Active Lesson

<B><I>This seminar is co-organised by the Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) and Faculty of Education, HKU</B></I>

ActiveLessons are engaging IT-based student-centered (pupil-centered) experiences easily designed by teachers. The idea is to empower teachers to easily create pedagogically sound activities that draw upon variety of existing resources and tools. ActiveLessons can be e developed using simple tools such as MS PowerPoint. This tool requires very moderate technical skills thus it empowers teachers to concentrate on pedagogy while designing effective technology-based learning activities.

A typical ActiveLesson begins with a presentation of a scenario with a problem or an inquiry to students in interesting multimedia-enhanced ways. It then engages students to analyze a problem or an inquiry presented and access variety of resources from the internet, digital repositories and other sources. Students are required to examine these resources, mine for further information, explore interactive models and simulations, discuss and engage in higher order thinking while completing a problem solving or an inquiry task. Students activity is usually collaborative and it requires them to negotiate solutions. An activity usually results in artifacts created by students, e.g., mind maps, completed documents, design, models, etc. These are used by teachers to spot students misconceptions and carry on with formative evaluation of students learning. Artifacts can be collected into an evaluation portfolio. Another powerful idea of ActiveLessons is to provide context for students to use technology while completing their activity, e.g., mind mapping tool, spreadsheet, word processor, digital camera, etc.

The presentation will introduce a concept of ActiveLessons and demonstrate a number of examples developed by practicing and pre-service teachers.