The Challenge for Educators

Knowledgeable, flexible and innovative workers are being sought by employers so that their workforce can add value to their own environment.

Educators are having to look differently at the way in which they prepare their students for the workplace. Not just skilled at what they do but able to reflect on why they do it, collaborate with colleagues to improve and know where to find the knowledge they need to grow and develop.

The attributes of such a 'knowledge worker' are not something that can be described in a competency standard!

Mobile learning uses the tools and language of students and so the challenge for educators is to understand those tools and prepare their material so that it can be delivered to current and emerging technologies.
 

A New Way to Plan Lessons

In simple terms, there are three layers to any piece of learning. The Underpinning Knowledge, Learning Activities or Practice, and Testing or Assessing.

Those wanting genuine and extensive flexibility are able to access their learning by a range of means at every level. So while each element is discreet in its own right, it remains linked to the other elements by virtue of the subject it covers.

This represents the first major shift in thinking that teachers must make so that they can prepare material for students in such a way that it can be transmitted as easily face to face as it can be by means of computer or mobile phone.

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Underpinning Knowledge

Underpinning knowledge is obtained by a great many means from formal research through to that which is almost subliminally absorbed through life experience or workplace activity.

Wetware refers to the brain of the teacher, who acts as a guide and a filter to make sure that there is maximum access in maximum media. While this model shows a linear progression through the teacher, through technology to the student there is a process that also flows back up this model as the students themselves contribute to increasing the body of knowledge itself.
 


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Learning Activities

Learning activities offer the most variety and creativity and therefore also offer the greatest scope for mobile and other technologies.

The management of the teaching still remains with the teacher and is only limited by the imagination.

Not all activities will lend themselves to all technologies but there are enough options to ensure that genuine flexibility is achieved.
 

Assessment

Where a drag and drop game as learning activity might not allow you to put something in the wrong spot, when it comes to testing the facility to auto correct might be turned off.

As with underpinning knowledge, there is the option for students to use the technology itself to deliver an assessable piece of work.


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