EdTech 2020 Journey: Teaching and Learning with Technology

Creating Learning Apps Repository: Application of Activity-Oriented Design Method  The growing spread of the COVID-19 virus has resulted in the enforcement of physical distancing and school closures. The school calendar has been disrupted and there is a high level of uncertainty and anxiety. This present parents and community at large with burdens to adopt new roles as teachers, many of whom are unprepared or trained to play this role. “The outbreak of the virus and lockdowns at the national level could be used as a good test for the education technology interventions for distance learning. Unfortunately, few systems arrived at this point fully prepared” (World Bank Blogs, 2020). In this post AODM (Activity-Oriented Design Method) was employed as a guide for a learning activity of collating a wide variety of teaching tools (apps) that are readily available, easily accessible and user friendly to equip parents as teachers. The activity is described as follows; “As students and...

Sociocultural theory According to Vygotsky’s (1978) higher order of thinking skills and human responses in general are mediated by technical tools and psychological tools. Individuals learn with a wide variety of tools, and people that help them carry out their goal-oriented activities in a sociocultural setting (Figure 1). Tools serve an extensive purpose and can be employed by individuals for interactions with their peers and subsequent creation of knowledge or contents. Thus, tools are infused with cultural meaning and influence human actions (Hasu and Engeström, 1999). See details of this theory in another post in this Blog ( Sociocultural Theory ). Figure 1 : Sociocultural theory of development Considering the fact that learning is a social process and teaching and learning do not take place in isolation (Lim, 2002), a similitude between culture and garden was drawn by Cole (1995) (Figure 2). According to this illustration, one “must attend concurrently to two...