digital learning design & Google applications
Digital learning design is the use of digital tools within the instructional process to enhance learning through a continual development of literacy skills. The components introduced in digital learning design provides opportunities for teachers to construct a concept development framework that is multidisciplinary, student centered, and authentic to 21st Century skills. The digital learning design framework is based on research in both explicit instruction and constructivist learning. Using the digital design framework will help teachers pull together elements of college and career readiness standards, while constructing deep learning opportunities for students to perform. Digital Learning Design serves as a “hub of innovation” that teachers can use to nurture learning skills, competencies, and habits of mind that provide students essential skills for tackling new and demanding cognitive challenges. Digital Learning Design is about teaching, learning, communicating, collaborating and creating.
The digital learning design model provides explanation through the use of a concept design template. The concept design template is a guide to the development of an authentic culminating problem-based unit. These units are problem based in nature and take no longer than five hours to complete. The problem based units are designed specifically for facilitated instruction where teachers are harmonized to a relationship that uses rigor and relevance as a design map for purposeful learning . |
The key component of the model is to construct college and career standards that have been previously mastered into authentic real life tasks. These authentic task are designed to stimulate student thinking through an inquiry process while using 21st Century skills. Digital Learning Design Includes:
Explicit Instruction
Project Based Learning |
Problem Based Learning
Individualized Student Centered Learning |
Learning Authentic Instruction and Assessment (AIW)
Blended Learning |
Digital learning design & google applications
Google has a long list of applications that are available to schools for free. Schools can establish their own Google Domain of application tools to allow students to safely experience the needed literacy skills to support 21st Century learning. Schools choose Google Applications for many reasons including the fact that it provides an excellent suite of productivity tools. Google Docs provides students and teachers with plethora of featured applications for teachers and students to learn 21st Century literacy through word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and more. In this section an introduction will be given on how to use Google applications as learning tools within the instructional design process.
If you do not have all of the infrastructure in place or budget to support software purchases schools should consider Google Apps as an option. Google has made a commitment to education and offers the entire Google Apps suite of services to schools for free, with no advertising, and with no strings attached. Large school districts who have investigated both Google Apps and Microsoft’s options
discovered that to match the features offered in Google Apps (for free) found they would have to pay Microsoft over $200,000 per year, every year. Google Docs is not a watered-down, light version of Office programs. It provides a full featured word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and more.
Digital literacy
The new challenge for education is in information consumption as literacy is redefined through connected learning experiences and in ways that students access the vast warehouses of digital content. Education will need to face these challenges by redefining the process of web found knowledge into best practices on how to access, curate and create content that will enhance 21st Century learning skills. This process is what defines digital literacy: the set of skills needed to collaboratively collect information from multiple sources, decipher and reduce shared information into segments of exactness, and reshape information into multimedia products that become new ideas with deeper meaning. Barbara R. Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan: in an article post entitled Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century; defined digital literacy as;
"A person's ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment ...Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments."
Accessing Information
The first incremental change is in knowing how, when, and where to locate useful information on the Internet. Accessing and sourcing Information is the ability to search for correct information; how to understand search engine results; how to make accurate inferences about information originating from a hyperlink and how to correctly source digital content. Ten years ago, information accessing on the internet was a simple process of one line source request which resulted in a read only Web 1.0 results. The availability of information resources and search technologies is expanding rapidly, increasing the importance of effectively knowing how to access and reduce digital information into reliable forms of content extraction. This requires a new set of skills and strategies that are essential in accessing and successfully screening information. To demonstrate how Web 2.0 Internet information has changed in complexity from simple searches to a more complex form is illustrated in (Fragmentation of Information Sourcing.)3 Information now comes from scattered Web 2.0 sources from a community of contributors that requires sense making by an individual interpreter. Teaching students about information assimilation is about knowing how, when, and where to access information on the Internet, will grow to be an increasingly significant factor of digital media literacy.
Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment. As teachers and librarians develop these skills and teach them to students, students will become better equipped to achieve their information needs.
Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment. As teachers and librarians develop these skills and teach them to students, students will become better equipped to achieve their information needs.
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collaboration
The Implications of Classroom Instruction and Open Source Networking Tools will have a major impact on classroom learning. The management skills required of today's educators and curriculum developers will include the ability to assess the importance of networking tools, and to develop methods that support the integration of these new instructional delivery formats within the given standards of the required curriculum.
We can define social networking as web-based Web 2.0 services that allow teachers and students to (1) construct a student profile within a circumscribed system, (2) inarticulate a list of other users with whom they collaborate ideas, and (3) view and collaborate a sources of information made by others within the networked environment. The nature and nomenclature of these collaborations may vary from the central purpose established by the networking site. Defining the central purpose for collaboration and social networking is key in digital learning design as social networking must not be a distracter to learning but a promotional avenue to share and deepen the learning process.
A way to introduce the ideas of accessing information that are built on content resourcing of social networks is to create a classroom backchannel. This will allow the students to participate in a virtual conversation while being facilitated by the classroom teacher. Backchannels that are asynchronous can be used for various classroom formal or informal discussions about current events, collaborative projects, readings, portfolios, and many other content specific activities generated by the teacher. The purpose behind the asynchronous backchannel is to provide immediate feedback or responses to learner. The teacher can also generate questions on the backchannel to support students in the construction of a project. Students can use the backchannel to describe their work to others; while other participants provide feedback or advice. Participation on the backchannel can help in the formation of a community among groups of learners who otherwise would be unable to communicate formally or informally.
We can define social networking as web-based Web 2.0 services that allow teachers and students to (1) construct a student profile within a circumscribed system, (2) inarticulate a list of other users with whom they collaborate ideas, and (3) view and collaborate a sources of information made by others within the networked environment. The nature and nomenclature of these collaborations may vary from the central purpose established by the networking site. Defining the central purpose for collaboration and social networking is key in digital learning design as social networking must not be a distracter to learning but a promotional avenue to share and deepen the learning process.
A way to introduce the ideas of accessing information that are built on content resourcing of social networks is to create a classroom backchannel. This will allow the students to participate in a virtual conversation while being facilitated by the classroom teacher. Backchannels that are asynchronous can be used for various classroom formal or informal discussions about current events, collaborative projects, readings, portfolios, and many other content specific activities generated by the teacher. The purpose behind the asynchronous backchannel is to provide immediate feedback or responses to learner. The teacher can also generate questions on the backchannel to support students in the construction of a project. Students can use the backchannel to describe their work to others; while other participants provide feedback or advice. Participation on the backchannel can help in the formation of a community among groups of learners who otherwise would be unable to communicate formally or informally.