I had a brief idea of SDL and CL (or at least what i thought they were) as shown in Activity 1. SDL, being self direct, involves independent thinking, self-motivation, self-management, or even self-assessment.
Personally i prefer the concept of CL, where being a teamwork is vital. Being a team player is often required in many organisations in today's world. If education is supposed to prepare students for the workforce, then CL should be embraced.
There is diversity within a group, and members learn to respect each others differences, be it cultural or individual differences. There is also interpersonal development as they learn social skills.
In today's pragmatic "dog eat dog" world, CL encourages students to work together rather than compete with each other individually. ( or at least work together before competing with other groups and not be so self-centred )
I think SDL and CL could be achieved without ICT. Therefore, to integrate ICT into SDL and CL would be another challenge. Ideally, ICT should not be so much of a challenge, but more of an affordance. Therefore, i should not say integrating ICT is a challenge. Perhaps i should say something like "we gonna explore how ICT can help us in SDL and CL" , which also happens to be something we gonna do for our demo.
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Initially, i feel that relating what we teach to reality would be meaningful learning to the students. As i've learned from ICT lessons, this is only one part of meaningful learning (authentic). Nonetheless, i stil feel its the most important component to meaningful learning, especially in subjects that might be abstract, such as Chemistry and Mathematics (which are also my CSs). I've yet to fully understand all the dimensions of meaningful learning, hopefully they will become clearer to me as the weeks go by. I'm not too sure what ICT tools i can utilise to achieve meaningful learning, but that is certainly something i will explore in the weeks to come for our demo.
All the best to all groups =).
Good reflection! As you figure out the meaning of meaningful learning, be aware of your own processes of learning. What did you do to learn about ML? What instructional strategies did I use? What did various technologies allow us to do that we could not do otherwise?
ReplyDeleteThese might be the same challenges that your students might experience. If you have gone through it yourself and see the merits of the approach, then you are more likely to model the practice yourself.