Week 5 - Multimodal & Co-constructed learning

Power of learner control

After reading Teachers and pupils incorporated - Developing a co-constructed classroom by Blackberry and Woods (2015) it made me think back to my primary school years when computers were fairly new within the classroom and to how my year 7 teacher must of thought how she was going to teach this new ICT within her class.

I can remember it being a co-constructed learning environment, not the teacher up the front being "sage on the stage" but more of a "guide on the side". We all explored and learnt together and used this opportunities to share our findings with the whole class. This allowed it to be more enjoyable by the students, and we all found in interesting and wanted to learn more.

Children today have such a wide range of different technologies that can be used - Skype, twitter, internet (WWW), email, wiki's, blogs - the list just continues which can all be incorporated within this co-constructed learning environment, as all teachers will be at their own individual levels of using ICT and how comfortable they are at using them within their own classroom.

Benefits of co-constructed learning for pupils:

• students are more engaged and motivated
• students become more independent
• students interests and learning needs identified and incorporated - individualization

Benefits for teachers

• gave more time during class with individual students
• reduction of anxiety, feeling needed to know everything
• student motivation - increased productivity and decreased time spent on tasks
• self-sufficient

Having this in mind, and with my personal interest in using ICT within the classroom, I will endeavour to use the co-constructed learning environment within and we can all learn together as a class as no doubt by the time I am teaching, there will be all this new technologies we will be using that children these days are learning and using from such an early age.