Innovation Profile 044

All teachers produce learning content

Many teachers produce considerable amounts of content for learning; worksheets, notes and diagrams. All teachers produce ephemeral content in class; questions, explanations and suggestions on how to do work.

This ephemeral content is important in stimulating and guiding students' work. It is quite easy to imagine the worksheets, notes and diagrams being put into online learning environments by teachers, but how many teachers have the skills to also incorporate the important guidance content?

Virtual learning environments are advancing rapidly and control is being given to teachers so that they can add the content that they wish. For example, the VLE from digitalbrain has a powerful Learning Manager built into it. The description at www.digitalbrain.com/digitalbrain/corporate/education/ learningmanager.htm
explains that maintenance of the school/college website can be delegated. The drag-and-drop document manager makes managing learning content on the website as easy as moving files between folders on your desktop.

There are obvious benefits to students if they can access their teachers' notes and worksheets whenever they need to, to catch up on work or for revision. There are also major benefits possible for teachers if they start to move their teaching notes into digital form. They can be customised and refeshed more easily and can be used more effectively as the school/college ICT infrastructure develops. With systems such as Digitalbrain's VLE teachers could also access class resources prepared by other teachers, in school or at home.

However what few teachers do is to incorporate into their classroom materials the explanations and guidance that they produce verbally in class. The absence of this kind of guidance makes a big difference as to how usable teacher-produced or commercially published learning content is - by students when their teacher is not present, or by other teachers.

If more teachers acquired the skills to do this, and could find the 10% or perhaps 20% extra time to add this guidance to materials they prepare, there could be major learning benefits. Other less expert teachers could benefit from their content and their own students would find the learning resources easier to use autonomously. The teacher can then dedicate more class time to higher level interactions, to encourage, energise and extend their students.

The digitalbrain company profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company.

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

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