5.8.4 Final Reflections on innovative teaching and learning

Did I gain any knowledge during this course? How will this change my perspective towards teaching and learning?

In the first place, the tenements of innovative teaching and learning can be summarized using this image:

Secondly, gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non- game contexts while Game Based Learning as the adoption of games for educational purposes

Educational gamification is a Five Step Model  as shown below: (Adapted from Huan and Soman (2013)

 Step 1: Understanding the target audience and context

Step 2:  Defining learning objectives

Step 3:  Structuring the experience

Step 4:   Applying gamification elements

Furthermore,Knowledge building is governed by the following knowledge building principles:

Constructive use of authoritative sources

 Drawing content from the readings and experiences, along with additional information sources, as data for one’s own knowledge building and ideas -  improving processes.

Democratizing Knowledge

 Treating, all participants as legitimate contributors to the shared goals of the community; all have a sense of ownership of knowledge advances achieved by the group.

Epistemic Agency  Mobilizing personal strengths to set forth one’s ideas and to negotiate a fit between personal ideas and ideas of others, using contrasts to spark and sustain knowledge advancement rather than depending on others to chart that course for another.

Idea Diversity

 Playing an active role in putting forward different ideas to create a dynamic environment in which contrasts, competition, and complementarity of ideas is evident, creating a rich environment for ideas to evolve into new and more refined forms.

Improvable Ideas

 Treating  all ideas as improvable by aiming to mirror the work of great thinkers in gathering and weighing evidence, and ensuring that explanations cohere with all available evidence.

Knowledge Building Discourse

One’s contribution to discourse serves to identify shared problems and gaps in understanding and to advance understanding beyond the level of the most knowledgeable individual.

On collaboration:

When is idea-sharing collaboration? If  a specific problem needs to be  solved (purpose),  involving  a specific set of people in generating ideas (team), with  a method for handling ideas that are generated (processes), this then is an example of legitimate collaboration.

Learning through social learning:

The table below shows some of the most popular social media types and their main purposes.

Name	URL	Function
Facebook.	www.facebook.com	Registered users can create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages and photos. Includes automatic notifications when users update their profile
Google Plus	https://plus.google.com	Real-life sharing though the web including messages, video conferencing and photographs.
YouTube	www.youtube.com	A video-sharing website.
Twitter	www.twitter.com	A micro-blogging platform where users
LinkedIn.	www.linkedin.com	A social network for business-related and professional networking
Flickr.	www.flickr.com	Primarily a photo sharing website
WordPress	www.wordpress.org	An open-source blogging platform.
SlideShare	www.slideshare. net	A presentation sharing website.
Wikipedia	www.wikipedia.org	An online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Del.icio.us	http://delicious.com	A social bookmarking website where you can share URLs with your contacts.

 What is Photo Story? (adapted from wikipedia) Microsoft Photo Story is a free application that allows users to create a show and tell presentation from their digital photos. The software allows the user to add narration and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with transitions and pan and zoom effects.  Once a photo story has been made it can be played on Windows Media Player or burned to a DVD or CD.

What does this mean to me as a teacher?

 Innovative teachers:

·         Are alert to new ideas, forge them into something uniquely their own, test them, and persist until their students are engaged and their teaching is transformed.

·         Are passionate about teaching:

·         Recognize the need for freedom to learn:

·         Cultivate professional knowledge and skills.

·         Are confident, yet aware of what they don’t know and keep themselves vital

5.5.4 REAL WORLD COLLABORATION

The collaborative experience

The greatest gain from this collaborative scholarship was the integration of the strengths of multiple viewpoints in a synthetic endeavor that no single member of the group could have completed independently.

All the collaborators benefited from the healthy exchange of ideas in a setting defined by mutual respect and a shared interest in the topic. The variety of responses helped the collaborators create a product that reflected a wide range of perspectives and was thus more complete and comprehensive. Each collaborator was actively involved in building knowledge enabling all the members to think critically about related issues. In this manner, the group was able to take ownership of the material.

The Use of Google Docs in an English Language Classroom

Google Docs is user-friendly and can facilitate collaborative writing in the language classroom. To achieve this, students can first form small groups and receive a writing assignment. They can then co-author a piece of text using Google Docs, giving comments to other collaborators and editing other collaborators’ drafts in real time (Synchronous communication).

Google Docs makes it very easy to produce co-edited documents that are only accessible to selected users, all under one interface, with full a revision history. The teacher can easily place comments in the comments box and in the margins, the students receive   instant feedback.  This way, the teacher can help with the writing process and not just the finished product. Peer editing with Google Docs allows the teacher to watch the discussions that go on between students during the editing process.

With Google Docs, Sharing and commenting provide students with opportunities to receive immediate feedback on their writing from teachers and peers in the 24/7 classroom. The integrated reference tools and smart spell checker provide students with convenient writing support right on the page. The built in research tool expands opportunities for students to engage in real world writing and streamlines the process of creating links and citations with a handy one click feature.  For students using a variety of sources in their writing, Google Docs integrates seamlessly with EasyBib.

With the features of Google Docs, collaborative writing is no longer bound by time and space. If the students cannot finish the writing task within class time, they can save their work, store it online, and then continue writing anytime and anywhere.

With the use of Google Docs, it is expected that students not only can have stronger motivation to write collaboratively, but also that their higher-order thinking skills, such as evaluating and commenting on peers’ written work, can be enhanced. Google Docs affords better feedback and better collaboration, which leads to better writing.