The e-learning Handbook for Classroom Teachers

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TACCLE_Book080609.pdf

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Description

This book - 170 pages - is written for classroom teachers who want to know more about elearning and who would like to experiment with designing e-learning material to use in their own classrooms. It is primarily targeted at secondary teachers but there is no reason why primary school teachers or teachers in adult education should not find it useful too.

The other group we had in mind were those of you still undertaking initial teacher training. Although there are some exemplary courses, a depressing number of trainee teachers continue to arrive in the classroom having barely heard the words ‘e-learning’, still less have hands on experience of it.

Some people have made the obvious point that a book about e-learning is rather a contradiction in terms and felt that it would have been more appropriate to have produced an on-line version with all of the obvious advantages of easy updating.

However, we felt that the very teachers for whom this book is written are probably the group least likely to use or feel confident about using web-based materials. A book is comfortable and familiar and that is exactly how we would like teachers to feel about e-learning.

It is both a reference book and a practical handbook. Some teachers will use it to find out about e-learning, others will be keen to actually get involved and start producing materials.

Using social software for teaching

We dealt in some detail in the first part of this book with ways in which social software could be used to support teaching and learning. However, for those readers who skipped over that part and are using this handbook as a reference rather than a practical guide, we will summarise the main points.

If we think of social software as a broad and varied category of web tools, then we can begin to think how they can be used to support computermediated collaboration between students and teachers. For example, we could create a collection of useful resources (websites, photos, wikipedia articles, videos, etc.). Once created, the resources can be organized by adding tags, creating a categorisation system, by using shared bookmarks or by creating ‘folksonomies’.

We can encourage students to use blogs to write about what they are learning and to share their ideas and work in progress, to give us feedback or as a medium for publishing their assignments – or we could create our own blog as a teacher to give them feedback. Using wiki software, as we suggested earlier, we can get whole groups of students working together on a common task.

Personal Learning Environments

The PLE approach is based on a learner-centred view of learning and differs fundamentally from the Learning Management Systems or Virtual Learning Environments approach, both of which are based on an institutionally focussed or course-centred view of learning The development of Personal Learning Environments can be seen as a response to a number of different social changes and also changes in the way people are rethinking and redefining ideas about learning and knowledge development.

Author

TACCLE. July 2009