EDU-40206: Online and Blended Learning Design

Week 7: Micro-lecture – Technology Enhanced Learning

Welcome to Week 7 Micro-lecture: Technology Enhanced Learning. This micro lecture builds
on the reading you've just completed and it's going to showcase a variety of different
technologies. It's not meant to be a comprehensive source just enough to get you thinking
about technology and how they can be used to enhance experiences of students learning.
So what I want you to think about whilst you're watching this micro lecture is what types of
technology there are, how they can be used to enhance the learning experience and think
about is all technology good in education and why/why not.

Now what you would consider technology has changed significantly over the years,
previously many many years ago it would have been considered having a textbook or a
chalkboard or a whiteboard which is a very crude form of technology so to speak compared
to where we are today, where technology is advancing at a rapid rate with things such as
ChatGPT and generative AI suddenly exploding in the way that it has and change in
education forever. Now when you consider making use of technology it's supposed to be
used to enhance the student learning experience. We don't just chuck a bit of technology in
because it looks nice. We've got to consider what value is it adding to the task that I have in
hand and that kind of goes back to that kind of TPCK model, the tpack model where you've
got to consider the subjects, the content, the pedagogy and technological tool. So you've
got to consider what you're teaching, how you're going to teach it and what tool is going to
support you to do that in the best way. So that's where it's building together the theories
we've learned about in this module, what I'm going to do next is I'm going to show you
some tools and I'm going to talk through what some of them could be used for and when
you might use them. This is not meant to be comprehensive as I've already said, it's just to
give you some ideas of what kind of things are out there and you need to go away and
explore in more detail.

Now tools and technologies, there's plenty of them. As you can see in this infographic this is
a hundred of the top learning tools of 2023 and this has been put together by Jane Hart and
you can see that we've got content-based apps so things like video and film apps. This is
really good if you want to vary up your acquisition-based learning. So, it's not always just
reading. Obviously micro-lectures from yourself a really important but learning from other
perspectives is equally vital. So using things such as YouTube, TED Talks, just as important.
Podcasts for example are an emerging kind of market that there's lots of educational
podcast popping up and podcasts about topics that you can make use of that allows more
flexibility for students to be able to do it around their needs. So adding in podcast is a great
way of updating your acquisition-base. There's also e -books and book websites. There's
more than what's just here and they're there to support you with your acquisition-based
reading materials. Then you've got content development-based tools and technologies. So
you've got your document and presentation software so that can be used to support you in
your making of your videos like I've been using in this module. You can also get students to
use these tools to support improving their digital literacy which is also a really vital skill that

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students need to develop as part of our programs and should be embedded into our
curriculum expectations. You've got websites for video editing for example so you know
feeding back into that digital literacy we want to produce authentic assessment so for some
that's going to be producing videos and using video software is an important tool to kind of
use as part of that. You've obviously got photo editing software, animation software. Again
that can be used to improve authentic assessment but also allow students to practice those
skills in advance. You've got things like H5P and interactive educational content such as
things like Edpuzzle and they enable you to create interactive tools. For example so H5P I've
used that in this module where I've created your knowledge checks of questions of different
formats and that allows students to self-assess their learning and it's helping them to kind of
check whether they've achieved their goals. You've got forms that can do the same kind of
things so they can be used for quizzes to enable students to you know self-assess their
understanding. They can also be used by academics to get feedback from students which
allows academics and educators to you know change up what they're doing which is also
really important. You've got quizzing software specifically so things like Quizziz, Kahoot,
quizlet, they're all really great for adding that kind of gamification element that that allows
students to you know battle against each other for example and also test their knowledge at
the same time and complete that self-assessment. They're really useful tools that I know
educators make use of a lot. We've got communication and collaboration software so things
from file sharing such as one drive, Google drive, it's important that we keep our content in
a structured way. We always recommend using VLEs and learning platforms which you can
see is on the other side of the infographic but if you are planning to store it yourself it's
good practice to have a good kind of file system in place. We've also got things like
collaborative whiteboard so for example Padlet is like an anonymous posting tool that
enables you to post comments, images it's like a notice board for example that enables
students to share more than just text and it allows for that kind of flexibility and students be
able to create whatever format and flexibility that they have within their curriculum which is
a useful thing that we said makes content accessible to students and enabling them and
flexibility to create a format suitable for them. You have some things like Miro which is a
massive whiteboard that you can use templates on where everyone can work on it at the
same time so that can combat things such as time zones of students working in different
areas. You've got your things like your social media for example, you know plenty of
educators make use of social media to kind of create that social environment to support the
belonging and then we've got kind of general web tools such as things like Google and
Wikipedia which it's not the kind of negative do not use tool anymore as long as you're
aware of the benefits and the drawbacks of it. Things like Google Translate is there to
support students who are of a different language. There's lots of tools available here that
you can see and there are even more than just this already I can see that you know there's
no Mentimeter on here for example which is a pulling software which enables you to get
nice graphics of your results so this isn't a comprehensive list this is just an example and
you'll have probably used plenty of tools and technologies in your own practice. So it's
important to reflect on what you use what you have available to you but also explore some
of these different things. You can see that there is a web page at the bottom you can find
links to the top 100 that is a kind of live top 100 and you can go away and explore some of
those tools and think about how you might use them to enhance that student experience.