Teachers, mentors, instructors, masters, educators, whatever they were called; they are all facilitators of learning. In a daily routine, most often than not, teachers will always ask during or upon the delivery of their lessons, Is there any question CLASS, do you understand the LESSON??
Having been a student for quite some time, the most common reaction from a student hearing that interrogative statement is....SILENCE. Silentness that needs to be assessed, interpreted and processed correctly by the confound teacher.
It is very alarming whenever a teacher gets SILENCE as an answer. Silence could be a YES or most often means NO.
Society would always dictate the norms among these now-learners. Recent studies shows that students of this generation (from preschool to college) needs different methods and tools in order to learn. It completely departs from the traditional old school teaching (especially in the field of Information and Communications Technology).
The real question now is, are we ready to deliver ICT education to the 21st century learners? At this age of computing, they are better known as "digital learners". Digital students are hypercommunicators, multitaskers, audio-visual oriented and fond of discovery-based learning.
Greater efforts have been put forth to address this issue. Different trainings and workshops were given but still some flaws were flaunting on the effectiveness of these knowledge-workers.
The College of Information and Communications Technology (CICT) of Holy Angel University (HAU) in Angeles City in Pampanga Philippines have endeavored a four day free seminar-workshop entitled, "Design, Development and Publication of Modular-Based Instructional Materials and on Educational Innovations on Blended and Grounded Learning/Teaching Principles" last September 29, 2010 to October 2, 2010 facilitated by Dr. Jose Rueben Q. Alagaran II, PhD, an author and a seasoned educational consultant of Miriam College together with Prof. Oliver Malabanan of DLSU Manila, whose work is currently focused on "learning quest".
During the four day seminar-workshop attended to by thirty preselected participants (that includes myself and majority were IT Educators without educational units or formal trainings on teaching but were equipped with all their skills and technical expertise ) coming from different colleges and universities from Region 3 held at the STL Building of HAU, they identified the would be solutions to address the issues that is currently being experienced by IT educators over the region.
Dr. Alagaran, on his three day seminar-workshop focused on design, development, assessment and publication of modular-based blended learning approach while Prof. Malabanan on the fourth day discusses new concepts, trends and different learning styles utilizing Web 2.0 and Cloud Technology to address the needs of grounded learning-teaching principles.
The seminar, workshop intensive, formally exposes the needs of ICT (education) delivering institutions to keep abreast with the special needs of their learners to become effective in engaging in teaching-learning experiential approach thus catching the students interest the way they wanted to be educated thus arriving at a common goal, LEARNING.
... ... ... to be continued
