KNOWLEDGE BUILDING

Knowledge Building.

It involves creative, sustained work with ideas.   

Knowledge building classrooms are knowledge creating. This means that they are idea-centred, with students taking collective cognitive responsibility for advancing shared knowledge. Students learn to create knowledge by actually doing it. 

Knowledge building teachers/ students collaborate and engage in sustained explanation-seeking discourse, they design, perform, and refine experiments, they test hypotheses and build onto each other’s ideas, and they create artifacts and engage in design work of all kinds. Students’ knowledge building work is sustained by collective curiosity, opportunities to chart the course of their own learning, opportunistic collaboration and the excitement and motivation generated when students are exploring authentic, real world problems that they actually care about.

In knowledge creating classrooms, diverse ideas,

 collaboration among members and a collective

 commitment to advancing shared goals is essential for

 success.

In order to help the students build the knowledge, tasks need to be challenging, authentic, and multidisciplinary.

Collaboration around authentic tasks often takes place with peers and mentors within school as well as with family members and others in the real world outside of school.

Collaboration is a very powerful in knowledge building , take for instance in the CCTI course  through collaboration we have been able to build knowledge by contributing to the google drive documents, wiki and groups which has widened our personal knowledge.

Engaged Learning, Pros and Cons of Technology in Engaging Learners.

When we’re engaged in something, we do better at it. That’s as true of learning as it is anything else: an engaged student is more likely to learn and succeed than a disengaged one.

What does engaged learning look like? Successful, engaged learners are responsible for their own learning. These students are self-regulated and able to define their own learning goals and evaluate their own achievement. They are also energized by their learning; their joy of learning leads to a lifelong passion for solving problems, understanding, and taking the next step in their thinking. These learners are strategic in that they know how to learn and are able to transfer knowledge to solve problems creatively. Engaged learning also involves being collaborative—that is, valuing and having the skills to work with others

Technology can play a huge part in this: motivating, involving, inspiring, and the interactive power of it makes students develop skills that help them to collaborate, think critically.

If we look at today’s students are more tech-savvy than ever before. It’s almost like they are programmed to learn a different way than traditional past methods. No I don’t mean they are like robots, but they have grown up around technology, so multimedia, vivid images, video, instantaneous information, all of this grabs today’s student’s attention. Having technology in the classroom is not to replace a great teacher, but a combination of a great teacher and constructive classroom technology usage can result to great education. It simply makes sense to integrate technology in the classroom since it has become so integral to the world outside of the classroom and today’s students are accustomed to it.

n However technology has some limitations in engaging learners some of which are mentioned below.

1. Access To Inappropriate Content
The biggest concern when it comes to the use of technology in schools is how easy pornographic, violent, and other inappropriate materials can be accessed and viewed. This could cause big problems if the material is shared with other students while in the classroom.

2. A Disconnected Youth
This harmful effect of technology has already come to light in today’s world. Students  are attached to their screens almost 24/7, which is causing an entirely new set of social issues to pop up. This translates into the school system in a bit of a different way, however. More and more students are experiencing social anxieties when it comes to face to face interactions, but are perfectly fine socializing online.

3. The Cyberbullying Trap
Giving students access to anonymous accounts and endless contact avenues can only lead to trouble. Cyber bullying has become a real and in our face problem among young people today. This harassment has no end, which includes the class room. There is also no way to monitor or discipline students who are involved.

4. Inevitable Cheating
While having an easy access to information may seem like a great thing, it can become a real problem in a test taking environment. Cell phones have made cheating easier than ever. You no longer have to figure out how to write all of the answers down, you can just look them up!

5. A Major Distraction
Attentiveness drops drastically in the classroom when students have their cell phones or other technologies out. The focus shifts from their teacher and education, to whatever they are looking at, playing, or doing on their phones.

INNOVATIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING.

Innovation teaching is a fundamentally different way of teaching which results in considerably better citizens that are able to competent in the 21^st century. For they will have achieved the skills necessary to meet the challenges of the century. These skills include;

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Communication
3. Collaboration

4.    Creativity and Innovation

I feel as a teacher today that the purpose of education is not just making a student literate but adds rationale thinking, knowledgeability and self-sufficiency.

Innovative teaching is necessary for the present and future of education to help students to reach their full potential. We should ask ourselves as teachers whether our methods of teaching is helping  the students to gain new insights or opened up new channels of intellectual stimulation or enhanced student’s essential and creative thinking power?. Innovative teaching is a necessity for all teachers in order to meet the educational needs of the new generations.

So every teacher should have strategies and create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning.

The innovative strategies   should do the empower students to think critically, access and analyze information, creatively problem solve, work collaboratively, and communicate with clarity and impact.

1.      Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom. with activities focused on their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study process, set goals, and monitor their own learning process.

2.      Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone.

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When students work together on project teams, they learn to collaborate, communicate, and resolve conflicts. Cooperative learning and character development supports the social and emotional development of students and prepares them for success in the modern workplace.

3.      Emotions are an integral part of learning. Students understand ideas better when there’s interplay between emotions, motivation and cognition, so positive beliefs about oneself are a core part of reaching a more profound understanding.

 Similarly, keeping students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it matters, learning becomes more important to them.

4.      Learners are different and innovative learning environments reflect the various experiences and prior knowledge that each student brings to class. As teachers we need to apply practices that engage every learner.

5.      Students need to be stretched, but not too much. “It’s really critical to find that student’s sweet spot,” Teachers should try to prevent both coasting and overloading. Students need to experience both academic success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this as students at different levels help one another.

6.      Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Assessments are important, but only to gauge how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning environment itself. So assessment should be comprehensive.

7.      Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out into the real world. Learning can’t be meaningful if students don’t understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for the ability to transfer skills and adapt. “We can’t just have things remain in silos that never interact,”

 I plan to change my way of teaching by making it more innovative in a number of ways which include;

·  involving students and teachers in significantly different ways that lead to increased student learning and engagement

·  defining new outcomes for learning and designing new ways of measuring students’ progress and mastery

· creating new ways of facilitating learning and designing different structures for deploying adults in schools

· moving from a “one-size-fits-all” instructional program to personalized learning

focusing on the 21st-century skills of collaboration, teamwork, problem-formulation, creativity and the ability to "learn how to learn"

·  creating systems where students are partners in designing and owning their learning. Learner -centered lessons.

·  ensuring that a student can learn anywhere he/she can access the instructional material and at any time 24 hours a day/7 days a week and 365 days a year

·  creating a system of support for each student to be successful in this environment 

·    Project -  based learning.

Long term and student centered, project learning is a rigorous hands-on approach to learning core subject matter and basic skills with meaningful activities that examine complex, real-world issues. Project learning helps students develop and retain useful, working knowledge of subjects that are often taught in isolation and abstraction.

“You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.”

Being Innovative Produces Successful Learners in the digital society.

 

“If we teach today's students, as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow” - John Dewey

Today’s learners are more of digital natives than digital immigrants because they are considered to have grown up with the technology. They are “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. Because of this, they “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.”

Therefore teachers of this century more than ever have a vital role to play in helping students realize their futures by providing them with instruction that gives direction and allows them to hone their new cognitive and technological skills. In a nutshell, students need facilitated content to be fully capable citizens, whether its blogging on a social network site or solving a math problem. They may have limitless technology and information at their disposal, but can they access that information efficiently and effectively? Can they evaluate it critically and competently and identify objective facts from propaganda? Do they understand the real ethical, legal, and moral issues concerning access to and use of information? Can they create meaning from data? In essence, do they know the value of information, do they use it to enhance their learning?

  How effectively to prepare learners/students for the digital society?

  Teachers:

• Prepare instructional materials rich in hands on activities. Because today’s learners are experiential learners who learn by discovery rather than being “told.” They like to interact with content to explore and draw their own conclusions. Simulations, games, and role playing allow them to learn by “being there,” and also to enjoy themselves and have fun. 

• Prepare tasks that promote collaboration amongst the learners. This will help them to be more social. Learners enjoy working in teams. Interaction with others is key to their learning, and they want to be part of a community, collaborating, sharing, and exchanging ideas. 

·                     Apply the approaches like Constructivist theory that encourage knowledge creation by the learners themselves. This will help them  to construct their own learning – assembling information and tools from different sources.

•          Lessons should be Student-Centered Teaching This makes them  very independent learners, and will be  able to teach themselves with guidance; they don’t need sets of instructions like their predecessors .

In belief the teacher today should have instruction materials that promotes the following;

·                     Collaboration

·                     Constructivist Teaching

·                     Student-Centered Teaching

·                     Project-Based Teaching

·                     Challenged-Based Teaching

·                     Problem-Solving skills

·                     Real World Application

Some of the changes that I can make to be more innovative.

1. Create a class blog or wiki space where learners can share their views. This can also be used by the teacher to share with his/her students.
2. Use of technology tools like projectors, laptops, and internet where the learners are guided on how to research and evaluate information.
3. Make learners always work in groups.