Wednesday, October 20, 2010

tutor, tools, and tutee in Learning

Before about six years, a colleague brought his students to my computer lab and gave them an E-Lesson. He created the lesson with Macromedia (Adobe) Director. He was a Science teacher and lesson was meant to be as a substitute of a lesson in the Science lab and showing them an experiment there.

The lesson was merely a show with some interactivity but without any questions/answers nor different levels. The students impression? they liked it so much and they understood the lesson.

I know this is not an ideal tutor in ICT, but it gives a glimpse on how using computing can turn learning to an attractive and effective way.
While there are so many obstacles in front of applying tutor-tools-tutee in learning, but with the right resources and time they can be applied differently depending on the level of the student.

One of the big problems is the needed flexibility of the tutor mode where the human teacher can beat it. Although I think with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, we may have some adaptive tutors which teach the students depending on their level of the understanding.

About the tutee mode, I think it can be deployed to some extent on children since we must bear in mind this mod needs high level of understanding in children to deal with programming skills needed here which seems to be time consuming. And to solve this, I think the focus can be on building programming skills in the first levels in the school to use them effectively in the advanced and next levels.

Last one in these modes is the tools. It's used widely between teachers and students in the form of word processors and spreadsheets to get statistics and writing assignments and reports. This mode is less time and consuming in opinion as the tools a ready to use and need not to be programmed in most cases.

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