I really do need to put ‘write blog’ on my to do list! I started this blog hoping to write at least once a week, but I’ve proven that that is not realistic. At least without the to do list option
My last post is almost a month ago! I’ll try to give you an update about my activities on research and teaching.
Teaching:
Courses Atelier 2 and Workshop 2 kicked off! I love these courses. Atelier 2 is for bachelors, and Workshop 2 is for pre-masters. The objectives of these courses are the same, but they differ in task, and supervision.
In both courses they objectives are:
Students gain experience in completing a real design task for an actual client.
Students plan, develop and evaluate, using a systematic approach.
Students reflect on the process en results
Students present the results to commissioner, students and teachers.
Bachelor students design a WebQuest for a primary school. Important: designing a quest that can be integrated in the current curriculum of the school. Students design, and the teachers implement the quest, while students observe and evaluate. Since primary school students still have difficulties with finding their way on the WWW, a WebQuest is a good way to let them explore it. And for teachers working together with these bachelor students is a good, easy and hopefully successful way of integrating ICT in their curriculum!
The pre-masters design a mobile learning quest for primary or secondary school students. A mobile learning quest is a challenging task. We haven’t set many boundaries. The primary or secondary students need to be active for one morning or afternoon. And here, a good relation with the curriculum is very important as well. Examples of mobile learning quests? A tour around the city, with smartphones. Students receive tasks on their phones, use GPS to find their way, take pictures, and so on. After this tour, they use the information they found to make a presentation, or a poster or whatever. Another option could be having students make short instructional movies, watch them, and reflect on them. I am really excited about this task! Mobile learning is becoming a bigger issue in my research and teaching, since I have master students working on this as well (with some really nice results so far!) I can’t wait to see the projects students come up with!
Mobile learning is also the focus of one of the two groups I supervise for the course Atelier 5. In this course (the final course before their bachelorthesis) students work on a design problem for a company or institute. They design and evaluate their product. The problems and product are always really diverse.
The first group I supervise this year is working on a manual for teachers to design mobile learning tours. My masterstudent made a great website for teachers to become enthusiastic about mobile learning, and to discover the things they could do with mobile learning (www.mobielleren.nl). This Atelier 5 groups takes off where she stopped. We know that designing instruction is difficult. Combining content, pedagogy and technology isn’t easy. Teachers who want to do something with mobile learning often don’t know how to go from that feeling of ‘I wanna do something cool with mobile learning’ to designing and implementing a good, instructional mobile learning tour. The Atelier 5 group is trying to fill this gap with a good, easy and ready to use manual that helps teachers design good mobile tours. I am very excited about this as well, and I am sure the product they come up with will have a real value. This project is being done for the City Learning Centre Enschede.
My second Atelier 5 group is designing an app for secondary education students. A real creative and difficult task! Buro Winners, the commissioner of this assignment, is very good at getting people to be ‘the best version of them’. And with this app, we are trying to coach secondary students to become the best version of them! It is really difficult to explain it here, but I will sure come back to this, since the task is so challenging that the world has to know more about this when we finish!
Current masterstudents assignments:
– Mobile learning (www.mobielleren.nl) almost finished!
– Mobile learning: an exposition with some learning material. We are creating several versions, to see whether it’s the gadget that does the trick with mobile learning.
– New ways of teaching math and language in vocational education. This project is starting with a very interesting literature review on how students use technology at home, and in school, and how they want to use technology in school.
This last one is also a bridge to a discussion I let my students react to. I promised to bake a cake for the best reaction to the news that another university is handing out Ipads to new enrolments to their educational science students this year. I also discussed this on Twitter, so in my next post I will only give a few arguments on this topic.
This post is becoming too long, so I’ll stop for now!
Next post: The Ipad Issue! And after that: Research Update! Stay tuned!