Designing Digital Learning – Platform

Designing Digital Learning – Platform

Each decision in creating your digital learning environment is essential. Some are evident like the first two, and some are not like designing for the platform you will use for your learning. You can use many different platforms in today’s market for your learners to receive your instructions and provide their learning examples. Finding the correct one for your particular assignment is an important task.

Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are great at collecting the evidence of learning, but it is not quite good at providing detailed instructions. Some allow videos, images, and other media types to be used but don’t collect anything from your learners. The first two steps completed a basic design, and you have a basic idea of how you want this lesson to run. With this knowledge, look at the different platforms you can access and decide which one you want to use. If you need to use a lot of media in your instructions and provide further learning examples, a website might be the best. Your instructions might be clear, and you want the learners to focus on those and a rubric, then an LMS or online document is the best choice. There are many different ways to get your learners started and working.

There are some things to think about when looking at the platform. What do you need to include in your instructions? If you need several media pieces, some image examples of work, a heavily formatted or designed list of instructions needs to be a strength of the platform. If you will be collecting many different learning articles and need that step to be easy for your learners, that needs to be a strength. By thinking through the design platform, you make it easier for you and your learners to successfully work through the learning experience.

Designing Digital Learning – Knowledge

Designing Digital Learning – Knowledge

Digital learning designing starts the same as most lesson designing. You need to decide what your learner needs to gain from the digital lesson. Looking at the knowledge that will focus on the learning experience is the first step.

To clearly outline the goals and set up your next steps in digital lesson design, you need to set up your knowledge acquisition goals first. These goals will guide you as you map your learners’ route as they go through your lesson. The goals need to be as specific as you can set goals. That will help you to focus your planning on specific learning targets. If you are a K-12 educator, these are your essential standards. These are usually decided by your district or in PLCs. There need to guide your planning, learning path, and what your learners need to do to showcase their learning in a later planning step.

If you are in charge of designing learning for adults, this step is more critical. Adult learners need to understand the why of what they are learning. You need to focus on your learning outcomes and add why it is essential to your adult learner to gain this knowledge. The impact will be much more significant if that is part of the initial planning. Keeping adults focused on learning and not completing the tasks because they are assigned is found in this step.

Knowledge is the entire reason for setting up digital learning or any learning. Starting with the entire process’s goal gives your planning a clear purpose and destination. It is always best to start a journey with a destination in mind.

Designing Digital Learning – Prove Learning

Designing Digital Learning – Prove Learning

How your learners prove, their learning is how you will gauge their understanding of the content you want them to master. That is why this step is so early in the lesson design process. When properly designed, this step will allow your learners to showcase their learning and help guide them to a deeper understanding. Knowledge acquisition is to be a journey and not a destination. Designing ways for your learners to prove what they have gained in their learning experience allows them to be active participants. It will enable the educator to help them along this path.

A digital environment allows for doors to open that were not there in a physical space. The change in learning spaces can make for a more robust way for your learners to prove their learning to you. Having your learners think about things differently and showcase those different perspectives is a great way to take advantage of technology in a digital lesson. Expressing these different perspectives in a video, picture, or another method can allow your learners to express themselves and, at the same time, will enable you to check to see if they got the content you set out as necessary in the previous step. Having adult learners use the topics in their daily lives or a work environment will help them create better habits. It will nudge them to use the content you are teaching without being too intrusive in their everyday routines. When designed this way, your learners prove their knowledge in different ways and helps to create the cognitive dissonance that creates deeper learning and more knowledge retention.

Remember, this is your assessment piece as well. It is how to gauge the understanding of your learners. It needs to be something with a rubric for you and your learners to know what to expect and how you will assess them. All of the assessment information, including rubrics and instructions, need to be given to your learners at the start of the learning process to understand the entire learning process from the beginning.

The second step in designing digital learning is about how your learners prove their knowledge. It needs to have a design feature that takes advantage of your digital environment instead of looking at ways to use in-person assessments in a digital environment.

Designing Digital Learning

Designing Digital Learning

The past few months of self-quarantine have opened our eyes to many different things we haven’t seen before. Issues and problems are coming up that were not on the radar just a few short months ago. One of these issues is the role of digital education in the learning environment.

Digital education was done at higher education levels to help others learn when they could not meet in person, but in K-12, it was much less prevalent. It seems that most post-bac degrees have gone mostly, if not totally, online. This form of education was the only means for much of the nation as K-12 schools shut down. The use of technology in the classroom was something many teachers did not understand outside of basic skills. Designing meaningful digital learning is something that is a skill needed for today’s educators. It is more than just taking your in-person training, classes, or workshops and putting them online. The digital space is a vast world of information that the instructional designer can leverage to open up the learning experience to places that were not possible in a physical space. These possibilities must be planned out following a different design process than traditional in-person learning. There are six steps to designing digital learning. I will quickly go over these steps and go into more detail on each one later.

The first step is knowledge. You must clearly define what you want your learners to walk away knowing, understanding, or being able to do/accomplish. This guides each of the other steps and will serve as the foundation of the design. The foundation needs to be strong and very clear. Next, you will decide how you want your learners to prove their learning. It could be passing a short survey or exam, creating something at the end of the workshop, or some other way of proving skills. The important thing is this task needs to be defined and relayed to your learners from the beginning. All learners, adults especially, need to know where their new knowledge is going to be applied.

Then the designer will decide the platform for delivery. This step allows you to plan with the strengths of the platform in mind and allows you to minimize any weakness of that platform. The online learning environment has many different platforms, all with their strengths and weakness, and if you properly plan for those, your learning experience will be better for that. Then you will design your learning experience. This can be one module is a much larger course or the large course itself. This step is used for large-scale planning and individual module planning. It can be repeated until the entire course is built. The last planning step is writing your instructions. This step is often overlooked, and the learning experience is launched, but it is important to take time on this step. Clear and thorough instructions are important to a successful learning experience. The learner needs to know what t do at any time in their journey through your content. After all of these steps are done, it is time to launch your digital learning. This is where the designer hands off the learning to the facilitator, and the learning begins.

In today’s educational environment, moving to digital learning is an important change that needs to happen at all levels. It allows for education to reach further than it has in the past and hopefully, with properly designed lessons, create learners who understand the technology’s power and use it to learn into their futures.

Grad School Blogs

I was looking through my stuff from grad school and found the blogs that I wrote for three of my classes. These have the beginning of the ideas that I formed while completing the coursework. I enjoyed reading through the different ideas that I had then. Take a read for yourself.

LTEC 5510 – Technology-Based Learning Environments

LTEC 5210 – Instructional Systems Design I

LTEC 5580 – Readings Seminar in Learning Technologies

 

Personal Learning Theory

Personal Learning Theory

I was looking through the blog I created for a grad school course and came across my personal learning theory.  I wanted to share it here.

 

Education is one of the more important things that happen in a person’s life. It is one of the few things that can never be taken away from a person. No matter what you lose, you will never lose your education. The education system was set up years ago to fit what was needed. Society has rapidly changed and is evolving more quickly each day. The educational system has struggled to keep up with those changes. Education needs to give learners the skills they need to be successful in their careers of choice. Its goal should be to create citizens that can adapt to new jobs or careers that they take on because there is no way to know what careers will available in the future. Education should focus on learners and the skills they need to become employees or employers who will learn the skills they need to be successful and implement those skills successfully. Learners need to be given skills through the content that is taught in the classes required. Many students will not need advanced math or science concepts in their everyday lives, but they need the problem-solving skills taught in those advanced classes. The skills students gain in the course should be the key, not the content. Many educators believe their content is the most critical thing and miss the opportunity to help with skill acquisition. Education needs to realize that the jobs students might hold do not exist or exist in different forms today than when the learners will hold those jobs. Many of the support jobs in K-12 education environment did not exist a few years ago. These essential positions help students with special needs or help with technology integration into the lesson plan cycle to help student engagement. These are examples of positions that were not around a decade ago that exist today. The people in these positions had to either learn their roles or lean on people who defined them before them. We need learners to set up these roles for positions that are not around today. The educational environment is the perfect place to help teach these skills, even in positions that change today from how they were done in the past. We need to create learners that never stop learning and keep looking for ways to do their jobs better. These skills are taught in classes that allow for student choice and student’s voice. Students know how they learn best. They are experts not in the content they are learning, but they are experts on how they learn best. They might not know or have ever been asked to help in their learning. These students need to be looking at their own learning and exploring those skills, and learning how to make their learning better. These are some of the most overlooked skills needed in today’s society that are not addressed in education. Students also need to create projects and learn in ways they find interesting. This will increase student knowledge and engagement because students are interested in the things they are learning. Interests are used to help students create personal connections to learning. This will allow students to have a bigger stake in their learning, which creates more engaged students. Students that are more engaged learn the content better. It is a way to help students learn the content and skills at the same time. This is the best way to simulate a work-type environment in the educational system. Education needs to help create citizens that are ready for any career they will have. If education focuses on getting learners the skills they need to succeed in learning skills for their jobs, it will be a successful system.

Iorad

Embedded content makes a blog, or any writing, more dynamic and can help a reader understand.  I have a tool that I use to quickly make step by step tutorials for teachers that I work with.  Iorad is a tool that takes your clicks and turns it into a tutorial.  I use it when I am not able to go help a teacher for some reason but they still need step by step directions.  It creates a wonderful tutorial with text directions and images that walk the teacher through the steps needed to complete their task.  It has really helped me get some great help tools out there for teachers so they don’t have to worry about how to do things, they can worry about how to teach their classes.

Copyright and Fair Use

Adult Black Pug in glasses
Photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Copyright and fair use is a topic that comes up often in my school.  Students often want to create something for one of their classes and use any image they find on the internet.  They think that because it is in Google Images, it is there for them to use.  They struggle with the idea that something so simple and easy can be the wrong thing to do.  This, of course, is not the case.  I try to have conversations with them that turn the conversation around.  I try to put them in the shoes of the content creator and ask if using their work without giving credit would upset them.  That is when the light bulb seems to click with them.  The problem comes when they still do the easy thing instead of the proper thing.  Students really need to be taught from an early age the value of using sources that follow their creator’s guidelines for their work.

This means educators need to be vigilant on the requirements they set for their students.  The educator must check all of the things a student could possibly do.  We use plagiarism checkers for students writing, so it should be done with all aspects of their work.  We need to make sure they are not taking credit for others’ work.  Intellectual property will become more important in the future, and it’s important we start today’s students on the correct path to protect the ideas and content they will create tomorrow.

My Path to Tech in Classrooms

Summer Job Business ProposalI started in a middle school that did not have much in the way of technology.  Each classroom had a projector; most were not mounted initially, which would project on a pull-down screen or a dry erase board.  In the last year or two, we all got interactive boards to boost the technology at each campus.  After a few years in a social studies classroom, I got the opportunity to transition to an Exploring Careers and Professional Communication classes.  These classes had never been offered in the district before.  That means there was no set curriculum for the courses.  As part of my transition, I wanted to get a classroom with desktop PCs to try out in regular coursework.  Before this, computer labs had only been used in technology courses.

I was interested in trying them as a tool for learning in a class that was not about technology.  I designed each assignment, project, and assessment around using the technology.  Students went from me handing them information to looking up their information.  I was able to give them choices on what they wanted to do.  No more limits of resources I could print out or find in a book.  They had an entire wealth of knowledge at their fingertips.

Assignments transformed from fill out this worksheet, write out your definitions, or take this test to create this project, research your own ideas, and present your work.  The topics we studied have some basic ideas that were part of the standards, but I had the freedom to add in their interests.  As part of a unit on entrepreneurship, students completed a project that had them start a summer business.  They were tasked with finding the start-up costs from supply lists generated, setting up a marketing plan, setting their prices, and conducting market research.

The student engagement and collaboration instantly made me a believer.  I went from the expert handing them the information to a guide helping them through the parts of the project as they needed it.  The technology in the classroom transformed the learning and allowed the students to do the driving toward a goal I set up, but they chose the path.  Everyone had the same destination, a presentation to the class pitching their business, but each group took vastly different paths to get there.  From then on, I looked for ways to create that type of learning in my classroom.  I wanted the students to be the leaders, and I wanted to be on the side, helping them to their own discoveries.

Hello world!

Welcome to my blog!!!

 

I had the idea to do this from the last few courses I took in grad school at the University of North Texas’ Learning Technologies program.  Blogging was part of the coursework for several courses.  It allowed me to express my thoughts and ideas in a way that could be shared.  I took that idea and started this blog to help spread those ideas to other.

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