An essential component of this course was the TPACK quests, which involved completing exploratory activities to earn different badges (displayed above). This experience was interactive, informative, and engaging. It allowed me to learn new knowledge, track my progress, and meet my goals. Creating these digital badges was one way educators can "gamify" a course, to enhance the learning content and use rewards to motivate learners.
In addition to this, it exposed us students to a variety of materials that we can utilize in our future classroom. I also loved how many of the badges gave you the chance to choose what we wanted to learn about. In many cases, it would give us options of web tools, websites, and activities to explore, which we would later reflect on or answer questions about it. This built the lesson around our interests and increased our motivation and sense of agency. Students would also thrive by using this approach, since it seamlessly integrates technology, online learning, and face-to-face learning to create a blended classroom. One of the key components of blended learning is for the online material to lend itself direct to what occurs in the classroom, which these TPACK badges did.
Despite these benefits, this approach to learning is not without its limitations. One of which is a result of the online component. I am a very hands-on learning and I am always full of questions. Thus, I found it challenges at times to lack that face-to-face interaction, because I was not able to immediate address my questions/concerns. Another potential limitation is in regards to the use of technology. I truly believe that technology only enhances instruction when used effectively. Before beginning this class, I had never used most of these programs, websites, and tools before this. Thus, when completing many of the activities, I was getting stuck more often on HOW to use the program/website, creating an account, finding out which browser it would be compatible with, rather than dedicating more time to the content it was talking about. I understand that learning about how to use these programs is part of what we are learning about in this tech class. However, in the future I think it would be beneficial to teach our students how to use the program, before sending them to complete the activities on the programs alone. That way they can master how to use it, and thus gain more from the material it contains.
No comments:
Post a Comment