OVERVIEW
Technology plays an important role in Personalized Learning. Dramatically increasing a teacher’s ability to identify and manage the needs of students. Technology helps define and target students’ strengths and weakness and helps build a kind of individualized education plan for every student. It helps students to access a large variety of content, resources, and learning opportunities anywhere and at anytime.
THE MOST POPULAR
Below are some of the most popular technologies that are out there today, either with extensive implementation, or extensive plans for implementation.
MOBILE DEVICES
More and more students own mobile devices, including tablets, phones etc. and indicate a strong desire to use those personal learning tools in school to increase collaboration and access to resources. Mobile technologies have the potential to enhance personalized learning due to their unique characteristics. First, learning occurs in environments that move with the learners; and secondly, learning is more personalized in continually reconstructed contexts (Looi et al. 2009).
CLOUD TECHNOLOGY
Cloud computing allows students to easily store the content they want, and cloud-based productivity tools such as Google Apps and WikiSpaces enable them to share their content with others, gather new and relevant items, write personal commentary, complete assignments, and more.
COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS
Personalized learning may be “personal” but it’s also highly social. Collaboration plays a large role in the personalized learning model. Examples of collaborative tools are the web 2.0 tools like Edmodo, Ning, Diigo and Mobile technology like SMART Notebook collaborative learning software.
APPS
With hundreds of thousands of apps available in multiple marketplaces, it is easy to see how no two students share the exact same set of apps. Everyone has distinctive preferences and approaches learning and exploration differently. This is the basic premise of personal learning environments. Examples of the apps that helps bring personalized learning to students are SMART notebook app for iPad and the CK-12 Flexbook, a series of digital textbooks that are accessible on all iPhone and Android smart phones, as well as the iPad, iPod Touch and Android tablets.
WEB 2.0
Web 2.0 has given learners a large collection of tools for creating, organizing, and making meaning from content. Examples of these tools are Wikis, Blogs, YouTube, GoogleDocs, Elgg, Flickr, and Jaiku. Using such software, learners can organize content that has meaning to them and easily share that content and their own interpretation of it.
OER AND LEARNING COMMONS
In the last few years, the use of social software tools and services such as Weblogs, Wikis, social networking, and social bookmarking services beyond the educational sector has played an active and important role in OER. The success of social software with many users has inspired the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE), which integrates several tools and services a learner can benefit from in self-directed and collaborative online learning. There are many OERs available to support personalized learning. Examples of these are Elgg, an open source social network tool, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), an open education project in which anyone can participate.
Many of the technologies mentioned above have accurate and succinct descriptions in the NMC Horizon Project’s Short List 2012 K-12 Edition. Pick one of interest to you to investigate the information presented. The lines become blurred between some of them, but these are the technologies that continuously were mentioned through my youtube and web searches on personalized learning.
CONCLUSION
Consistently web 2.0 and mobile devices have come up as the most effectively used tools for facilitating personalized learning. Cloud technology is also becoming a great way for students to learn in this model, as is software that allows students or teachers to store information they find important. OER and Web2.0 applications complement each other. The advent of Web2.0 opened wide the opportunities for new ways of collaboration, peer support, communities of practice and crowd sourcing in the development and use of OER.
THE FUTURE
The future of Personalized Learning will shift based on what technology becomes available. Use of increasingly sophisticated and seamless mobile devices, and cloud technology are areas that we expect significant growth in, as well as OER’s, Learning Commons, badges to show learning completion and media representations or presentations of learning (video, photo, etc.). The increasing use of internet in facilitating learning will provide more opportunities for sharing information and expertise. Alternative formats for handing in work or representing learning will be allowed and encouraged. Basically, personalized learning is a shift from TEACHING to FACILITATING, without strict guidelines on the format of learning.
Below are a couple of examples of where we might be headed.
Ignite Honolulu 4: Mobile Technology & Personalized Learning
This video provides is a quick overview of how technology has shaped classrooms and what changes might happen in the future. It is a good starting-off point for thinking about what innovations might mean to learning.
The whole video is interesting, but I have included a clip that is pertitent to personalized learning from the end of the video.
Socrait
These provides an example of an online program which can increase learning across all age levels. Basically, a system “built outside of education”, where teachers become “coaches”, much more like a Socratic model. Questions and areas of interests drive individual learning.
The idea is summed up in this last section, but feel free to watch the whole presentation.
If you are particularly interested in the idea presented in this video here is some further information on it.
References:
Looi, C.-K., Seow, P., Zhang, B., So, H. J., Chen, W., & Wong, L.-H. (2010). Leveraging mobile technology for sustainable seamless learning: A research agenda. British Journal of Educational Technology,41(2), 154–169.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2yuZ8XlWcc&feature=relmfu
http://brandon-hall.com/blogs/news/?p=3373
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-K12-shortlist.pdf
http://education.une.edu/mobile-apps-aim-to-give-students-a-personalized-learning-experience/
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet26/mcloughlin.pdf
Thanks for the link to Andersen’s explanation of what learning could be like with SOCRAIT. It is doable, though not all the content in the Internet is necessarily accurate or correct. It’s interesting how in the BC Plan video, though the teachers also see themselves as facilitators, one of them said there is structure but at the same time learning is personalized. Do we need structure? Is personalized learning about these open choices Andersen discusses in her web page? One BC teacher mentioned how he helps students on their journey. I think learning is a journey, not an end; however, for a journey to be fruitful we need some sort of ‘map’ or ‘guide’. I wonder how SOCRAIT fits into this idea of a journey?
I am guessing just looking at SOCRAIT that they would benefit from some kind of mentoring program or guide. They would help people break down the elements that you would need for you to create your step by step goals and how they would all come together to create your personalized path.
But yes, Adelpaso I agree with you that a it would be difficult to validate the validity of content on the internet.
The idea is that there would be guides, and individuals who did the “tagging” of information for students to access. I would imagine that programs, websites, schools, etc. could be verified so that anytime they “tagged” their own information you could know that it came from a valid source.
Very interesting concepts. My questions – and perhaps I just missed this – is in some standardization of performance or ability as a demonstration that the student has met some level of performance. I find the entire idea of personalized learning very intriging – it is going to be something to definitely keep an eye on.