Combining Flexibility, Technology and Pedagogical approaches

In my blogs I have been talking about flexibility, pedagogical approaches and technology. But not about all of them together. I talked about flexibility and combining this with technology. The same for pedagogical approaches and also I tried some technological tools. Now the question is, what about combining these three?

I think combining pedagogical approaches, flexibility and technology is not that difficult. You start with choosing your pedagogical approach, or maybe a few approaches you want to use. Then you look what kind of flexibility will fit with this approach. Then you add a technology. You can do this yourself or you can make this flexible and let the students choose.

An example. As pedagogical approach you choose collaborative learning, it is about learning together. You can make this flexible related to the content or even to delivery and logistics. If for example the students have to write a paper together, they can be flexible about the topic of the paper, when they work together, were they work together etc. So it is really easy to make the pedagogical approach you use flexible. Adding technology is something that can again be flexible or maybe be chosen by the teacher. In the example, technologies that can be used are computers, using the internet or something like dropbox or blackboard to share your documents. Also a beamer and a screen are technologies that can be used when the students have to present the content of their paper.

So as you see in the example, it is pretty easy to come up with a combination of the three. As long as you make sure they fit together it isn’t a problem. Also it is possible to choose different pedagogies, flexibilities and technologies during your course or lessons. This is exactly what in the course ‘pedagogies for flexible learning supported by technolgy’ the teacher does, at least I think. She uses different pedagogies in the lessons: traditional learning to explain the content, collaborative learning when discussing topics or doing an assignment, problem-based learning by giving us a problem and collaboratively think about it, and so on. Also the flexibility varies. There are a few deadlines and we have lectures every week, so that is not flexible. But we are flexible in when we do our assignment, with whom we work together, were we work on our assignment and so on. And at last she uses different kinds of technologies. In the lectures she uses a beamer, a computer, a simulation, sometimes a video and tools we had to look into. At home she uses facebook and blackboard to communicate with us. As you can see, it are all different pedagogies, flexibilities and technologies that are used. This makes the course a good example that it is possible to combine the three and that there are different ways to do this.

Later this week I will talk more about this, after we discussed this topic in the lecture!