The whole idea of being educated is to understand how education evolves and the techniques to make it effective. Authentic learning is one of the best techniques.
Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students
to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world. Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, they nurture and provide the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side or a project manager, a facilitator not a dictator. Processes become the predominant force and the content collected is organized appropriately into portfolios.
Good teachers have always been fascinated about kids. Now days, Teacher are interested in Twitter because there they can be able to conduct conferences, reading other people’s books and twitter is connecting thousands of teachers around the world so that they can share their best practices, they can ask questions of each other and get responses. An idea can start with an astronaut in a space station or a scientist in Antarctica, or a class room in Brazil and within seconds it’s travelling around the world and the teachers can show up in their class room. For a teacher, it’s just very exciting to be able to give the best that’s out there to his/her students.
For the teachers who have been working with social media, social networking and students, they’ll surely know how helpful it is. Teachers can help each other by giving lectures to other one’s students through Skype call. It’s a very exciting thing for a teacher as well as students. You may be teaching the same subject for years, but you will just get shocked to hear the stuff that you might not have. This can be possible only with online global connections. Every major organization is having twitter accounts, for example, NASA is having twitter account, and you can connect with astronauts. It’s very helpful because, if you want to be an astronaut, it’s a good way to talk to astronauts.
The best thing about authentic learning is that it isn’t just a school or college’s work, it’s a global effort. You can get the best with little investment. People of unbelievable poverty are also getting good quality education with this authentic learning experience. There are many teachers who can teach you online effectively without considering the pay scales. They just do what they love. They love to support the students, teachers and everyone in learning. Email, Skype, instant messaging and sometimes texting, they are all the functions of sharing and exploring knowledge.
With authentic learning, students will get information from all types of sources and they need to be trained to evaluate the information. Students will also learn to get sources like where they can find them. They will have their experience with things like people in older days didn’t have and never used to have. They don’t need to wait for News, Magazines or something else, all they need to do is to up to date with social network and social media.
Hope you are aware of this awesome authentic learning experience by using global connections. Please share your experiences and techniques too. The comment box is waiting for you.
