- How can technology be used to create an effective learning experience?
Firstly, as a new teacher I will be utilizing a blog space that I expect students to post on. This will include ongoing discussion boards, whatever readings/viewings are assigned and will have due dates and timelines available for students and parents. By maintaining a website parents will feel connected and students will be able to practice their online identity in a safe space, with neutral (school work) topics. This is used as practice for when they want to express a personal opinion or choose to make themselves vulnerable in a public forum. In this space, I can moderate their discussions and then if something should go awry, have an in class discussion using it as a learning experience. By making each student foster their student identity online, they will begin to positively network and have work associated with their actual name, not just a pseudonym.
The ability to work online on projects and work provides the opportunity for students to work from home, at school and anywhere else they have access to the internet. That means that students can create a presentation (for example) during class, and then work on it while they are babysitting, at home the next day or in the computer lab before class. Students can virtually submit assignments, saving space, paper and time. By using their online community as a resource for finding research, establishing opinions, participating in discussion and submitting assignments the students are practicing positive identities within the world wide web. Importantly, this also provides a public forum that holds students accountable to their immediate peers and anyone who can access the blog, wiki, etc. If students are mandated to read, view, or listen to each others' work, they will improve their quality of product and incidentally this fosters intrinsic motivation. Students will want their friends, parents and babysitter to see the game they made or watch the video they edited more than if their teacher was their only witness.
What used to be impossible, or at least extremely tedious: trying to find obscure references, going to multiple libraries, conducting qualitative research globally are all easily facilitated within the online community. Today, more than ever, students in Canada can Skype or chat online with students around the world and can access any information that has been encoded into the online databases. Now library searches are done exclusively online, saving countless hours and energy. Also, when students are submitting assignments online, teachers are able to access the information regardless of where they are.
Lastly, the type of assignments have now shifted to encompass a wide variety of mediums. Rather than the ‘old fashioned‘ colour a title page for this unit and summarize the text, technology has created the ability for students to use a variety of programs and mediums to articulate themselves and express their own identity. The development of technology introduces, or at least embraces the element of choice. In other words, giving the students choices of how to complete assignments creates internal motivation and fosters creativity that you wouldn’t have been able to request otherwise. With the pairing of choice and technology, the completed assignments can be limitless and take curricula to new heights.