LEARNING THEORIES
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
The Setting
The workshop facilitators were both secondary school history teachers who had integrated H5P activities in their teaching practices. The first part focused on a 30-minute presentation of H5P, its origins and a general overview of what it could potentially offer in terms of interactive learning.
During the second part, participants had an hour to create as many H5P tasks as possible and shared them with the rest of the group by creating a personal section on the Moodle page dedicated to the activity. I was able to design four of them: Image Slide, Image Blender, Summary and Essay.
Experiential Learning
The task in question illustrates a fine example of experiential learning. Here are the main features:
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hands-on approach: based on what I had been briefly exposed to, I was given a clear objective and therefore was learning by doing;
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reflection: by directly experimenting with the tool, I could see the benefits and/or the limitations of each H5P activity;
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transferability: given that it was a “real-world” setting, the task was meaningful and could be recycled in my own teaching practices.
Authenticity
According to Wiggins, authentic assessment examples can be defined as follows:
"...Engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively. The tasks are either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field."
Another definition is what Jon Mueller refers to as “[a] form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills.”
Which of the definitions best applies here? I will go for the second one as it highlights the real-world aspect of the task and its transferability to my own setting.
Learning Theory
Constructivism best applies here since the activity was deeply rooted in discovery learning / simulation context. The end result might not have been conclusive, but the objective was to make the participants decide for themselves if they could see any pedagogical benefit of using the tool.
Experiential Learning (n.d.). Retrieved July 9 2018 from https://facultyinnovate.utexas.edu/experiential-learning
Mueller, J. (2016). What is Authentic Assessment? [blog post]. Retrieved from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm
Wiggins, G. P. (1993). Assessing student performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Retrieved from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/references.htm#wiggins1993