Innovation Profile 117

Which do you prefer?

When you want to learn something new, how do you like information presented? Do you find that pictures say everything and text is hard to absorb? Does a graph help or confuse?

And when these things become interactive, which do you play with? Do you like exploring hyper-linked text? Does it help to be able to run an animation, or replay a video? Does asking your own 'what if' questions with a simulation allow you to gain a better perspective?

If you have preferences like these you must expect that students will also have their own preferences. And how much does it matter to you? Some people are multi-skilled and can absorb information through many different media. Some people are very considerably more able to use some kinds of information, than others.

Now that educators are becoming more aware of these issues and their importance in helping learners achieve, it is hardly acceptable to limit information presentation to what can be managed on a chalkboard and in a textbook.

The implication is that educators will need ready access to many more digital learning resources, to use in teaching and to make available to students for personal study. Digitalbrain, in their Learning Manager system, now include an easily searchable collection of over 6000 literary texts, 1000 animations, over 10000 video clips and over 400000 digital images. See their website at http://www.digitalbrain.com and click 'products and services' and Learning Manager.

An assembly of resources such as this provides the range of resources to begin to serve the needs of students with different learning styles.

The next question is how teachers will learn the skills to use interactive whiteboards, on which such resources can be used with a class. Linked to this is learning what changes in teaching approach are necessary, to introduce the use of a greater variety of resources into their teaching approach.

The next question is how the school/college should organise its approach to ICT, to ensure that students can access the learning resources they like to use, anytime and anywhere.

And then the question is how can teachers in a school/college collaborate and share effort in making such large collections of digital teaching and learning resources coherent and easy to use? It is not a task one teacher can manage.

The Digitalbrain Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company and a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.

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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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