OU blog

Personal Blogs

Design Museum

I've never read enough

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 23 Aug 2019, 13:55

I got through it in an hour.

Using edtech in a way that helps your learners

Having the skills and mindset to embrace constant change in a fluid environment while every emerging technology develops its functionality and sophistication. 

Edtech should always be linked to meaningful formative assessment.

Types of tools

Recent and emerging themes in edtech

  • Assessment/assignment tools
  • Social media
  • Video and audio
  • Collaborative working
  • Games and learner response systems
  • Presentation

Name of the edtech tool

An infographic summarising its benefits

What can it do for teachers and learners

How to use it

How to assess using it

It is wrong to reference Prensky whose theories were entirely hypothetical and once tested proved to be totally wrong. Search here to see the multiple times I have picked up on this one and stripped in bare. Prensky wrote a piece for Atlantic in 2001 - journalist, not research. There was a resonance about it that people wanted to believe. It is nonsense. 

Nonsense like ‘though digital natives are demonstrating advances skills in multitasking at speed’.

When someone was born no more makes them digitally literate than being capable of driving a car or flying a light aircraft. The inverse is the truth: those with the greater digital skills are older and educated: they could afford the devices and the Internet connection. Today, a student who can waste their day playing games, using Instagram and messaging friends cannot even search for something and differentiate between fact and invention, let alone complete a range of digital skills - skills they come to college to be taught from scratch. Indeed, in a vocational college some students baulk at the site of a computer saying they came to study carpentry or motor vehicle maintenance because they wanted nothing to do with them. 

It is also utter nonsense to talk about preferred learning styles such visual and kinaesthetic. Once again, this is a plausible theory that has no basis in fact. The facts are that the highly complex brain exploits multiple parts of the brain stimulated by all the senses in varying circumstances in order to construct a short term memory and in time reconstruct and build on this in the long term memory while clinging on to some sense of it all before some of it, or the best part of it is forgotten. All the senses matter. If a student tells me they prefer to watch videos rather than being given a written test, then I will oblige them to take notes, write essays and do written exams because it has also been shown that the challenge of doing something you don’t like, rather than doing things the way that suits you is more memorable.

At this point the author has lost all credibility and I am loath to read on.

Nor does he know the correct definition of the word ‘indifference’ mistaking it for  

There's a good review of the pros and cons of Nearpod.

Others include: Turnitin, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Learnium, H5P, YouTube, EDpuzzle, TuitionKit, Panopto, Audacity, GarageBand, Padlet, QR codes, G Suite for Education, Lino, Popplet, MindMapfree, WordPress, Notability, Slido, Kahoot!, Quizlet, GoSoapBox, Poll Everywhere, Wordclouds, Plickers, ClassDojo, Explain Everything, Infographics, Canva, PowerPoint, iSpring, 











Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Design Museum

Death by Kahoot

Visible to anyone in the world

I've suffered too often from death by PowerPoint. Are you now suffering from death by Kahoot? These gimmicks come in waves. At the Sussex Show & TEL event a presentation on Accessibility in HE incorporated a Kahoot quiz which included irritating Teletubbies/Angry Birds style music during the count down as every question was posted, and absurdly detailed niche questions. In particular percentages expressed to the third decimal place were totally out of place. Too many educators fail in the most basic of communications best practices - know your audience!

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Design Museum

Facilitators of learning rather than a teachers

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 5 Apr 2018, 18:18

Teachers will tell you never to take away teaching time, that they are hard pressed to deliver all the required course work as it is. If you want to involved 'Technology Enhanced Learning' (TEL) that it needs to during added hours.

The OU has taken up with Google's philosophy of more 'facilitator-led learning' with those teachers who create the courses elevated in status, while everyone else takes on what they may see as a diminished role. Or an apprenticeship role before they too become writers of content.

I am putting it too crudely. Teachers do hours of planning to carry the hours of 'taught hours' that they deliver. If they are able to teach may more by including the indirect experience of learning online then this may, in some measure, begin to cater for the millions around the world who want a secondary or tertiary education but don't have access to one.

 

IMAGE: Working in small groups to correct copyrights and Non-NPOV violations. Photo by Shani Evenstein (שני אבנשטיין), freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

IMAGE: Medical English student (Group 2) uploading photograph related to their field into Wikimedia Commons

IMAGE:  Children with iPads by  Wesley Fryer 

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Design Museum

Time for social media

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 5 Jun 2011, 09:32
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations

From The Times Education Supplement April 2008

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=401300

'Web 2.0 has become a warm and dark space for people with too much time and too few ideas.'

I disagree; we all have the same amount of time we simply borrow it from elsewhere.

'Older citizens, the poor, the illiterate and the socially excluded are invisible in Shirky's "everybody". Once more, the US, and occasionally the UK, is "the world" in the world wide web. The hypothesis is clear: the internet/web/Web 2.0 changed "everything". The question remains: for whom?'

Reviewer : Tara Brabazon is professor of media studies, University of Brighton.

The same criticisms can be made of Marc Prensky and all his unsubstantiated twaddle about 'Digital Natives'.

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 11300552