Having worked with Moodle before and having participated in the live demo, I was not anticipating any issues. I focused my time on working offline to create content, reflecting on what was relevant to my teaching and making the language student friendly for the grade 6/7 (age 11-13) range. As I prepared myself to work in Moodle, I ran in to an unexpected issue – I couldn’t login! I had done all my work and was left unable to access the one technology I need to complete the assignment. As you can imagine, a major panic attack ensued. I turned to my Google+ community for help and I was saved by another MET student. There were two user profiles with my name on Moodle, one from a previous course a few semesters ago, and then the new one that had been created for ETEC 565 that I didn’t know about. My knight in shining armour helped me access the new one since my old login was not providing me access to the ETEC 565 sites. I share this because it reinforced the importance of being a learning community. Had I not had my Google+ community to turn to for answers, and gotten such a prompt response, I doubt I would have been successful this week in creating my Introductory Module.
Vygotsky’s premise on social development theory revolves around a principle that learning is a social process is widely accepted in education in addition, Piaget mused that collaboration was key to cognitive development. Alfred Bandura’s social learning theory, later known as social cognitive theory, states that ‘people learn from one another via observation, imitation and modeling (Caron & Brennaman, 2010). All of these theories came in to play this week as I reached out and learned from my peers. I had hoped to meet this need for my students by introducing students to Google Docs as a way of collaborating outside of the classroom. Adding features, like a vocabulary wiki, facilitates collaborative knowledge building among students.
Vygotsky’s learning theory also centers around is the gap between needing help to complete a task and being able to do it independently or the ‘Zone of Proximal Development.’ Ideally educators must challenge students within the ZPD, not beyond it, or the resulting frustration will trigger a loss of a learning opportunity. Using a blended environment also helps transition students to on online learning platform while still feeling supported. Students can build community through informal communication and just in time interactions (Dunlap, 2009) and solve problems in a collaborative fashion within their zone of proximal development, working toward independence (Caron and Brennaman, 2010).
Social Development theory is the foundation of constructivism, student-centered, peer to peer learning offers students the opportunity to construct their own knowledge, or discourse on class assignments or problem solving. Better learning and new knowledge building results when students realize the value of these connections and networks in their learning process. Technology has the ability to open doors to a world of minds, diverse experiences, and massive knowledge base.
Engagement Theory postulates that learners need to be meaningfully involved in perceived worthwhile tasks, ideally through collaborative, project-based, and authentic tasks. While it is not necessary to use technology to engage students in learning, its use does promote greater engagement in Net Geners and offers more possibilities than a traditional classroom learning environment (Caron &Brennaman, 2010). However, successful application of technology means designing tasks that are objective driven, not merely chosen on availability. Grade 7 students are faced with the reality of “leaving the nest” and going in to the high school environment where they receive less support than they have been accustomed to. One of my goals as a transition year teacher is to teach them how to read an information text and how to extract the important information. Working together to discern this is a great tool for students to have in Grade 8. If they can collaborate from home in an online environment on an assigned chapter, they can achieve goals together in a more efficient manner and discuss topics they need clarification on. My use of Google Docs for the Introductory Activity in my Moodle is aimed at achieving this goal.
Bloom’s Taxonomy reminds educators that the objective must direct the activity to achieve the desired outcome. Although technology offers increasing opportunities and mediums to achieve desired outcomes, careful choices by teachers are key to student engagement and learning. This is known as objective driven design. Educators of the Net Generation must design hybrid learning environments that use carefully selected tools to achieve desired outcomes.
References
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a Theory of Online Learning. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University.
Bandura, A. (2012, July 31). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 1, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Bandura&oldid=505161860
Berk, R. (2011). Presentation at the 26th annual ES Conference. No Teacher Left Behind: Teaching Strategies for the Net Generation, pp. 77-90 Unpublished manuscript.
Caron & Brennaman. (2010) Symbiosis:Co-Evolution of Emerging Technology, Learning Theory, and Instructional Design. Retrieved July 2012 from https://sites.google.com/a/boisestate.edu/edtechtheories/caron_brennaman
Dunlap, J. (2009) Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence. Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 20 (2) pp. 129-135