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Póvoa de Varzim City Council and Aver-o-Mar School Group chosen for national joint project: Family Reading

The City Council of Póvoa de Varzim has been selected to apply for the Family Reading Programme, an initiative in partnership with the Aver-o-Mar School Group, and all parties involved are delighted with this approval.

This national programme aims to provide families with the skills and motivation to read with children and young people and is based on four pillars: research; training mediators; actions to empower families to read; and the Family Reading festival. It provides for liaison between families, schools, the municipal library and the municipal social network, all of which were already provided for in the application phase, which included four phases:

Phase 1

– Launch of a research study into existing family reading practices.

– Municipalities apply to the Family Reading Programme, setting up a team comprising a teacher librarian, a municipal librarian and a member of the social network.

Phase 2

– Training of teacher librarians and municipal librarians (45 municipalities by 2024).

– Allocation of PNL funding.

Phase 3

– Organisation of training activities for families in the municipalities.

– Family Reading Festival 2024 (PNL, RBE, DGAE).

Phase 4

– Launch of the Great Family Reading Game in 2025.

Family reading is a strong predictor of students’ success at school and their relationship with books, which led the National Reading Plan to reformulate the existing project aimed at families, centred on access to books via loans. This expansion from an action to a structural programme allows for intervention that empowers families and creates a connection with books and reading for adults and children, in their homes and in the communities in which they live.  The family is the basic nucleus of children’s emotional, social and cognitive development. Reading as a family promotes essential literacy skills, builds emotional relationships and creates reading habits.

Having access to books is fundamental, but it’s not enough. You have to know how to choose it and read it together. Realising that the need for access to books is complementary to training in reading and its mediation, the Family Reading programme has now taken on a broader dimension, integrating research, training of trainers, training of families, access to books and participation.

The Family Reading programme is based on the strategy that the National Reading Plan has been implementing: developing reading skills and habits in the territories, training mediators and disseminating practices according to the specific needs of each community.

In 2025, the aim is for this programme to be nationwide, by making reading challenges available in digital format, allowing everyone to take part, which is why this partnership is so important for the school.

School Group’s website presents publication no. 1000

Redesigned in January 2017, the website of the Aver-o-Mar School Group (www.aeaveromar.pt), which until then had been in Joomla language, was now in WordPress, completely renovated and redesigned, and was then a benchmark in terms of school websites.

In addition to a reserved area, accessible only to accredited users, the site contained (and maintains) a ticket system for recording anomalies, which allows for better monitoring of needs and repairs, and has a public repository of numerous documents, including plans, assessment criteria, regulations and other guiding documents. Its structure was eventually followed by other institutions, which we welcome, as it is a recognition of the design made at the time.

Since then, there has been a whole evolution, including the adaptation of the site when it came to online teaching, due to the COVID pandemic, with additional needs to readjust the model, either due to lack of storage capacity or to be more responsive on cell phones and tablets. It has also met new “relatives”, in this case Teams, an internal communication platform that is very agile and accessible to all students, teachers and staff of the school, within the scope of the institutional email that is made available.

In January 2024, we entered a new phase, with a change of domain (@aeaveromar.pt) and new hosting capacities, and a redesign of the site is beginning, which will be developed throughout the 2nd and 3rd periods, highlighting, in this analysis of content to be maintained/adjusted, which we have been developing this past month, and almost seven years and one month after the 1st publication (news from the then Music Club, on 03.02.2017) our publication number 1000!!!

It’s an achievement that we want to mark, with the publication of February 29th (also an atypical date), with the title “Civil Protection Day – March 1st”, whose image illustrates this publication, which is already number 1007!

The publication of news/information has been a constant over the years, because it’s important to publicize what we do and, without false modesty, what we do well!

Who better to talk about the school than the school itself?!

Accessing the site, the search function (magnifying glass in the top right-hand corner) will allow you to travel back in time, along with current documents, while a subscription-based newsletter is being developed that will automatically send notifications when something is published, so that no data is lost.

Since April 2021, the site has also had a multilingual version, with in-house translation of the news published into English, French and Spanish (through the helpful collaboration of teachers Fátima Cunha [English] and Maria José Crasto [French]; we are currently limited to Spanish), so it is a vehicle for communication between members of the community, and we congratulate, on the occasion of this thousandth publication, all those who made and make the Agrupamento de Escolas de Aver-o-Mar.

Today’s edition of the International Journal of Scientific Research and Public Management features a scientific article entitled “Alan Turing’s History and Legacy for Computer Science”, co-authored by António Santos, a computer technician at this school for two years.

Abstract

“Throughout history we have come across some personalities who think ahead of their time and, in many cases, are misunderstood or even wronged. However, they all have one thing in common: they are geniuses who find impressive solutions to complex problems. The aim of this article is to carry out a historical review of one of the important personalities who has written his name in history and has great relevance to the development of modern computing: Alan Mathison Turing, or as he is known: Alan Turing. Considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, he made his great contribution to humanity by developing, in 1936, through an academic article, an automatic machine (“a-machine”, which was later called Turing) that could read and write different numbers and symbols. This article covers his birth, his academic career, his mentality and vision of machines and technological equipment, his partnerships and some interesting facts about his life.

Thus, it can be understood that, even at that time, it was already possible to see the signs of the first computer logics and realise that machines have dynamics beyond human comprehension, as they can also learn from humans and other machines and, best of all, transmit this knowledge with quality. Thus realising the legacy and historical milestone that this British mathematician, computer scientist, philosopher and biologist left for the modern and contemporary world in which we live today.”