How to Get a Good Job and Improve Your Career – With a PLE - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 100

3 The Rationale and the Description of the Experience

The question raised by Jonassen, quoted in section 2, provides the rationale for
this experience. The goal is to let students experience with PLE creation and use,
in order to become aware of educational resource quality. This will foster the
skills needed in their future as lifelong learners.
The experience involved a class at the 4th year of a Liceo Scientifico, consist-
ing of 22 teenage students. The topic for the experience was Mathematics, and
more in details, Plane Trigonometry. The choice of Mathematics was motivated
by the difficulties that students usually face in such a topic, so that they would be
encouraged to overcome individual difficulties by a personalized study path. Ma-
thematical skills are indispensable in most careers, as OECD-PISA[10] states that
“... citizens routinely face situations in which the use of quantitative or spatial rea-
soning, or other cognitive mathematical competencies would help clarify, formu-
late or solve a problem. ...”.
The experience needed a preparation phase, which took place during the first
semester, and developed during the second semester (February to mid June 2012).
In the preparation phase, Mathematics was taught as traditionally, with lectures
and paper-and-pencil exercises. At the same time, students were also trained
about: what is a PLE and which are its purposes; how to perform an effective
team-working, and how to face Mathematics with an heuristic approach, as de-
scribed by Polya[12]. During the second semester, students abandoned the tradi-
tional way of learning Maths, and undertook the following steps:
1. Each Student built a personal website using GoogleSites (i.e. an own PLE).
2. As homework, students were requested to analyze certain Maths topics, on their
own, searching for "sound" web resources.
3. After a few days, students had to share their findings in class, discussing with
peers and tutor about the quality and trust of their findings, adopting the heuris-
tic approach
4. Elements considered of good quality, after the discussion, were stored in each
student's PLE, in order to build a basic mathematical portfolio.
5. Students' PLEs were completed by each student with additional information,
and then, the process restarted on a new topic.
These steps describe a process that builds simultaneously the contents of the PLE
and students' skills of critical analysis of information retrieved, with the support of
the tutor. The methodological approach for the development of each PLE could be
referred to a participatory design approach, because each student (that will be the
final user of the PLE) could act for modifying their PLE structure accordingly
with their needs.
The acquisition of new knowledge, both in a traditional classroom activity, and
via the above approach, is finally assessed in the traditional way, that is, with
periodical class tests made during the 1 st and 2 nd semester.