The Learning Success Blog

Sydney University has published a very interesting article about how it's classrooms have changed.  To read Sydney Uni's complete post, go here.

Here is a summary of the article, which starts with this comment: 

"Today, the classroom is flexible, creative, and agile – our students are logging in and learning from all over the globe. The modern tutorial room, lecture theatre and laboratory are still hives of activity, but not in the way you remember it. Here are a handful of ways the classrooms at Sydney have changed."

iPads can be useful learning tools for younger children – aged 2 to 6. This is the conclusion of a study, iPlay, iLearn, iGrow,  just published by Dr Nicola Yelland, Professor of Education at Victoria University in Melbourne.

Professor Yelland’s study looked at 61 apps suitable for children aged 2 to 6 years.  She and her research team assessed the Apps in 4 categories:

• Literacy
• Numeracy
• Creative
• Skills

“It would really pain me when I used to listen to my son read and he’d look at a word and couldn’t for the life of him try and sound it out. He just couldn’t do it”.

This is how *Alice described her 12 year old son’s reading before he did the Fast ForWord program.

Her son *Ryan was able to go from a reluctant struggling reader, to a determined flourishing student using the neuroscience based exercises in the program.

Alice used to watch on helplessly as Ryan would struggle with reading and spelling. But she saw how the program took Ryan from frustration to fluency.

Do you remember being bored when you were a child?  How often do your children complain "I'm bored" ?

It seems being bored can be a good thing, as it may foster creativity. But kids often use screen time to prevent being "bored".

I have just read a very interesting article about this by Speech Language Pathologist, Renee Petherbridge-Lim. She questions whether the access children have now to ever-present smart phones, iPads and tablets is depriving them of opportunities to be bored.

Recently I visited a school to talk about technology implementation issues. Yes, despite the fact that we’ve come so far, there were issues to talk about.

It was a good reminder of the fact that as technology changes, or develops and improves, we as humans are essentially still the same. Our collective knowledge is growing, and we are making great advances in progress, but we as physical human beings are largely the same as we always have been. Some may say that this is not quite true because we are getting taller, living longer or becoming more resilient, but I’m referring more to the fact that our basic physical bodies are the same. In an increasingly digital world, you could say that we’re analogue, and always will be. Why is this pertinent with regards to my recent school visit?

Digital games based learning (GBL) in schools raises many interesting questions. A paper published in January 2013 entitled, “Acceptance of game-based learning by secondary school teachers” (Bourgonjon et al., 2013), provides insight from a study of 505 teachers. The average age was 40, with a male/female split of 42.7/57.3% respectively.

Teachers were surveyed on a range of issues such as personal innovation, behavioural intention (to use video games), critical mass, experience (with video games), learning opportunities, usefulness, social norm and complexity. A lot of number crunching went on to create some interesting looking tables, but the insights gained revealed bigger issues about tech in schools than just the use of games based learning approaches.

“More engaging, immersive eLearning is more than “fancier window dressing for content”; it is a transformation of assumptions about what it means to think, learn and teach.” (Squire, 2013)

I read this quote in a research paper investigating the changing thinking on games based learning (GBL). What struck me as interesting in this paper was the notion that games based learning was less about content, and more about the experience of the learner. Squire talks about stimulating new ways of thinking, acting and being in the world. His comment about window dressing are not surprising either, as most online learning resources are simply digitized versions of paper based resources.