recording, and broadcasting lessons from different subjects and school years. When schools reopened in 2021, this project evolved to a digital platform - #EstudoEmCasa Apoia (“StudyAtHome Support”) and started focusing on the recovery of lost learnings during the pandemic. This platform now lodges hundreds of digital educational contents - escape rooms, webinars, podcasts, quizzes, games, online courses, and many others.

To provide algebra digital microlearning sequences in blended learning contexts, teachers must work in collaboration reinforcing trust, which is necessary for innovation, as well as to improve effectiveness, reduce overload, situate certainty, and offer opportunities to learn. The structure of collaborative work is quite demanding since all actors are necessary. This work does not demand complex logistics but requires real experience, sharing time, concerns, knowledge, expectations, and devotedness. This sharing work enables to build better strategies to overcome difficulties and problems, and a trust feeling which transforms a problem into an added value. All teachers’ work is focussed on students learning autonomy using these resources.

This is a qualitative study performed with 10 students and two teachers of two Portuguese public schools, that resorted to some of the digital pedagogical resources to learn algebra in a blended learning context. The mentioned resources were specifically created thinking of students who study autonomously, either at school or at home. Preliminary results show evidence of a positive impact both on motivation to and the quality of learning emerge from students and teachers’ discourses.

Keywords:

Algebra, blended learning online platforms, collaboration, digital microlearning sequences.