The document discusses meaningful learning and how technology can facilitate it. Meaningful learning involves active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative activities. Technologies can support meaningful learning by engaging learners in knowledge construction, providing information for exploration, creating authentic contexts, enabling social interaction and conversation, and acting as intellectual partners that help learners reflect. When used appropriately, technologies can foster different types of thinking like causal reasoning, analogical thinking, expressive thinking, experiential learning, and problem solving.

1. “ WHAT IS MEANINGFUL LEARNING” By: G-one T. Paisones

2. Glossary of Terms and Words K-12 Education = is a designation for the sum of primary and secondary education. It is used in the United States, Canada, and some parts of Australia ( http://cooranbong.heritage.edu.au/our_school ). Symbiotic = commonly describes close and often long-term interactions between different biological species. Analogy= is a cognitive process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process.

3. Characteristics of Meaningful Learning

4. In order for meaningful learning to occur, the task that students pursue should engage in are the following: Active activities Constructive activities Intentional activities Authentic activities Cooperative activities

5. Students must learn how to: recognize and solve problems comprehend new phenomena construct mental models of those phenomena given a new situation set learning goals regulate their own learning

6. Active (Manipulative/Observant) -Learning is a natural, adaptive human process. -Through formal and informal apprenticeships in communities of play and work , learners develop skills and knowledge. -Learners share with other members of the communities with whom they learned and practiced manipulative skills. -learners are actively manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and observing the effects of what they have done. -Meaningful learning requires learners who are active-actively engaged by a meaningful task in which they manipulate objects and parameters of the environment they are working in and observing the results of their manipulations.

7. Constructive (Articulative/Reflective) learners articulate what they have accomplished and reflect on their activity and observations-to learn the lessons that their activity has to teach. By reflecting on the puzzling experience, learners integrate their new experiences with their prior knowledge about the world. establish goals for what they need to learn in order to make sense out of what they observe. The active and constructive parts of the meaning making process are symbiotic.

8. Intentional (Goal-Directed/Regulatory) Everything that we do is intended to fulfill some goal. The learners think and learn more when learners are actively and willfully trying to achieve a cognitive goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). Technologies need to engage learners in articulating and representing their understanding. When learners use technologies 'to represent their actions and construction, they understand more and are better able to use the knowledge that they have constructed in new situations.

9. Authentic (Complex/Contextual) The teachers and professors remove the general principles or theories that may be used to explain phenomena from their natural contexts in order to be able to cover the curriculum more efficiently. Teachers read a simplified problem and immediately represent the problem in a formula. Most contemporary research on learning has shown that learning tasks that are situated in some meaningful real-world task or simulated in some case-based or problem-based learning environment are. not only better understood and remembered but also more consistently transferred to new situations. Learning should be embedded ill. real-life, useful contexts for learners to practice using those ideas.

10. Cooperative (Collaborative/Conversational) Humans naturally work together in learning and knowledge-building communities, exploiting each others‘ skills and appropriating each others' knowledge. Humans naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks. Schools generally function based on the belief that learning is an independent process, so learners seldom have the opportunity to "do anything that counts" in collaborative teams despite their natural inclinations. relying solely on independent methods of instruction cheats learners out of more natural and productive modes of thinking. Educators will promote collaborative methods of learning, only to resort to independent assessment of learning. Learners must be accountable for their own knowledge, at least in principle of collaborative learning. Collaboration most often requires conversation among participants. Technologies can support this conversational process by connecting learners in the same classroom, across town, or around the world. Conversation should be encouraged because it is the most natural way of meaning making.

11. How Does Technology Facilitate Learning? Through the technical programmed instruction education. Through the use of information from the internet. Through teacher’s presentation of the information. Deliver drill and practice and simple tutorials for teaching students lessons. Applying the word processing, databases, spreadsheets, graphics programs, and desktop publishing was enabling businesses and learning to become more productive. Through the use of inexpensive multimedia computers. Sharing of information in the internet. Provide rich and flexible media for representing what students know and ,what they are learning.

12. Learning With Technology We use technologies in schools to foster meaningful learning outcome. Technologies can support productive thinking and meaning making by students. Technology consists also of the designs and the environments that engage learners. Technology consist of any reliable technique or method for engaging learning, such as: cognitive learning strategies critical thinking skills. Learning technologies can be any environment or definable set of activities that engage learners in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative learning. Technologies are not conveyors or communicators of meaning. Technologies support meaningful learning. when they fulfill a learning need – when interactions with technologies are learner initiated and learner controlled and when interactions with the technologies are conceptually and intellectually engaging.

13. Technologies should function as intellectual tool kits that enable learners to build more meaningful personal interpretations and representations of the world. Learners and technologies should be intellectual partners, where the cognitive responsibility for performance is distributed by the part of the partnership that performs it better. Learning With Technology

14. Technologies Foster Learning • Technology as tools to support knowledge construction: for representing learners' ideas, understandings, and beliefs for producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by learners Technology as information vehicle for exploring knowledge to support learning by constructing: for accessing needed information for comparing perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews Technology as authentic context to support learning by doing: for representing and simulating meaningful real-world problems, situations, and contexts for representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments, and stories of others for defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking

15. Technologies Foster Learning Technology as social medium to support learning by conversing: for collaborating with others for discussing, arguing, and, building consensus among members of a community for supporting discourse among knowledge-building communities Technology as intellectual partner (Jonassen, 2000) to support learning by reflecting: for helping learners to articulate and represent what they know for reflecting on what they have learned and how they came to know it for supporting learners' internal negotiations and meaning making for constructing personal representations of meaning for supporting mindful thinking

16. “ Kinds of thinking fostered when learning with technologies” Causal reasoning is one of the most basic and important cognitive processes that underpin all higher-order activities, such as problem solving. Analogical thinking- understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. Expressive thinking- Using technologies as tools to learn with entails learners representing what they know, that is, teaching the computer. Experiential- result in the most meaningful and resistant memories. Problem Solving- using technologies to express and convey learner knowledge all entail different kinds of problems solving.

17. Conclusion: P roductive and Meaningful uses of Technology Knowledge construction, not reproduction Conversation, not reception Articulation, not repetition Collaboration, not competition Reflection, not prescription