Digital educational resources: The case of Manual Digital II

Abstract

The textbook has been a privileged element for teachers, students and parents to support acquisition and construction of knowledge. However, in the information and knowledge society, we are witnessing the introduction, increasingly intense, of technology in the classroom, starting from the early years of schooling. Still worthy of being studied, the supply of digital educational content for primary education, is little known, especially with regard to the quality of existing resources and the intensity of their use. In this context we present the Manual Digital II (MDII) project, which aims at producing digital pedagogic contents based on innovative design, production and application processes, for children, educators, teachers and parents. Especially for primary education it developed the multimedia application Manual Digital®, in accordance with the curricular guidelines from the Portuguese Ministry of Education, offering children creative learning adjusted to their own learning pace. Establishing itself as a complement to the textbook, this proposal was geared to help children acquire basic skills of thinking and develop other levels of higher cognitive demand. The proposal was also designed to be easily and naturally integrated into teachers’ regular lessons. In order to study the impact of this digital resource, three case studies, two in formal learning contexts and one in a non-formal learning context, were developed. The findings suggest different impacts on learning, depending on how they are operationalized. Simultaneously, during 2012/2013, several training initiatives were held, resulting in pedagogical materials to assist the integration of the Manual Digital resources in teachers’ daily lesson plans. In this paper, we present: a) the concept and the product; b) the findings obtained in the various field activities; and c) the future prospects of this project, including the development of its potential and its possible adaptation to Portuguese speaking countries contexts.