After reading Salmon’s 5-stage framework and e-activities I found that children need to be supported through a structured developmental process, this means that children need ‘scaffold-ed learning’ this allows them to build on their current knowledge and experiences. Salmon talks about a five stage model that provided this structure, it also provides examples of how participants can benefit form increasing skills that leads to success.
This is the 5-stage framework and e-activities:
Each stage requires the children to master certain technical skills, each stage calls for different skills. Moving through the stages the child increases their interaction with others as well as improving technological skills. Technical support is provided by e-moderators and this promotes action and interaction, Salmon says that nearly all children will progress through these stages. Salmon is a aware that children will take a varied amount of time to progress through each stage, children all learn at different speeds according to their skills, and it is vital for teachers and e-moderators to support their learning. Using this model to design development processes and build a programme of e-activities for online learning will provided knowledge of how individuals are likely to exploit the system at each stage as well as avoiding common pitfalls.
To ensure that the children are progresses through the stages it is important to motivate them. Teachers should not to assume that the online aspect will be enough to motivate the children to progress. Many children are lead by ‘achievement’ motivation, they require tasks that can easily be achieved where as others will need ‘competence’ motivation which requires the child to believe they can achieve what they see as a difficult task.