Teachers

Learning platforms and Educational Technology

Date

March 1, 2022

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What is a learning platform? What resources should an efficient platform have? How has educational technology helped have all the traditional elements of a face-to-face class in a virtual environment? In this new Let’s Blog! We will discuss these questions and more, so enjoy your reading.

Let’s begin by defining the concept of a learning platform. This is defined as a virtual space to enrich learning, regardless of the modality (online, face-to-face or hybrid). In general, it is for the sole use of teachers and students. However, some platforms consider the needs of the entire educational community: students, teachers, school managers, and parents as well. The latter is essential to be involved in their children’s learning process.

With the advent of the Internet in education, the academic world has undergone a profound transformation. New technologies are already part of schools at any stage and are helping to improve teaching and learning processes in different ways.

A learning platform allows us to host all content and resources for our classes in one single place. It also offers teachers the opportunity to assign extra activities for students to do after class to reinforce knowledge. Nevertheless, what else do we need it to include?

Communication is crucial. Therefore, within any good virtual environment, it is necessary to have a space for teachers and students to be in touch. If so, in case students have doubts, they can message their teacher. Similarly, teachers can announce or explain new assignments by sending a message to students’ inboxes or the class chat.

The use of didactic platforms allows teachers to create more dynamic and fun classes while achieving measurable learning from students with multiple resources, such as interactive activities, videos, audios and games. Moreover, they can deliver interactive quizzes and tests or set projects, among other activities. To facilitate this form of interactive teaching, it is advantageous that we can link our platform with other tools to teach online classes. Examples of these could be Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet. Through these, we can interact with students as if in a face-to-face class!

To teach an online class is simpler than we may imagine. First, we need to create a class using Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet. We then review the material on our platform and select what we will use in our class. Next, on the day of the lesson, we assign the tasks to students and give them control to solve the activities during the lesson. Finally, students receive the results of the activities and clarify doubts with us. We ensure students feel genuinely involved in class and gain a sense of ownership by following this sequence.

If we think carefully, making the most of the different tools a didactic platform may offer is possible by using education technology. As we already mentioned in a previous blog, its application has made it possible to improve the quality of education. Educational technology complements teachers’ work with interactive resources that make learning a new experience.

However, there is still another critical aspect any platform we select for our school must have. We are talking about a sound markbook. A platform that simply works as an exercise repository but does not keep track of students’ results is not an effective one. Without a markbook, it would be almost impossible prove a student’s progress. Instead, we need a platform that provides us with learning analytics to assess data showing students’ level at the beginning, during, and end of a course. If you missed our January blog, we suggest you read it here to learn about all the benefits collecting evidence of learning has.

Nevertheless, for now, we would like to hear from you. Do you already use a learning platform for your classes? What do you like about it? What would you change about it? Do you already know the Richmond Learning Platform?

Do not forget that we always have a solution designed for you!

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Learning platforms and Educational Technology

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