Abstract:

The purpose of this document is to present an initiative carried out on the Computer Engineering Department of a school of the Polytechnic of Porto which aimed to promote knowledge share between teachers.
For this purpose some teachers were asked to plan training activities related to specific areas within the programming engineering.
Considering that the quality of teaching is one of the central challenges of society and the professional development of teachers is one of the important aspects that can influence and translate into improvement, governments consider that schools should seek to motivate their teachers. In this sense since this update it comes to educational attainment which is the core of the teaching activity.
In several educational areas, especially in those related with technology some are critical areas given that the world is constantly evolving and where we assist at constant changes of knowledge, technologies and concepts.
This problem is more significative concerning the constant development that we feel particularly is the Computer Engineering where over time changes has been considerable.
In HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) it appears that the teaching staff, resulting of their activities as preparing learning activities, trainers, assessors and jury members, supervisors or participants in research projects, and producers of scientific writing, do not have enough time to learn autonomously new subjetcs and get new knowledge in other different areas, especially in computer programming areas.
The methodology for this study was related with finding that over time, teachers of the Department of Computer Engineering manifested will and interest to participate in initiatives promoted by the direction of the department conducting the acquisition of new skills or differentiated new knowledge that could be useful for them.
Some iniciatives were planned and implemented. The first initiatives undertaken were the Android, Python and Arduino courses. The Android subject was later target of a new action, more advanced called “Android advanced”. Also a training in SCRUM Master has been carried out..
It was considered that it might be important to enhance the existing endogenous resources in the department (classrooms, equipment and experts in certain areas) and analyze the potential to provide to other teachers of the department some training initiatives by providing them with small thematic courses.
In this context, some teachers have been challenged to plan these short training actions in order to provide new training to their colleagues that would allow other teachers new knowledge that could break the grip with this new topic.
It can be concluded that these initiatives where usefful and teachers said they were extremely helpful and that now they felt more refreshed and prepared to work with the topics presented.
They also stated that they were open to further initiatives that the main advantages were the fact that occur in the workplace, are free and appropriate times. In some cases they said it would be useful some additional time training.
We believe that with this reflection this kind of actions should be replicated by other schools and / or departments as educational initiatives that represent an added value not only in the training and preparation of teachers but in parallel with a significant improvement of team spirit.
These initiatives can translate into important and usefull actions of Long Life Learning.

Keywords:

Minds On, Long Life Learning, ISEP, Learning iniciatives.