Web Enhanced Learning / Teaching

Ania Lian (PhD)

 Examples of educational web-resources

1. Hot potatoes games

2. Web-based activities (literacy, maths, seminars …)
3. Gmail, google reader google sites.
4. Document sharing, conferencing (zoho.com, google docs)
5. Windows Movie Maker – free on your PC
6. Street View (Google Maps)
7. About our world (youtube, google video)
8. Free Applications (What is Alice?, Photoshop)
9. zamzar.com (for downloading yuotube movies)
10.smartboard application download
11.iTunes for Windows
12.Harvard online
Education blog Australia (for teachers)
http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/
 More examples of educational web-resources

1. Interactive crosswords
2. Map puzzles
3. Literacy primary
4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/
5. Get smart science
6. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/games/
7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/index.shtml
8. Best French course ever
9. Free TV (some links work better at different times)
10.Complicated video clips
11.http://www.librivox.org - free audio books (see also books in print)
12.Check local weather
13.http://kids.yahoo.com/jokes
14.http://www.azkidsnet.com/JSknockjoke.htm
What are we to do with these resources?
Computers are of value when our lives resonate with the potential that they offer.
CONTENT

1. What do we know? - Values

2. What are we told? - Practice
3. What do we need to do? - Truth
4. What can we do? - Logistics
CONTENT

1. What we know? – Values

Please suggest: …………..
A Web-enhanced instruction provides instant and varied collaboration forums,
which may promote […] cognitive flexibility by criss-crossing domains (Spiro,
Vispoel, Samarapunguan, & Boerger, 1987).

Another possible advantage is readily accessible shared learning contexts

(Bransford & Johnson, 1972). In addition, captured communications in cases allow
for reflection and elaborated planning (Andrews, 1997).

Collaboration, cognitive flexibility, shared learning, and reflection are known

factors that, over time, can contribute to progression along the continuum from
novice to expert (Berliner, 1986 )

From: Preparing General Education Pre-Service Teachers for Inclusion:

Web-Enhanced Case-Based Instruction
Lanna Andrews
University of San Francisco
CONTENT

2. What are we told? – Practice

Please suggest: …………..
Collaboration, cognitive flexibility, shared learning, and reflection
and WebCT–like spaces

• Go to your subject area !

• Click on the relevant week !
• Do activities of the week !
• Answer the questions of the week !
• Talk to peers !!
Collaboration, cognitive flexibility, shared learning, and reflection
and WebCT–like spaces

• Go to your subject area !

• Click on the relevant week !
• Do activities of the week !
• Answer the questions of the week !
• Talk to your peers !!

All these commands are driven externally to the students –

Teacher / syllabus / BSSS - centred model.
Playing the school game
 CONTROL

“Due to the structure of WebCT, the researcher / instructor was

able to note the amount of time each student was working online
and follow the chat group discussion threads”

From: Preparing General Education Pre-Service Teachers for Inclusion:

Web-Enhanced Case-Based Instruction
Lanna Andrews
University of San Francisco
CONTENT

3. What do we need to do? - Truth

Please suggest: …………..
We are organic, social beings.
We connect to realise our nature, not to be regulated and
thus reduced to the image of existence produced by the
regulators.
Web-Enhanced Learning Environment Strategies, or WELES, are models
illustrating how Web-based resources can be used to enhance instruction.

Pedagogic Task: What would these models be? For example, are webquests
such models?
Web-Enhanced Learning Environment Strategies, or WELES, are opportunities
made available to students to enhance their participation in the real world
with Web-based tools. (Ania Lian)

Pedagogy: Focus on strategies enabling students to engage, relate to, impact

upon the real world, i.e. the world larger than classroom.
Pedagogy: Focus on strategies enabling students to engage, relate to, impact upon the
real world, i.e. the world larger than classroom.
These are largely apprenticeship-style models of learning, with a critical component.
They involve students in doing, planning, working out things for the community.
1. Create our own school / class website reporting on anything (with news, views, blogs,
videos, albums, chats). Link with other schools, other countries, and have information
in more than one language.
• Creating a “green-living” online TV series where students develop and show practical
and theoretical ways for living green.
• Assist a local green engineer (someone’s dad) in drawing plans and building a fence,
green toilette, etc.
• Produce a series (own soap opera) on resolving life / relationship problems by
students and for students. Get it translated by LOTE students.
• Live in a French Village for one semester - a macrosimulation.
• Creating a Sale of Century game for different grades (prepare students to win; do it in
LOTE)
Pedagogy: Focus on strategies enabling students to engage, relate to, impact
upon the real world, i.e. the world larger than classroom.

Learning is a function of negotiation between students and ???

Pedagogy: Focus on strategies enabling students to engage, relate to, impact
upon the real world, i.e. the world larger than classroom.

Nobody is in control. Learning is a function of negotiation between students and

life (contexts of their engagement).
 PSU Model

WEB-ENHANCED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT STRATEGIES

The design of your Home Page of resources does matter. The design is
to help students to find quickly relevant assistance and exercises. The
example below does not show a clear and easy structure.
 Objectives

• Ease of access to resources

• Improving the ability of people to make sense of the world and therefore build up
their own internal understanding systems - this is how knowledge is constructed:
people interact with complex tasks and invent their own personal knowledge
• Long-lasting: once you have done the work to set up the environment and
resources, you can use them again and again. It is an effective/efficient use of
time.
• The creation of these systems gives stability in the quality of the environments -
they are teacher-proof in some way. teachers come and go but the structures
remain.
 On learning and teaching relationship

Learning is not about acquisition of new knowledge. It is about reorganizing what

is known by the student and, as a result, creating new knowledge, new
perceptions. The need for this re-organisation of perception arises due to
students experiencing tension in the understandings which inform their actions.

Thus, for the pedagogue, the issue is not to give knowledge to students but to
challenge students for new forms of knowledge to have the opportunity to
emerge.
 The learning process

1. Connectedness of knowledge – Exploring issues in different contexts

2. Making learning relevant – Identifying how what you have explored is helping
you answer the research question
3. Supportive environment – Well designed computer environments help students
follow up their own questions and be better engaged in the learning.
4. Generating deep knowledge – It is a function of explorative learning, good
balance between group and individual work, and well designed web-based
environment.