Elearning in our Secondary schools

One of the main things which really struck me and made me think a lot after our first week’s lecture was how Ken Robinson managed to focus on an instinctive human desire and connect it to a way of teaching. It sounds so obvious to us that we do best at the things we love, and it comes very natural to us since we enjoy putting energy and passion in what we love. Yet it rarely might rarely cross our finds, that the students we have, are in search of things to enjoy, especially at an age where they are still quite young and want to explore more. We can offer those instances where they can enjoy what they do and develop a desire to learn and know more through their enthusiasm about what they love doing.

In my opinion, there are various ways how to capture the students’ enthusiasm and link it with educational stuff. Two particular tools which I find may be very useful are:

1. Gaming in education - as this provides fun and generally the right gaming environment appeals to people of different ages especially to young and adolescent ones

2. Elearning which should be designed in a manner to provide a personalised way of self learning. This can be very useful as one finds different tasks requiring different abilities, from which the user can choose to try and learn according to his/her skills and the pace he/she wishes to move with. This personalisation in education gives space to providing instances where the learner can learn in accordance to what he/she loves doing and what he/she prefers.

So I think, using elearning as a tool in our schools might be very useful and helpful to the students. To be honest I can’t imagine using solely elearning to teach, our secondary school students at this point in time, however I think it could be used as an additional tool which can be used to instigate our students’ desire to learn more by designing the topics in a way which attracts the students’ interests. This I believe can be done as elearning is quite a flexible teaching tool where the same concept can be presented in different activities on the same platform and is accessible to all to explore. This variety and accessibility to all can be very useful to teach our secondary students, especially now with the new college system.

I think as teachers of this new system it can be a bit difficult at times to make sure that every student, with his/her own ability is being catered for with the explanation and exercises given in class. Through elearning we as teachers can design different activities which require different abilities , those requiring low abilities to those requiring higher abilities, which students can try out and work one activity after the other, thus scaffolding learning. Having said this, elearning provides self paced learning, thus if a student is a slow learner, one can take his/her time to grasp the concept through activities; whilst one who is a quick learner is not held down from aspiring to know more about a concept; thus it may avoid any sense of uneasiness or discomfort for our students.

I think the main obstacle at this point is, how are we going to introduce and implement effectively this elearning system in our profession, so that the advantages which come with elearning, are exploited.