Connect your Learning A Resource for Innovative Classroom

Aims of the tool

Our aim is to encourage:
- Experimentation and play: the sense of play seems to have been completely lost in the mainstream school education in sharp contrast to innovative learning activities incorporating elements of gaming in informal settings.
- Border crossing projects: they require students to explore themes cutting across the curriculum and combining knowledge and skills from various disciplines, e.g. IT, design, language arts or social studies.
- Experiential, practice-based learning: hands-on tasks are an essential part of the process in which students actually engage in something meaningful to them.
- Sharing class projects with authentic audiences: learners’ motivation is raised if they know that their work can be shared with a public close to them, in terms of interests and cultures.
- Making students active users of technology in the process of learning rather than passive receivers of digitally mediated instruction.

Description of the tool

Digital media become more and more important as teaching tools in schools across Europe: teachers use PREZIs, online materials, e-handbooks and give assignments to be done and reported with digital means. However, there is a characteristic challenge that arises here: what is initially received by students as exciting and motivating may soon align with the appeal of standard paper handouts unless we make them ‘connect’ with the learning content in a new way. This is exactly the advantage of new media which invite interaction, creative input and multiple forms of engagement, letting students become editors, designers, researchers or publishers. In brief, digital media have the potential to foster ‘connected learning’, not yet fully realised and exploited in many schools.

The idea of the publication resulted from a range of encounters of teachers working in different educational and cultural establishments in Poland, Croatia and Portugal. We all involve our students in creative use of digital media in the learning process. We follow different pathways though so we realised that a cooperation of such a variegated teacher group can bring concrete benefits not only for our classes but much further beyond. The particular approach that we have chosen for elaborating new learning scenarios was very much inspired by the work done by a research group at the Digital Media and Learning Hub who proposed an approach to education called “connected learning” (cf. http://clrn.dmlhub.net). The approach advocates for broadened access to learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, production-centred and oriented toward educational opportunity. Such learning takes place when a young person pursues a personal interest with the support of peers and caring adults and is able to link this learning and interest to school achievement, further career or civic engagement. There is ample evidence that when young people are able to connect the often fragmented contexts of school, home, community and peer culture they engage in the most meaningful and resilient forms of learning. Digital and networked media provide unprecedented opportunities for connecting these formal and informal spheres of learning.