Month: July 2023

Learning Pod: #8
Peers’ Names: Tanya Dixit, Joysna Genganah
Interactive Learning Resource Topic: Social Media and Generation Gap

1 – Identify components of the Interactive Learning Resource that might be missing (e.g., appropriate outcomes, alignment, interactivity, inclusivity, technology use and rationale, presentation, grammar, spelling, citations, etc.).

Going through the “Interactive Learning Resource” rubric, I found that a few components were missing/incomplete. Those being: I didn’t see a learning theory explicitly chosen for the resource (Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism); I may have missed it, but it would be good to see a rationale provided for why Inquiry-Based Learning was uniquely suited to your topic; I wasn’t able to find what levels of Bloom’s taxonomy this resource was targeting(perhaps remember and create); Within the “Influence of social media users on us and our self-esteem” module, the quiz at the bottom failed to load, giving an “Invalid Game Code error”.

2 – Provide a summary of The Interactive Learning Resource’s strengths and weaknesses. Draw out specific examples from your peers’ work to justify your feedback.

Strengths:
I liked the interactive elements that were included for each module and thought that they helped the person taking the course remember what they had read/heard in the given resources.
Weaknesses:
I found that the learning resource wasn’t too cohesive and that the flow between modules/pages was a bit confusing. For example, the introduction of the focus of “[mitigating] the negative perception held by the public towards social media while simultaneously discussing its potential capabilities” was followed immediately about how social media damages the self-esteem of its users. This could be mitigated by adding introductions to each module to connect them logically to the previous modules.

3 – Provide general, specific, and practical recommendations to your peers on how to improve their Interactive Learning Resource.

I think that adding introduction text to each module and ensuring that the modules flow logically between each other and within themselves could help your resource feel more cohesive and help your users follow your central focus. Additionally, making your formatting consistent throughout the resource helps make your resource more accessible and easy to understand. If you want to increase the accessibility of your resource, Google Chrome has a built-in tool called Lighthouse that can tell you how to improve your accessibility if that is possible with Notion.

What kind of interaction would the video require from your students? Does it force them to respond in some way (inherent)? In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g., make notes, do an activity, or think about the topic (learner-generated)? What activity could you suggest that they do after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity? How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity? How much work for you would that activity cause? Would the work be both manageable and worthwhile? Could the activity be scaled for larger numbers of students?

In this blog post, I’ll be analyzing the video “Supporting Emotional Wellbeing in Children: Calming Your Mind” by The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for its interactivity to answer the questions above(Supporting emotional wellbeing in children: Calming your mind 2021). We are currently using this video in our learning resource targeted at helping young children manage their well-being and mental health. In the video, students are shown how to practice mindfulness using the 5-4-3-2-1 method. The video first starts by laying out a situation where the protagonist, Taylor, is distressed by a nearby fire they saw on the news. The video then goes on to show how mindfulness can help calm Taylor’s mind and how they can practice the 5-4-3-2-1 method to be mindful. When Taylor is practicing the 5-4-3-2-1 method, the audience is encouraged to follow along. After the main body of the video, the audience is urged to use the method they learned in the video whenever they are feeling scared or worried. When using this as a resource for designed learning, it would be helpful to have the students interact with the content they learned by having them practice the steps of the 5-4-3-2-1 method. By practicing the 5-4-3-2-1 method in real life, students would have the tools and knowledge to help them be mindful. After watching the video, students should be able to describe mindfulness, recall examples, and explain when mindfulness can help them. These criteria can help design assessments such as verbal quizzes and class discussions to be able to measure the knowledge gained by the students. Since our students are so young and mindfulness is quite subjective to experience, feedback can only really be in the form of verbal response, as it would be difficult to provide accurate individualized feedback for such an unstructured assessment. To provide accurate and comprehensive feedback based on such an unstructured assessment, would require an extreme amount of effort and resources to keep track of every student, especially as class sizes scaled. A class that I’ve found that struggles with this problem, are the physical education classes. These classes often only required that you participate willingly in the day’s activity for you to receive a good grade. If the goal of these classes was to improve the fitness of young people, it didn’t have a very accurate feedback system for achieving that goal, as anything comprehensive would have required massive amounts of resources.

In summary, creating interactive material that is accessible to young people is challenging when you are dealing with smaller children. Since children can’t engage with written media as effectively as other people, being able to provide feedback is limited to in-person communication, a medium that doesn’t scale well for larger class sizes. 

Source(s):

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021, September 15). Supporting emotional wellbeing in children: Calming your mind. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8k7ydvVtlE