CROWDSOURCING CONCEPTS FOR STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING

Student-centered learning refers to “... instructional approaches … that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, [or] aspirations ...” (edglossary.org). Allowing learners to play a role in the selection of the lesson content allows them to make an investment in their learning. Choices also reveal to teachers and students a lot about the interests, needs, and aspirations of the learner. The goal of this session is to explore concepts for technology integration that allow learners to engage in lessons by becoming content contributors. The workshop will engage participants through demonstration of crowdsourcing as a content resource. For example, before the workshop begins, I will not know the participants’ specific thoughts or feelings. Like presenting a lesson to my students, I will use a tool like Mentimeter to get a sense of what the room thinks or feels about student-centered learning or technology, which also engages the learners for the next activity. Continuing with the crowdsourcing approach, participants in this workshop will use Prism for collaborative text analysis, explore key Internet search tools, and Google Apps to work with content contributions from the people in the room. Lastly, this is a hands-on, concept-based approach to learning about technology integration, so professionals can use these strategies with a variety of tools, even paper.