Innovation Profile 026

Bite by bite into the future

The answer to the question 'How do you eat an elephant?' is of course, 'One bite at a time'. Understanding the extensive ICT-for-learning systems now available is just as frightening as trying to eat an elephant, but the answer is the same.

Though the people responsible for implementing school/college-wide or city-wide learning platforms will need to understand deeply the opportunities they bring, teachers will be able to start using the system bit by bit, and the individual bits of functionality are not frightening.

For a good overview of the different pieces of functionality available in managed learning platforms go to http://www.digitalbrain.com and click the 'training' button. The index to the online help pages presents the choices available to teachers.

In schools/colleges with the Digitalbrain system teachers can do such things as -

• transfer existing material into the system
• set up online discussion groups
• understand how students will work on an e-learning module
• create their own content
• create courses from the available content
• create and join online communities.

Quite often, as teachers are introduced to new ICT capabilities, they suddenly realise that ICT enables them to help their students learn in ways that they always wanted to, but could not achieve in a traditional classroom with traditional learning resources and tools.

I would be surprised to find a good teacher who could not see advantages from using at least one of the areas of functionality the Digitalbrain learning platform provides. Once they have become familiar with the system by using this one area of functionality, it will be easier for them to start using it in other ways. Sensible teachers and education managers will see this process as continuing professional development and will plan and manage it over several years.

The list of all the functionality that Digitalbrain's managed learning environments provide is impressive (see Innovation Profile 003). In time teachers will realise how much added learning value the system can bring - provided they can bite off one 'mind-sized' piece of functionality at a time.

The Digitalbrain Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

_________________________________________________________________________________________