#EduGoalsMooc: The Goal Minded Teacher: Challenges to Transform Student Learning. WEEK 3 CHALLENGE #1:

#EduGoalsMooc: The Goal Minded Teacher: Challenges to Transform Student Learning. WEEK 3 CHALLENGE #1: Create a mindmap of one of the digital learning theories.

The first task we have been asked this week at #EduGoalsMooc has been to create a mindmap of one of the Several Learning theories I have been able to know during the first days of this week. I have to admit I knew nothing about Digital Learning Theories, but I had the feeling that although  I was trying to do my best to catch up with technology and use it coherently and consistently in classroom  with my students, there was something wrong in the way I was doing it. On the other hand, I had never made a mindmap before: It was nor common in the 70s when I was at school and have never considered them necessary to teach ESL.
We teachers have to link balance our students' likes and needs with the curricula of subjects, issued by administrations in terms of goals, criteria, contents and standards and with the rank of law, which must be obeyed. Among the first group we find some skills our students need to meet in order to live in a connected and digital world. Some of these skills include:

1. digital safety and citizenship,
2. literacy,
3. research skills, 
4. creativity with digital tools and programs, 
5. visual rhetoric, collaboration,
6. design, coding, project management, and problem solving.

Digital learning theories and approaches allow us  to adapt our curricula within a framework to make sure our students gain these skills. They propose  stages or degrees of digital technology use and learning and give us project ideas, lesson plans and activity examples. They also provide us with guidelines and criteria for deciding on which websites, apps, and web resources provide our students with the best ways to use technology. 

Among these Digital Learning Theories, we have been able to read about:

• Bloom's Taxonomy for the Digital Age,
• Connectivism in a couple of articles,  
• SAMR & TPCK,
• R.A.T. & THE RAT MODEL,
• Design Thinking, and
• Peeragogy.

After reading all those articles and some others in embedded links in them, I found that some of them exposed very interesting frameworks about knowledge creation or different taxonomies of activities and resources. However, I chose the R.A.T. MODEL for my mindmap because it seemed more connected with my teaching practice and also because the concept below it lets me set a S.M.A.R.T. goal, and that's why we're here: Moving from  REPLACEMENT level of technology integration to the TRANSFORMATION one implies a good deal of methodogical and a significant and valuable challenge for me to achieve.

Apart form the pages suggested in the #EduGoalsMooc blog and cited above(see R.A.T. & THE RAT MODEL), I also found useful reading the original paper by the authors of the theory: Assessing Technology Integration: The RAT Model (=Replacement, Amplification and Transformation) (by Dr. Joan Hughes, Dr. Ruth Thomas and Cassie Scharber). 

In addition, I also found useful reading  entries in a couple of blogs:

The RAT Model in Instructional Design by Kelly 

1.-  The RAT Model in Instructional Design By Kelly 21st Century Learning Examples, Ideas, and Discussion, where she states that RAT is a Digital Learning Framework that allows us to evaluate and determine the usefulness of our current lesson plans as they relate to the ISTE standards and can help to motivate us to improve them so that learning is relevant, fun, and exciting for our students! She defines the three steps of the model by asking herself questions as a teacher and trying to answer them. Thus,

• REPLACEMENT: Are your lessons just taking some form of technology and replacing it for the paper and pencil or chalk and chalkboard?  Are you just using the computer or iPad as a book?  If so, you are stuck in replacement!  She suggests checking Cool Tools for School to find apps to include in our lesson plans.
• AMPLIFICATION: We are proud of ourselves for going beyond the basic word processing and have used Google Slides, PowerPoint, Prezi, (...).  We might even use an app (...) to remind our students of tests (...) or of anything else that may be pertinent to our classroom.  (...)  We should be proud of ourselves for amplifying our lesson plans and using technology to improve the efficiency and educational quality of student learning…but we have not yet completed our transformation for 21st century learners.
• TRANSFORMATION: It is here where we take our lessons and create something we never would have thought possible before technology. (...)  They can create movies, cartoons, and interactive images that will help show how well they understand the concept you are teaching while simultaneously learning to use technology for more than just social media and gaming.

2.- Then I came across Sean McHughs' blog where I found an interesting point of view about the phases of the RAT Model. He adds some adjectives to each of the steps, enabling a kind of visual understanding of where you are and where you want to be:

• R: replacement - redundant - retrograde
• A: augmented - average - acceptable
• T: transformed - terrific - tremendous

Besides those funny adjectives, McHugh takes then the role of technology into consideration, regarding it a tool to transform the instructional method, the students' learning processes, and/or the actual subject matter in such a way that 

1 The actual mental work is changed or expanded 
2 The number of variables involved in the mental processes are expanded
3 The tool changes the organisation in which it had been used 
4 New players become involved with the tool's use (or expanded use of the tool). 
5 New opportunities for different forms and types of learning through problem solving, unavailable in traditional approaches, are developed.


Furthermore, he remarks that  [transformative use of ICTs] improves the process of bringing thought into communicable expressions in such significant ways that, once the tool is understood and used regularly, the user feels wanting if it is not available because it has opened up new possibilities of thought and action without which one comes to feel at a disadvantage. 

After this research, creating, transformative work to create a mindmap, I have got a much more clear idea about the Digital learning theoretical frameworks and, more important, about what I can do to make my classes technologically transformed.

Finally, I include a video  which also explains this Digital Learning Theory:

The RAT Framework from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.