Using Technology to Enhance Student Learning
Wednesday 13 May 2009Comment on this article Permlink
Research on learning models indicates that technology can enhance student learning, engagement, and productivity.
Technology can help with the tasks that students perform, increase their motivation, and lead to changes in classroom roles and organisation.
Communicating
Blogs
- Online public diary
- Vehicle for thoughts and opinions
- Legitimise opinions with links
- Provides insights into other cultures
- Reflective
- Can be done in Blackboard.
Other free blogging sites include:
Uses:
- Students on work experience or placements
- Encouraging reflection
- Exploring links to common interests
- As a research diary
- Project notes
- Writing up and sharing notes after a meeting or conference
- Peer assessment.
Teacher can give support and guidance through use of comments.
Micro-blogging. Simple messaging service, short – max 140 characters – designed for users to share what they are doing or thinking at that moment.
Users can receive Twitter updates (“tweetsâ€) on their phones, via Instant Messaging, RSS or on the Web.
The brevity, combined with the variety of delivery systems, make Twitter a powerful medium.
Uses:
- Sharing ideas and knowledge
- Alerting students to an article or Web site (include a link)
- Getting feedback
- Giving support
- Sending reminders.
Hudson River plane crash was first reported on Twitter!
Wikis
- Information resource
- Communal document everyone can edit (therefore information should be used with care)
- Can also be done in Blackboard
- Word derived from Hawaiian for ‘fast’
- e.g. wikipedia (English site)
- PB Wiki has a free education wiki creation site.
Uses:
- Getting students to work collaboratively, sharing information and knowledge.
Discussion boards
- Via Internet Forum
- Bulletin Board
- Message Board, an online discussion site.
- These can be done in Blackboard
- e.g. The Student Room peer support site.
Uses:
- Collaborative learning through the social construction of knowledge
- Online discussion for particular topics, for groups of students, either for a certain time (i.e. instead of a classroom session) or ongoing (asynchronous) discussion
- Continue a discussion begun in the classroom, or gather initial opinions before a classroom-based discussion
- Shyer students may find it easier to contribute to an online discussion than to speak out in class
- Help improve students’ writing skills, as an intermediate stage between oral discussion and formal writing
- Encourage reflection – students can look back over and consider what has been said before, and can compose their contribution more carefully than a spoken response
- You can have ‘threads’ within a discussion for different topics/areas.
Social networking site with lots of educational applications; can set up open or closed groups.
Uses:
- Group work and discussion
- Keeping in touch, e.g. students on year abroad/work placement
- Networking – students can find and interact with a contact with similar academic or research interests on the other side of the world.
Issues:
- Much research shows students prefer to use separate sites for socialising and work; they do not want the tutor to be their ‘friend’
- Privacy issues
- Many would like their VLE to be more like Facebook (Oxford Brookes/Bristol).
Social networking site with an emphasis on music and videos.
Uses:
- Keeping in touch with students on year abroad/work placement
- Blogging
- Getting an audience for musical productions.
Tagging and bookmarks
Tagging
A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file).
This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.
Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item’s creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.
On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. e.g. see Delicious
Social bookmarking service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Bookmark items that interest you and share with others, or find websites others found useful.
Uses:
- Students could tag useful sites they came across with the module code, so other students on the same module can easily find these sites
- Create and share reading lists and lists of resources.
Tag cloud
- User generated navigation
- A collection of tags, often these are hyperlinked
- Size or colour of tag’s text indicates number of ‘hits’ and so is a visual representation of a tag’s popularity.
Social media site which helps you to discover websites of particular interest to you, and share them with others.
Based on your ratings of sites you have viewed (by clicking a simple thumbs up/thumbs down icon) StumbleUpon suggests other sites you may find interesting or relevant.
Uses:
- Discover more websites and resources in your areas of particular interest.
Searching
Searches academic publications by word, phrase, author, publication, date; can define subject areas to search.
Uses:
- Literature reviews
- Building reading lists.
An internet search engine for searching blogs.
Uses:
- Finding other relevant or interesting blogs.
Enables super searching, allows you to create personal search engines to restrict searches to only the sites you specify. Save and share your searchrolls.
Uses:
- Create searchroll of trusted, authoritative sites for students to use.
Creating
Mashup
- Mix of more than one application
- Combining data from more than one source into a single tool, creating a new service, e.g. mixing Google Maps with Amazon to show map location of buyers of a particular item
- E.g. iguide mixes travel and hotel information with interactive maps
- AlertMap shows worldwide actual hazards such as volcanoes erupting, earthquakes etc on a map
- Frappr combines maps with social networking sites.
Uses:
- Allows the sharing and presentation of material in new ways that might facilitate different insights, e.g. http://simile.mit.edu/timeline is a mashup site where you can build timelines for your particular topic.
Composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. E.g. New York Times through Flickr pipe, which takes The New York Times RSS feed and adds a photo from Flickr based on the keywords of each item:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=aqKO8LvG2xGlHqr9l7okhQ.
Generates “word clouds†from the text you provide.
Uses:
- Brainstorming ideas
- Mapping
- Creating posters etc.
You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes.
Images
Online photo sharing and photo management. You can tag images to enable sharing or searching.
Free – Share photos, image storage space; organise, edit (crop, retouch, add effects), tag, share create slideshows, search public albums for relevant photos.
Free Photoshop-type image editing. Integrates with photo sharing sites such as Flickr.
Online documents, desktops and homepages
- Stores documents online
- Can share as wanted
- Can upload existing documents, such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.
Uses:
- Can access documents from any computer, useful if working on a different site or from home
- Latest version of document always available to sharers, so you don’t have to email different versions of a document around for others to contribute to/update.
- Share documents for group projects
- Use annotation or comment features for peer review.
Suite of free online web applications (e.g. emails, wiki, web conferencing) and document creation/storage. Like Google Docs, but more business oriented.
Create your own customised home page, so your settings, bookmarks, etc are available on any computer, wherever you are.
Create your own customised home page, so your settings, bookmarks, etc are available on any computer, wherever you are.
Customisable home page; pulls together all your online services, e.g. blogs, social networks, news.
Online private desktop, with file sharing and storage space, chat, email etc.
Uses:
- Store and share online all documents, photos, music, etc
- Log in from anywhere
- Claims to remove the need to actually own a computer.
ePortfolios
Online personal collection of documents that can be shared; online record of learning; could include documents, images, blog entries, links, and other evidence of learning.
Uses:
- Collect evidence of learning
- Encourages reflection of learning, and can lead to more awareness of learning strategies and needs
- Owner can direct potential employers to view their e-portfolio
- Can be done in Blackboard.
- See also: ePet at Newcastle University.
Learning resources
Free JISC funded online repository of teaching and learning materials and RLOs for HE and FE in a range of subjects. Need to register to gain access.
RLO – Reusable Learning Objects
Digital resources that support learning – these can be downloaded, re-used or linked into for use in another context, course or any Institution.
Can often customise – content can be changed or adapted. As used in CETL and Jorum.
Common characteristics:
- Learning objects are much smaller units of learning, typically ranging from 2 -15 minutes
- They are self-contained – each learning object can be taken independently
- They are reusable – a single learning object may be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes
- They can be aggregated –grouped into larger collections of content, including traditional course structures.
GLO tool for creating Re-usable Learning Objects.
FREE open source materials for education – training and tutorials are available.
Podcasts
A way of distributing multimedia files such as MP3 audio files and video files over the Internet, for students to access anywhere on mobile devices such as iPods, or personal computers.
Some universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Open University, MIT) produce free materials as podcasts. You can find podcasts on directories such as iTunes U or Juice.
Audio podcasts are relatively easy to create using an iPod or computer with a microphone.
Uses:
- Students can create podcasts to document or share learning experiences
- Teachers can give individual audio feedback to assignments (some students found this to be ‘like a mini tutorial’)
- Lots of resources readily available to download as podcasts
Increasingly in the future, lectures will need to be podcast to meet the needs of new learner constituencies (eg those in work; studying part-time; to add flexibility and reduce the need for expensive provision and maintenance of on-site facilities).
Other
Web 2.0
Doesn’t refer to an update in web technologies, but rather to the way developers and users use the web: communal web use, no central control, everyone contributing, democratic, creative, collaborative, communication, information sharing.
Directory of Web 2.0 applications and services:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
Also called a ‘feed’, ‘webfeed’ or ‘channel’.
Subscribable download feed, e.g. for getting latest news, podcasts, additions to blogs, etc.
Uses:
- Keep up with developments in your area of specialism
- Be alerted to new postings on blogs, alert students to new announcements.
3D virtual world. Participant is represented by an Avatar, which he/she controls, to interact and socialise with other avatars and explore virtual surroundings.
Uses:
- Learning languages through carrying out activities
- Running simulations
- Setting up situations which would be impossible to create in real life, e.g. a medical school set up an emergency situation in Second Life for students’ avatars to deal with.
Open University uses Second Life for some tutorials. Also, see example from
Kingston University for paramedic course (blood is optional!).
Some issues:
- Students may resent academics invading ‘their’ social spaces, e.g. using Facebook for academic purposes; commenting on blogs etc. Ensure students’ privacy in discussion groups/blogs etc
- Not all students have the technological knowhow
- Tools’ popularity changes – is it worth investing in it?
- Who owns the intellectual property?
- Manage new technologies in ways that are useful to the student
- Who takes ownership of a shared document?
- Online materials may be searched to target advertising.
Useful links
‘Grappling with the digital divide’ Times Higher Education 14 Aug 08
‘Dawn of the cyberstudent’
Phoebe – Pedagogic Planner from Oxford University
What technology can I use for a particular activity?
CollegeDegree.com – Online Colleges and Degrees has a list of useful links and articles
Including 100 web tools for learning with a disability
The Facebook Classroom: 25 Facebook Apps that are perfect for Online Education
99 Mind Mapping Resources, Tools and Tips FREE SOFTWARE
100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access
Ted talks
A series of videos of inspirational talks given by prominent people in business, politics, education and the arts, released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
Thanks and acknowledgements
The West London Lifelong Learning Network would like to thank and acknowledge the contribution of Lyn Graves, Teresa Burton and Andy Lapham for their presentation of this material to the Faculty of Professional Studies at Thames Valley University.
We wish to add the following reference for those who may wish to cite this paper and material:
- Lapham, A. C. (2007). Creativity Through e-Learning: Engendering collaborative creativity through folksonomy
- In D. Remenyi (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on e-Learning, Copenhagen, Denmark (pp. 379-389). Reading, UK: Academic Conferences International.
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