Topic 3

Comment posted on Sunday 8th September 2019 on Julia Gale’s Blog

Hi Julia,

Thank you for your post. I have never heard of Education Perfect before so thank you for sharing that with us. Your exploration of its’ affordances are detailed and are helpful in understanding its’ strengths. The progress summary seems a particularly useful tool for teachers to ensure students are on-task.

From a multimedia perspective, the platform seems very visually simplistic with little to no redundant material and appears to use signalling in the way that it colours particular keywords. To hark all the way back to the TPACK model, it seems that the developers of this platform are very aware of the content and pedagogical elements of their technology. The content is designed to address the NSW Syllabus as you stated, but it also implements pedagogical tools such as explicit teaching seen in the first slide of the Smart Lesson that clearly introduces the learning targets, allowing space for note-taking, and using videos as a more engaging means of conveying information where appropriate.

Kayla

Comment posted on Sunday 8th September 2019 on Yvette Copley’s blog

Hi Yvette,

Thank you for your post and for sharing that resource. I was considering whether or not it would be helpful to zoom into the relevant areas so that they were easier to see. However, I think that the way that the slides are exactly the same aside from the lines and the name of the explorer would support the visual signalling that you discussed. The limited processing capacity assumption holds that humans have limited processing capacity (Bower, 2017), so I think that perhaps by making minimal changes to the slides it perhaps would use minimise the cognitive load used to interpret the map.
I suppose it would also depend on the size of the screen you were using too – perhaps if it was a small screen, you could zoom in on a state. This way you could have the same portion of the map on screen for at least a few slides, and students would only have to attend to new visual information when the explore crossed state lines. However, I also acknowledge that at the time of these explorers, state lines were not a thing!

Also – in response to your and Julia’s discussion about videos: depending on the length of the video, I will watch it twice. Of course, this is not ideal if time is limited, but I find by letting my students watch the video first without any obligation to write anything, it encourages them to engage all their cognitive energy on the video. I may also pause from time to time and/or replay segments if there is any important information that may require some note-taking or discussion.

References:
Bower, M. (2017). Design of technology-enhanced learning – Integrating research and practice. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Group