Blog+response+3

====Mira's blog about the teacher as instructional designer popped into my feed exactly as I was writing about a future in which teachers are designers and facilitators, and in which much of the grunt work of lesson planning is covered by technologies such as LAMS. I think teachers are going to need some scaffolding here. This is the first course we've done at uni that looks at pedagogy in a general but practical way. We've either looked at the (rather tired, and false IMO) dichotomy of teacher-centred vs student centred approaches, and we've looked at very specific approaches such as "group work", but LAMS and other technologies offer us a library of pedagogical approaches at the scale of lesson through to unit (and maybe even syllabus). This gives us a baseline from which to work, rather than starting from scratch. A scaffold to see how it's done, and then launch out on our to fit the templates to our own and our students' needs.====

====We were chatting as a group about some ideal future in which the syllabus comes not as a pdf document, but as a LAMS template. The very new teacher (or casual teacher, or, sadly, the rather ordinary teacher) then has something to hit the ground running with. I think this would considerably improve the bottom end of the teaching spectrum, and allow teachers more time to create truly amazing learning experiences, instead of spending lots of time and energy getting the base resources together and photocopied and so on.====

====And back in the real world, we can't switch our whole programme in one step, but each time we are thinking about a learning outcome, we can and should be thinking "is this one where technology gives whole new design options?" and slowly build up our catalogue, and expand our horizons.====