Metamorphosis of learning objects in my learning career
Viljenka Šavli teaches at Solkan Primary School in Slovenia. She has been one of the first teachers in Europe and probably in the world who integrated ICT into the teaching, since the beginning of the Internet. In this article she looks back to what she has achieved over the past years.
In my long teaching career different learning objects (LO) from different course books, dictionaries, flashcards, pictures, real objects, cassettes, videos and other materials helped me to achieve better learning results and make learning more interesting or challenging. All of them proved to be effective and good motivation if used in proper situation.
Viljenka Šavli teaching her students (photo 1)
Teaching is a demanding job as there are a variety of students with different learning strategies who observe what and how effectively you present or deliver new topics or what way you explain new facts. For that reason innovative teachers tend to use different learning objects that provoke and motivate students to be engaged and to cooperate actively and independently in learning process.
Nowadays we face also a bigger challenge that is called ICT which has brought revolution also into education. It stresses a new way of communication and cooperation within the variety of tools the new technology offers. ICT provides not only useful and powerful tools and environments for preparing and organising different tasks and activities, but it also attracts students and makes learning fun. So motivation here is stressed both form the point of view of a student and a teacher.
Viljenka Šavli teaching her students (photo 2)
Years ago (1999, 2000) a group of Slovenian teachers were asked to help one of our students, who went around the world with his family on a sailing boat, to keep in touch with some school subjects. We had to prepare distant lessons for him. My colleague and I were in charge for teaching him English so we decided to split our tasks. She was engaged to communicate with him, give him instructions and guide him through topics and I had to prepare different types of exercises for consolidating grammatical knowledge and skills and providing enough self assessment exercises.
So I started to work on them, but I found it difficult to deliver them to the student and to give him an effective and prompt feedback. When you are in such a situation you are forced to find a better, more powerful and appropriate solution than in the traditional teaching. Internet was one of the most challenging ways for delivering him a set of exercises so I decided to prepare a special webpage (http://ro.zrsss.si/~viljenka/) with lessons and exercises for each lesson. I had some basic knowledge of web editing and had already been acquainted with certain tools for making interactive exercises but had never used them before in real situation.
So I started to build the site and make different types of interactive exercises with the help of HotPotatoes tool. It was not easy for me, as there was nobody to help me but the authors of the tool who proved to be very handy and gave me prompt hints via e-mail. After building sets of interactive exercises I grouped them according to the skills, topics and lessons they covered. The student liked them as he could learn, check what he knows and get the feedback right away by himself. They were not only accessible via internet, we could also put them on a CD, so the student could take it on the boat and use them also when sailing and Internet was not accessible.
This positive experience motivated me to go on with my new experience and search for different tools and environments useful for teaching and learning. Now I have a collection of many types of learning objects created with the help of different ICT tools and use them daily in my educational practice. Not all of them are very sophisticated, but they are powerful in certain situation with certain students. I believe LOs appeal to the learner because they can use them independently; they can repeat the exercises as many times as they want or need to learn a certain topic, they get help, hints or feedback promptly, they are very illustrative as they contain text, graphic and even sound and they can be game like so more challenging.
In my practice I frequently use computer implemented LOs in my lessons as a worming up activity, as an introduction to a certain new topic or cooling down activity. In many cases I also organize lessons where students work on a set of LOs for the whole lesson. The last few years I try to guide some more ICT skilful students preparing simple LOs for their peers which is even more challenging way of learning. In any case students like LOs and admit that with the help of them learning is much more interesting and rewarding.
