The past 3 weeks of this ICT course has been essential in understanding e-learning design and how students learn effectively. Exploration into the learning theories, learning styles, Gardner’s multiple intelligences, ICT design frameworks, thinking routines (scaffolding)and exploring digital tools such as blogs and wiki’s will assist me in becoming a successful 21st century teacher.
The learning theories were used to frame our analysis on a range of activities. Of the four learning theories learnt in week one, I consider constructivism and connectivism to play the leading roles in the wiki activities. Constructivism is about how people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting upon those experiences (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2004). This online wiki was valuable in constructivist learning as it allowed students to have a permanent record of text conversations so they could return to the record to elaborate and construct knowledge (CQUniversity, 2011). Seimens (2005) describes connectivism as, ‘Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.’ In the wiki tasks we were encouraged to build our own personal learning network by making connections with other class members through the use of a wiki where we could read, compare and learn about each other’s ideas and opinions on certain issues.
The scaffolding of a wiki activity is imperative for students. Scaffolding encourages students to think critically. Bloom Taxonomy created 6 stages of thinking. The bottom 3 stages (lower order thinking) are remembering, understanding and applying. The top 3 stages (higher order thinking) are analysing, evaluating and creating. The importance of scaffolding a wiki space through thinking routines such as PMI (plus, minus and interesting) and De Bono’s 6 thinking hats (negative, positive, intuitive, process, objective and creative) is that it encouraged higher order thinking. It’s important for teachers to challenge their students to help develop critical thinking. These 2 particular strategies could assist my students in the future by supporting complex reasoning processes by scaffolding required ways of thinking (CQUniversity, 2011).
Overall, the main approach to the design of these online learning activities was that we collaborate with one another and expand on our knowledge through the use of networking strategies and thinking routines.This was achieved by participating in the learning theories wiki and the mobile phones wiki where the PMI and De Bono’s 6 thinking hats was utilised. Networking with other students through these online learning activities enabled us to share ideas and perspectives and as a result build our knowledge. These activities won’t suit everyone. For that reason it’s essential that teachers continue to investigate new ways of teaching to guarantee that all students learning styles are catered for. Each student has different knowledge and experience with ICT, thus there has been a diverse range of ideas and perspectives put forward in the different activities. This can increase individual learning because there's such an array of different ideas, some students might not have considered some points where other students might have picked up on it.These learning activities predominantly cater for the 21st century learner. Prensky (2001) states, ‘Our students have changed dramatically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.’ 21st century learners ‘today are all native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the internet’, their born into the digital world (Prensky, 2001). Today’s older people were socialised differently from kids today and are in the process of learning this digital language. As Prensky (2001) stated, 21st learners are highly unlikely to go backwards. Therefore it’s important for us as pre-service teachers to take this onboard and extract as much information as we can to assist the 21st century learners.
References
CQUniversity. (2011). Week 1 readings: active learning, learning diversity and the theory. Retrieved from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491 ICTs for Learning Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/course/view.php?id=17135
Educational Broadcasting Corporation. (2004). Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index.html
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Retrieved from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491 ICTs for Learning Design, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Siemens, G. (2005). Elearnspace. Constructivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Retrieved from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491 ICTs for Learning Design,
No comments:
Post a Comment