Isabel Estrela Rego

Facebook vs moodle: Surveying university students on the use of learning management systems to support learning activities outside the classroom

Learning management systems and social networks on Web have been tools most used by students in higher education institutions as learning support tools outside of the classroom. In this paper, we present the results from a survey conducted at a Portuguese university to 159 students in Computer Science and Psychology about the purposes and reasons for the use of Moodle and Facebook. We conclude, among other conclusions, that they complement each other: while the first is mostly used for formal communication with teachers, the second is mostly used for informal communication with peers.

Contributos da psicologia para o estudo da indisciplina na sala de aula

In the last decades parents, teachers and educators in general have been feeling an increasing concern about students disruptive behaviour in schools. Underlying these concerns are the growing number of students with disruptive behaviour, the severity of these behaviours, and their manifestation in ever younger pupils. This article presents a descriptive and exploratory study designed to explore teachers’ conceptions of classroom disruption. A set of situations containing classroom disruptive behaviours were created and later presented to teachers of grades seven to nine in schools of Ponta Delgada, Acores. We aimed at finding out which of these situations teachers considered more severe in terms of disruption, which factors they believed were more influential, and what kind of interventions they considered more appropriate to deal with those situations.