Fwd - How Learning Platforms could become the new 'worksheet' July 19, 2011
Great post for anyone interested in how we learn, post-web worlds, enabling learning, personal ownership of the learning experience, tracking your own learning journey etc. (I'll leave you to make the connections for yourself)
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How Learning Platforms could become the new 'worksheet'
I was adding some maths games to my school's Google Apps domain the other day when suddenly a warning bell went off in my mind. What if I was filling up the learning platform with so much stuff, it would detract from the relationships between the adult and the child?
Let me explain myself a little.
I've been doing some research on the use of social media in maths learning and what I've found is that social media can be used to promote 'negotiated scaffolding'. Some people call this co-construction. It's a pedagogy that fits within the realm of 'social constructivism'. What I also found is that most primary (elementary) children are exposed to mainly 'rigid scaffolding'. Now I have to admit at this point that I'm not completely clued up as to where a pedagogy starts and a teaching strategy starts, but suffice it to say that in my own teaching I'm a social constructivist who's good at making connections between ideas. I use two main strategies: negotiated and rigid scaffolding to take children into their zone of proximal development and onto 'the edge of learning' (Vygotsky).
Is that enough jargon yet? I'll put it another way - essentially my lessons take 2 forms:
- Lessons where I start from a point the children have specified, negotiate the learning goals and guide them to achieve them. (You can see why co-construction is a useful term for this, as the children work together with the adult to 'constuct' the scaffold).
- Lessons where I define the learning goal, set the specified success criteria (or steps to success, learning ladder - whatever you want to call it) and teach the various stages until the children achieve the learning goal.