Choose one (or more) of your planned learning activities from your Blueprint and identify any barriers to student success. How can you alter or adjust your current plan to reduce those barriers?
- Learning activity: Listening to Examples
Learners are to watch and listen to YouTube videos and answer anonymously on a word cloud of phrases they heard in the videos. This activity may have barriers that include difficulty hearing the videos, or the speed at which the videos are played. One possible adjustment would be to slow the YouTube video playback, which is fairly easy to do as it is in the YouTube settings itself where you can adjust the speed to 0.75x, or 0.5x, etc. Then, playing the videos more than once would benefit the learners to be more comfortable and confident with their answers on what they heard. Another adjustment could be to add an additional component to the activity where the learners would come back to the video once they answered on word cloud, then watching the videos again with subtitles added on. This method would require instructors to add subtitles into the video, but may be important support for those who may have struggled with answering the prompts and phrases from the activity. It would give the learners a chance to reflect and understand what they missed before proceeding to the next activity. Overall, this activity is designed in a way to safely and comfortably introduce the topic to the learners and get their brains warmed-up.
2. Listening and Speaking: Review
This learning activity is designed to review the new material in a casual way of assessment, where there is no grading or pressure on the learners to know exactly what they learned. They will partake in a listening quiz, then answer out loud if they know the answer. One barrier that may prevent learners from taking full benefits from this activity could be the method of answering the prompts. If one learner answers before the other learners have the chance to think about the correct answer, these other learners will miss the opportunity to find the correct answer for themselves. One possible alteration that could be made to this design would be to have the class collectively answer. This way, even if a learner gets the answer wrong, there is no fear of embarrassment as everyone will be speaking at the same time.
References
Bates, A.W. (2019). Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition. Vancouver, B.C.: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. Retrieved from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/
Comments on other posts:
Hi Rana,
It’s such a useful lesson when I go through your blog!
I explored that the barriers in learning activities, which focuse on three main areas: technological, social, and cognitive challenges. And most of your words highlights that these obstacles can impact the learning process and offers practical strategies for educators to address them,which definitely involves in the development of education and culture.What’s more,after comparing with our blueprint,I discovered that we’ve ignored a very important element and that is cognitive challenge.We will improve about that! Thanks so much!