At the heart of the education system and school are teachers and pupils.
Teachers need refresher training to keep up with the times, and to deliver distance learning effectively and efficiently.
Data from the OECD report indicate that 3 out of 4 teachers need more training in "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)". For a new education system, you need new techniques.
Today I want to focus on the concept of Micro-learning, soon we will also talk about gamification, social learning, adaptive learning.
Finally, we will see how all these concepts together will create a new system where children and young people can learn while having fun. What is the Micro-learning? "Micro-learning deals with relatively small units of lessons. It involves micro-lesson strategies specifically designed for understanding, learning, competence-based education."
It is therefore essential to be able to break down each individual lesson into short, manageable pieces of information, which will allow the learner to access them with any kind of digital device.
This does not mean reducing or summarising, it means getting to the essence of the concept.
It is proven that there is a limit to how much information the brain can absorb and retain during a lesson.
Each piece of content should be limited to a maximum of nine concepts in order to optimise the students' memory capacity.
Each unit of the lesson must be able to be implemented in any environment: from a traditional classroom to virtual classrooms and even through smartphones and tablets.
In an era when everyone seems to have less time, microlearning allows teachers to create short content and students to consume it anytime, anywhere, without spending hours and hours studying behind their desks.
The benefits are manifold: #Student-centricity: the micro-lessons allow each student to proceed at his or her own pace, and to return to a topic as many times as they wish, as well as being able to delve endlessly into content using the large library on the internet. #Attenzione: Reducing the lessons into micro-lessons (videos), of short duration (4-8 minutes), increases the level of attention. Each micro-lesson is a module of a larger learning path that the teacher assigns on a specific topic and can be compared to chapters in a book.
#Personal Learning Rhythm : Students can choose their own learning rhythm by studying and reviewing content as often as they wish, at any speed. Final assessments will demonstrate the level of learning.
#Tempo: Lessons are short and therefore quick to produce. The content of traditional textbooks rarely changes, but by using technology to create micro-lessons you can take advantage of updated content from the digital world, the old model of static textbooks is no longer useful.
#Learn_where_you_want:the increasing variety and accessibility of smart devices is making digital content more accessible. Micro-lessons can be consumed on an Apple Watch as easily as on a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
Basic principles for planning micro-lessons:
1) Each unit must be focused on a specific objective. So it is not a question of condensing 30 minutes of content into 5 minutes, it is necessary to divide the content of a traditional lesson into sections, where at the end of the first section you have acquired knowledge that allows you to access the next content.
2) Make the content interactive, to allow in-depth analysis, videos, quizzes, games, to increase participation. The content must attract the student to go on in the course.
3) Do not lose sight of the objective: Each micro-lesson must lead to a larger objective. Like building a treasure hunt, each clue leads to the final prize.
Microlearning is not the solution to every type of lesson, but it is certainly a good technique to understand what is best to change in the teaching method when creating content for distance education.
It can also be useful to combine it with traditional lessons, allowing you to give the basics to the students and use the real time in the classroom to deepen the subject and treat it in a more complex way. At the heart of the education system and the school are teachers and pupils.
Teachers need basic fundamentals concepts to plan micro-lessons:
1) Each unit must be focused on a specific objective. So it is not a question of condensing 30 minutes of content into 5 minutes, it is necessary to divide the content of a traditional lesson into sections, where at the end of the first section you have acquired knowledge that allows you to access the next content.
2) Make the content interactive, to allow in-depth analysis, videos, quizzes, games, to increase participation. The content must attract the student to go on in the course.
3) Do not lose sight of the objective: Each micro-lesson must lead to a larger objective. Like building a treasure hunt, each clue leads to the final prize.
Microlearning is not the solution to every type of lesson, but it is certainly a good technique to understand what is best to change in the teaching method when creating content for distance education.
It can also be useful to combine it with traditional lessons, allowing you to give the basics to the students and use the real time in the classroom to deepen the topic and treat it in a more complex way.
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