New Technologies, New Pedagogies: Using Scenarios for Staff Development with Mobile Technologies

This paper explores the staff development process to engage academics in a Faculty of Education to explore new pedagogies required to incorporate the use of mobile learning technologies in teaching and learning activities with their students. Many staff acknowledged the benefits of active learning to meet the needs of millennial learners. This project sought to address ways to incorporate the everyday technologies these learners are using within the assessment process. The staff development process addressed the need for staff to own and use mobile technology in their professional and personal contexts in order to think differently about engaging their students in pedagogically sound ways. We explore the steps taken in this action learning process as staff members became familiar with smartphones and ipods and examine the development of the perspectives of the academics involved of the affordances these technologies could offer to improve and support student learning. The use of scenarios as part of an action learning process assisted academics to think more broadly about how the devices could support student learning

Designing Serious Games for Education: From Pedagogical Principles to Game Mechanisms

International audienceSGs represent an important opportunity for improving education thanks to their ability to compel players and to present realistic simulations of real-life situations. The scientific community is aware that we are just at the beginning of a proper use of gaming technologies for education and training and, in particular, there is a need for scientific and engineering methods for building games not only as more realistic simulations of the physical world, but as means that provide effective learning experiences. This requires an ever closer cooperation among the various actors involved in the overall SG life- chain, putting pedagogy in a central role, given the educational target of the SGs. This paper addresses the till-now inadequate integration of educational and game design principles and proposes techniques, methods and mechanisms that allow designers with different background to dialogue among each other and to define games that are able to integrate - by design - entertainment and educational features. In particular, the paper follows a design path that starts from the definition of reference frameworks and then analyses the typical categories of design patterns, before focusing on the user-interaction modalities - seen from a pedagogical point of view - given their relevance for the end-users. In the end, we discuss the sandbox serious game model, that looks suited to implement - by design - joint pedagogical and entertainment features. We believe that the indications provided in this paper can be useful for researchers and stakeholders to understand the typical issues in SG design and to get inspiration about possible solutions that take into account the need to implement tools that are effective both as an entertainment medium and as an education tool

Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors

Girardin, F., Ayman, M., & Josep, B. (2007). Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors. In T. Navarrete, J. Blat & R. Koper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd TENComptence Open workshop 'Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastucture' (pp. 99-104). June, 20-21, 2007, Barcelona, Spain: TENCompetence.This article reports on the background research on requirements and current approaches to editors for learning curriculum designers. First we take a critique look at the state of the art in the domain of learning activity editors. We then look back in the information visualization and interaction literature to discuss the design challenged of such tools. From these current theories and applied works we define a set a rules that are crucial for the design of CDP editors based developed on top of complex e-learning models. Finally, we exemplify the set of design rules with a prototype integrating tightly coupled map-based and Gantt chart views.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Pedagogic Corpora for Content and Language Integrated Learning. Insights from the BACKBONE Project

BACKBONE is a European LLP/Languages project (1) (Jan 2009 - Feb 2011), whose overall objective is to provide foreign language teachers in CLIL settings with innovative language learning solutions. To achieve this goal, pedagogic corpora of spoken interviews are combined with corpus-related e-learning activities in blended learning scenarios. The seven BACKBONE corpora contain video interviews in English, German, French, Polish, Spanish and Turkish as well as in European manifestations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The interviews have been transcribed and pedagogically annotated with regard to thematic and linguistic features; additional enrichment resources include ready-made language learning modules as well as suggestions and instructions for exploratory and communicative learning activities. The BACKBONE search interface provides free online access to the interviews and enrichment resources. It supports pedagogically motivated searches using thematic and linguistic categories as well as lexical searches with words and phrases. 24 CLIL-related pilot courses have been implemented and evaluated in secondary, higher and vocational education; they demonstrate how BACKBONE search results can be used to facilitate individual and collaborative learning in Moodle-based blended learning activities. A suite of pedagogic corpus tools covering transcription, annotation, management of enrichment resources and corpus search is available under a GNU General Public License. The customization and flexibility these tools offer enables teachers to cater to diverse language learning and teaching needs in CLIL contexts or in connection with lesser taught languages and varieties. To facilitate exploitation, the BACKBONE website serves as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for an ensemble of teacher support facilities including web support for the development and hosting of “guest†corpora and courses