A learning community is anything that helps an individual person within a group, whether it is a face to face meeting or a group chat on a social media platform such as WhatsApp or Facebook. The learning platforms allow safe and secure online teaching and learning for each member of the education society.
These E-Learning Communities can be managed by the teacher in charge and made accessible for the pupils, parents and teachers within the classroom. The government set a target for all children to be able to connect to a personalised online workspace by 2007. (Department of Education, 2005)
When I reflected upon the benefits of these e-Learning Platforms, I could see which would benefit my own platform. These would be a parent accessibility link so that parents and teachers could monitor the work the children were doing online. I would also try to incorporate how easy the children within the classroom could connect in order to work together online.
However a handful of teachers and parents will still be in denial about how a e-learning platforms is able to help the children in a positive way and these few will not see the benefits of moving some learning, online. Making there a disagreement in the workplace about which learning community works best for the children involved. Is it face to face tutorials or is it online communities where the pupils can be in a similar community behind the computer screen where the teachers can still monitor and filter the negativity.
[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/thorntom/files/2016/11/Computers-in-Human-Behavior-pimhxj.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]
The article that I looked at, speaks about how school’s can positively use ICT to promote community cohesion in communities that have a form of segregation within them. Northern Ireland is one of these communities that has a divide, and this is to do with Christians. This divide has caused multiple conflicts over the years between Catholics and Protestants. The Department of Education stepped in to try and build schools that would be integrated (children of any faith or no faith at all) and would allow the children to share facilities. There were many oppositions with this movement such as; church leaders, teachers and politicians.
There were many different tries into bringing together the new generation of school population and you can see from the article that this is common curriculums, shared education and finally technology to link schools. The use of ICT to link schools has been welcomed by teachers and has had a positive response from young people’s attitudes and their skills. ICT provisions can give out potential to inclusive of all young people no matter which type of school they are enrolled in.
This e-partners programme was set up by Ulster University, and involved using a VLE called Fronter. This project allowed 16 schools to integrate online. Although some found it difficult to use and some had limited internet connection the results still show that they were able to work collaboratively on the task building on their ICT skills and community cohesions. These types of VLE’s provide a comfortable and controlled online space for schools, teachers and pupils to work together without the segregation of past ideas and occurrences. This project allowed the children to build relationships with other pupils from other school’s who they may not normally associate themselves with.
E-Partners allowed school’s to develop and grow with the ICT software that is available to them, learning from and teaching other schools so that each person in the programme can learn and bring community cohesion into practise.
In school the world wide web was used as a place to go and find the millions of games that were available to us, when it was raining. We eventually grew and matured to understand that not only does the web show us the gaming websites we used when we type the word “game” into the search engine but it also helped us to see more information about the topics we were studying.
Teacher’s showed us that we could merge learning with online games on websites such as BBC bitesize or even on sites that were less formal such as funbrain – maths arcade, where we could access the maths arcade and work our way round the board completely different maths tasks. These sites are still fully functional and I have attached two links to the sites above.
Berners-Lee said on his article: “I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer.”
From looking at my own experience the World Wide Web, I have realised that it is useful having all the information I need together. Whilst using the WWW you notice that by having all your result searches in one place no matter the webpage, it is less time consuming than what Berners-Lee said about having to log on and off each time you want to find something else out.
In year five (aged 9-10) the girls in my class were invited to join a club called CC4G, which is still running but has changed name. This club was set up to encourage girls to participate in ICT. We would go once a week and work with the teacher on different projects, programmes and websites. You can find out about TechFuture Girls (formally CC4G) here.