Re-Evaluating Digital Technology to Enhance Learning

Project summary

The use of digital technology in education has been actively promoted for a number of years throughout the EU and generally teachers and educational management have responded positively to the introduction and use of digital technology in the classroom. Many vocational schools strive towards digital maturity as outlined in the eSchools programme and the partners in this project are all actively using digital technology in their vocational education and are all well advanced towards digital maturity. However we have now reached a point where we need to examine the effectiveness of this use. Not only a self evaluation of our digital maturity but also of our response to the learning needs of students. It would seem that in many cases digital technology has been used to substitute for existing teaching tools. Students often use tablets or laptop computers as a substitute for books. Teachers use digital projectors and digital presentations as a substitute for the traditional blackboard. The Internet is being used to replace the students trip to the library. While there is nothing wrong with this as such it demotes digital technology's role in education to one of substitution for existing technology. As educationalists we should be asking if we can we get more from digital technology. How can digital technology be employed in a more productive way to enhance vocational learning. In fact how can we harness the full potential of digital technology so that our students gain the maximum vocational educational benefit from it’s use. In many ways the things we know about how students learn, their attention span, different types of learning and other educational theories have not been employed in deciding how, when and why we should use digital technology. This project seeks to address this question at a practical level in the following way: By conducting a critical examination of how digital technology is currently being used in vocational education. By identifying digital resources currently available that may be used to enhance student learning. This will include the identification and evaluation of online educational resources as well as a more general evaluation of the Internet as a learning resource. Areas such as independent e-Learning, digital technology in classroom gamification and the use of Alternate reality software will also be considered. We will Re-examining how students learn with the goal of developing a better strategy for the use of digital technology in the vocational classroom. This will include an examination of the different types of learning : Visual, Aural, Verbal, Physical, Logical, Solitary and how digital technology can be used to deliver each of these. We will also examine how we can better use digital technology to assist students with learning difficulties, disadvantaged students and minority groups. This will include examining digital technology as a learning supports, as an accessible resource and study support, types of digital assistive technology, focusing on the stronger learning styles of the individual student. From this we will develop sample vocational lessons using digital technology to enhance student learning and demonstrate how a more professional application of digital technology can add significantly to the students learning. These lessons will cover a wide range of vocational subjects. We will then test and evaluate these sample lessons in a real vocational classroom situation so as to fine tune our examples of a better way to use digital technology in vocational education. Primarily the project will give participating teachers the opportunity to examine in detail how they currently use digital technology in vocational education, question whether this use is educationally sound and work to develop a better strategy for digital technology use to enhance student learning. In so doing also to examine how students with difficulty can be helped by using digital technology to deliver course material targeted towards their stronger learning type. The importance of recording and sharing the project experience is also fully recognized. There will be a project website and public Facebook group which will record project activity and learning as each phase of the project progresses. We will produce an ebook entitled “Effective use of Digital Technology for Vocational Learning” which will record the learning from the project and contain the sample lessons as well as a detailed rationale behind each lesson outlining why the approach taken enhances student learning, student evaluation of the lesson and suggestions as to how the lesson may be adapted to other subject areas or age groups. It should be stressed that all of the partners in this project currently use digital technology in their vocational classrooms; the critical question we wish to answer is how can we use that technology more effectively.