Tools for online and blended learning

On Thursday, we’ll be looking at 11 wonderful tools for making online and blended learning wonderfully engaging.

Now if you’re into technology-enhanced learning, that sort of opening sentence will produce one type of emotional reaction. But if you curse Rona every time you teach online, you might experience an entirely different emotion! Please bear with me, however, as this session isn’t what you think. I promise there’ll be no cognitive overload and that I won’t try to teach you how to use any of my 11 favourite tools (well, maybe I’ll teach just one).

Using learning technologies isn’t hard; you simply have to ‘click and type’ – that’s it. We’ll get to where to click and what to type in a moment. The hard part is sifting through the huge number of technologies available to us. And for some, it’s the ‘starting the sift’ that’s the hardest part of all. In this session, however, all that hard sifting has been done for you. Here are the three rules I set myself for what to include in this session:

  • it must be free
  • I must be able to model its use
  • it must have a strong pedagogical purpose.

And it’s that last point that I teach in this session – the benefits to your teaching of each of my favourite technologies. Actually, I go a bit further than that. For teach technology, I set out the learning impact I want it to have along with the emotional response I’m wanting it to create in the learners. Throughout the session, delegates reflect on the emotional response they’ve had to using each technology, and the potential impact on their own learners.

By the end of the session, you’ll have ‘auditioned’ all 11 techniques, and chosen a handful to include in your next research lesson.

So how do you learn where to click and what to type? All delegates are given password-protected access to a resource page for the session, which includes precise instructions on where to click (in both words and pictures) and what to type. Just follow the instructions and you’re done!

We’ll look at tools for creating ‘pre-learning’, learning during the lesson, and learning between lessons. Here are a few comments that show the impact the session can have:

“We have been provided with a wealth of resources and ‘how-to’ sheets which means I have all the support I need to be able to experiment with what I have learned.” Bolton College

“Being guided to the valuable objects in a cluttered and overflowing storage room.” Halton Borough Council

“Chomping at the bit now to put new learning into practice. Very inspirational session!” Innovative Alliance

“My brain is a bed of blossoming seeds.” NPTC Group of Colleges

“I was originally daunted by the thought of a 3.5 hour session but the time passed more enjoyably and easily than other much shorter training sessions that I have attended, as the sessions were interesting and engaging.” WEA

Full details can be found here: www.ccqi.org.uk/toolsforonline.

Do join us if you can at 13:00 on Thursday October 7th in Zoomland and do please share this post, or tag people in the comments who might find this session valuable.

Best wishes

Tony

#FE #onlinelearning #learningtechnology #blended #c4cqi #JoyFE #UKFEchat #TonyDavis

Comments

No comments yet

Join In

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *