Topic 5

Comment posted Sunday 22nd September on Julia Gale’s Blog

Hi Julia,
Thank you for another informative blog post. I had difficulty making an account for the Learning Designer platform, so I am grateful that you’ve shared your experiences and screenshots!
I agree with you that although these tools have been insightful, they are time-consuming to use. It makes me wonder what innovative learning programs we would be developing if we had more planning time (or perhaps the problem is that these tools are not efficient enough to implement?). I thought the same about using the TPACK model when planning or reflecting.

Do you think that using this tool (or similar) would actually change your end product i.e. the lesson(s)? One of the main criticisms of learning design tools was that they haven’t necessarily affected the daily practices of educators (Bower, 2017). You already found that your programme was rich in inquiry learning as you intended it to be, so I would think that this tool might influence your lessons more if it found they were inconsistent with your philosophies as a teacher (e.g. there was minimal inquiry learning) and you felt you needed to adjust your teaching accordingly.

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

Comment posted Sunday 22nd September on Adrian Pickworth’s Blog

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your post and for sharing your experiences with the Learning Designer platform. It seems incredibly impractical that there is no way to adjust learning outcomes, as you pointed out. I definitely question what value is being added by this tool if it is distancing the educator from the very reason why we are designing the lessons in the first place – to help students achieve specific outcomes as stated in our respective mandated curriculums.

Also, in regards to your comments about how the Learning Designer may show 95% of a lesson is direct instruction – I think this may be interesting to look at over the course of a unit of work. My hypothesis using my own teaching style is that I tend to begin with a lot more direct instruction but then this tapers off as students have the knowledge and skills to work on more higher-order or independent tasks. I would be interested to see how these graphs change as you progress through a unit of work, as one lesson wouldn’t necessarily be indicative of your teaching style in general.

Kayla