In this talk, we will discuss three main issues: (a) the importance of ICT in the Portuguese Education System (PES), including new national initiatives and their impact in the New Curriculum for the Portuguese Basic Education; (b) the initiatives EECM, PmatE, TextMat, and IntBooks; and (c) our point of view regarding the current PES, the TERC reform in the US, and how the AA model may help to clarify some questions in Education.

The number of students studying sciences in Europe has steadily declined to such an extent that this is seen as a threat to the competitiveness of Europe. In France the decline has been about 5% each year during the past several years. Inquiry Based Study, IBS, is the paradigm that is generally seen as a possible way to increase students’ interest in sciences.

Developing and experimenting a Dynamic Geometry and Computer Algebra environment for the upper-secondary algebra and calculus curriculum.

In France, at at upper secondary level, students have to consolidate their algebraic proficiencies in order to tackle pre-calculus.

The WebALT project created a translator of mathematical teaching material from OpenMath formulas to seven European languages. This translator has recently become open-source, which opens new ways to develop and extend it. One of the main ambitions is to extend the system to cover all of the 23 official languages of the European Union. This goal requires organized collaboration of voluntary work. The main part of the work is the implementation of the GF Resource Grammar Library to new languages.

For some time WIRIS suite has offered tools to support education in mathematics and science topics in Moodle, the Open Source LMS. So far these solutions offered a formula editor based on icons and pallets, plus a powerful platform for mathematical calculation called WIRIS CAS. We want to present the new WIRIS family member, called Quizzes, that integrates the powerful WIRIS mathematical calculation engine of with Moodle quizzes system.

Engineering students have traditionally had a lot of difficulty in reaching the objectives they have to cover, laid out in the different Mathematics courses. In a distance learning environment, both the learning methodology and the students’ profile (adults with family and professional responsibilities and with usually insufficient previous knowledge levels) are elements which aggravate these difficulties.

Lightning talk given at the Semantic Wiki Meeting at the International Semantic Web Conference. This is a very short and general summary of research that I have been doing for some time.

One important part of the feedback that I got was: Maybe people don't actually mind clicking one out of five reply buttons. Don't overrate automatic annotation: it's not too trivial after all.

Applications such as GeoGebra and TERC together with other technology-based innovations for instructional delivery, such as mobile delivery systems, provide exciting new ways of supporting the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, as with any dramatic new innovation that stimulates people who are “early adopters,” there can be challenges in the process of integrating the innovation systemically into the mainstream of established ways of doing things.

The generalized availability, and the abundance, of digital resources for mathematics teachers entail a complete metamorphosis of the curriculum material, still in progress. They also yield a deep change in teachers’ professional knowledge and development. This statement leads to study mathematics teachers’ documentation work: looking for resources, selecting/designing mathematical tasks, planning their succession, managing available artifacts, sharing recombined resources etc. This documentation work is at the core of teachers’ professional activity and professional development.

The document is a short Introduction of MathML and its use within DAISY books. It is meant to be a starter with further references and aims to address primarily teachers, students, publishers and software and service developers. Given the subject, it is of somewhat technical nature, but should be understandable by the general audience.

The document is available as a PDF document.