1. Introduction and study counselling:


  • The whole purpose of this course is to gain a general overview of the faculty of education and the types of research being done and who is doing that research,

  • It is important for us to understand all of the different types of educational research going on at the university because we never know where our inspiration could come from. It is also very important that we are exposed to different ways of approaching the field of educational studies.

These lectures will help me to gain the knowledge and understanding I need so that I may have the deepest understanding of the tools and resources at my disposal through the university. The reason that I chose the Learning, Education and Technology masters program is because I found the research that they are doing to be the most fascinating. Specifically Dindar, M., Ren, Lei., & Järvenoja, H. (2020). An experimental study on the effects of gamified cooperation and competition on English vocabulary learning. British Journal of Educational. This piece was relevant to me at the time of my application because I had just returned from Shanghai after having taught English there for about 20 months, terminated only because of the pandemic. I had seen the ineffective use of games/ video games to teach English as a second language in the classroom with almost no regards to leveling or how effective these games were. I found that tactile based strategies were more effective in teaching the students vocabulary. The videogames and digital representations of vocabulary however, were far more effective in capturing and maintaining the children's attention. Capturing the attention of youngsters has value in itself, however it is my feeling that capturing attention is not the most effective way to teach foreing language. 

I look forward to helping to blend these “old school” and  “new school” technologies as well as being exposed to technologies that I don’t even know exist yet. More importantly I hope to be able to collaborate with my peers in a meaningful way so that we may conceive of and develop some of these “unknown-unknown” technologies ourselves with the aid of our teachers and the resources of the university.

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