Lesson 11: The Computer as a Teacher’s Tool

Constructivist and Social Constructivist

Constructivist: Introduced by Piaget and Bruner. They gave stress to knowledge discovery of new meaning/concepts/principles in the learning process.

Social Constructivist: An effort to show that the construction of knowledge is governed by social, historical and cultural contexts. Lev Vygotsky stressed that learning is affected by social influences. For John Dewey human learning is interacting with one another.

Framework:

1.   Knowledge is constructed by the individual while in social constructivist; knowledge is constructed within a social context.

2.   Students build their own learning while in social constructivist; they build knowledge influenced by the social context

3.   They gather unorganized information to create new concept/principle while in social constructivist they share and exchange ideas, form to stimulate thinking.

4.   They discover knowledge individually while in social constructivist they discuss and discover things socially.

The teacher can employ the computer as:

·         Information tool- provides vast amounts of information in various forms

·         Communication tool- talks to students in online world

·         Constructive tool- used for manipulating information, visualizing one’s understanding and building new knowledge

·         Co- constructive tool- students can work cooperatively and construct a shared understanding of new knowledge.

·         Situating tool- by means of virtual reality extension systems, the computer can create 3-D images or display to give user the feeling that are situated in a real environment.