Characteristics of Meaningful Learning

Unfortunately is sad but it is true that School systems now are more test-oriented in order to avoid loss of funding, but the more affected here are the students, because they make a little attempt to understand what they are being tested on. They basically learn how to pass the exams instead of actually understanding the knowledge behind it. As described in chapter 1, tests are individual tasks and they force the students to not collaborate with each other to develop conceptual learning.

One of the characteristics I chose is intentional, because everything we do in life is for a purpose or a goal, everything is goal-oriented. There is technology available almost for everything, but the one I think that supports intentional learning is Google Docs. I am currently developing How-To’s documents to provide to faculty and staff on how to complete certain tasks. Such as how to map a network drive, how to use effectevly Microsoft products such as the Office suite.  I meet with faculty and staff at least once a month. The purpose here is to raise the level of understanding on how to make their work much more efficient and raise their productivity by at least 50%. I use goggle docs, to share different documents where they can easily download them at any time anywhere.  I allow them to provide feedback on how to improve the document for future learners.  The use of Google docs facilitates the ability for the user to have the documents handy all the time.

My second characteristic is Cooperative learning. This is for me on the most important characteristics, because I personally think that collaboration is another way to represent and understand knowledge.  Students do not always understand the same way as the others; cooperative learning will represent what other knows in multiple ways.  In my personal experience, MS Share Point is a technology that definitely supports Cooperative learning, MS share point is a web-based application that is mainly use for collaboration in different areas in the work area or in education as well. One of the neat features I like about share point is the famous Work flow.  This feature allows the user to upload any kind of document to a server and then you need to specify the user that needs your approval or feedback. You get an email confirmation every time a user has either approved, reject or provided feedback to your document, this is process is done for all the users that you specify.  The workflow will complete until all the users have provided the feedback requested. This can be very useful in a classroom environment where you can upload an article and you want feedback from everyone in the classroom the work flow process will not complete until everyone in the classroom provide their feedback.