Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Learning remotely and online can present new challenges, or just put a strain on your existing learning strategies. You might be finding that you’re being provided with a lot of learning materials such as powerpoint slides, video, readings or handouts. What do you do with all this material, and how can you make sure you’re learning effectively rather than just staring at your screen, with nothing really going in?

Listen to Helen, one of our tutors, suggesting a few strategies to ensure that you’re actively engaging with learning materials and getting the most out of them.

As teachers, we’re all trying to better understand how people learn–not now they’re taught in terms of teaching strategies, but more so learning strategies–only not really strategies. Learning actions, or cognitive actions. Strategies for learning.

Self-directed and social learning will undoubtedly be at the core of any sort of future learning–both near and far future. But to improve learning in both self-directed and teacher-centered learning environments, it can be illuminating to look past the activities, projects, and courses to try to see what sort of brain-level actions learners are performing. Like push-ups, wind sprints, and weight training are physical actions that help train an athlete’s body, what kind of cognitive actions train a learner’s mind?

It’s been an exciting year in education with big advances in educational technology and instructional design, from new implementations of virtual reality to fascinating insights into everything from motivation and creativity to tried-and-true learning strategies.

Have you ever told your students to study for a test? Have you ever actually taught them how to study?

It turns out studying can be taught. And two cognitive psychological scientists, Yana Weinstein and Megan Smith, have made it their mission to teach people how to study better. On their new website, The Learning Scientists, they use infographics and videos to share strategies and other insights about how we learn.

Stories about blended learning programs. In these programs, students learn partly at a supervised physical location away from home (such as school) and partly through content delivered online. Students also have control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of learning.

In higher education, the need for blended learning strategies will continue to grow. This resource guide will help you facilitate a fast change to engaging students in the face-to-face, online, or hybrid classroom using blended learning methodologies. From incorporating tools and resources that promote blended learning methods, you’ll gain specific insight from articles and seminars to guide your blended learning journey. Additionally, for instructors interested in exploring blended learning, such as deciding which course elements to teach face-to-face and which to address through online technology, these resources will address those questions and more – you’ll learn a framework for making those essential educational judgment calls. You’ll be confident that your selection of which materials to present online and which to present in the classroom will provide the best learning experience for your students in your blended course.

Note-taking is a skill that’s critical to most reading assignments, and sound, thorough notes can help students read for deeper comprehension. The process of encoding that occurs during note-taking forms new pathways in the brain, lodging information more durably in long-term memory. Good notes can go a long way toward preparing students for tests, and they can also help reduce their stress..

Empowered with some basic information about how the mind and brain work during learning, teachers can plan to use some new strategies for supporting high student achievement.

Through the years we have facilitated the use of brain-based strategies that help foster growth mindsets through the internalization of learning successes, individual choice, positive self-talk, and teacher modeling. Teachers tell us that using these teacher-friendly tools can jumpstart the learning process early in the year.

You can’t watch a video like you read a book; the modalities couldn’t be much more different.

On the surface level a video uses light, color, sound, and moving images, with the potential for adding text and shape and color and light filters as overlays to communicate ideas, while the most basic text structures use alphanumeric symbols, paragraph and sentence structure, and an assortment of text features (e.g., white space, headings and subheadings, fonts, etc.) to convey their message.

Like many teachers, the launch of the popular Pokémon Go app recently raised the question as to how this could be utilised to support education. Not as a gimmick, not as a toy, but as an opportunity to enhance learning opportunities for our students. And this is the crux, as with the use of any technology in education, an opportunity to enhance, or build on, learning strategies to enthuse and engage pupils.