A Guide to Creating Digital Landscapes of Learning

“To capture the students’ attention, generate two-way emotional communication that tells stories, and makes them live experiences.”

We live in an information age that evolves rapidly due to dizzying changes in digital media and its underlying technology. With the pandemic’s emergence, this constant evolution has led to profound social and educational transformations that challenge the current educational framework, highlighting the need to change the way new generations are educated.

How many PowerPoint presentations overcrowded with data and endless pages full of text have you encountered over the years? How many teachers have you seen reading their slides linearly in a flat tone? Do you think this is an ideal way to teach and motivate students? This formula worked for decades successfully, more or less. However, our students are now accustomed to bi-directional, emotional communication that tells stories and makes them live the experiences. Why is this so? Simple. It is our human nature.

“When our brain enjoys, it better assimilates the concepts, making the lessons more motivating and meaningful.”

Considering the learning cone proposed by Edgar Dale in 1946 (Saad et al. 2014), we can estimate that we only remember 10% of what we read or 20% of what we hear. However, we are capable of remembering 90% of what we do. Therefore, if we seek to make our lesson memorable and the learning meaningful, we must place our students at the center of learning, acquiring knowledge.

What are the Landscapes of Learning?

Landscapes of Learning are a pedagogical tool that allows educators to generate fully customized, immersive learning environments. We can share didactic content through activities adapted to our classroom’s reality and the aesthetics that best capture our students’ attention. These can be used as pedagogical tools to enhance learning by creating study environments that unleash students’ creativity and imagination.

Learning Landscapes are mainly based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Authentic Evaluation. We can also supplement them with methodologies such as Gamification, Inverted Classroom, Cooperative Learning, or Project-Based Learning.

Digital tools like Genially are crucial to creating Landscapes of Learning in an environment where students navigate a narrative world through endless stories. The places, characters, roles, spaces, and aesthetics develop a framework of reference and environment conducive to learning.

The principal characteristics of the Landscapes of Learning

Genially is a tool that allows class materials to come to life in a digital environment, thanks to this application’s interactivity, animation, and content integration.

• Interactive content. We can create a communicative experience that helps contextualize information. Its benefits include enhancing memorization, critical thinking, creativity, personalization of learning, participation, and motivation in the classroom.

• Animated content. This content focuses our student’s attention on essential concepts and discovering information. Besides increasing concentration and motivation, it is handy for hierarchizing content.

• Content integration. This platform allows integration of content from thousands of digital providers, for example, YouTube videos, virtual tours, or tools like Kahoot. It is beneficial for concentrating much of the content that we find on the Internet into the same space.

 When our brain is enjoying, it assimilates concepts better, making the lessons more motivating and meaningful. Designing Landscapes of Learning is quite an experience. It requires work, but creating the landscapes is fun and gratifying, knowing that we build an environment that combines playful elements with a relevant instructional design.

A Guide to designing digital landscapes

There is a consolidated guide to constructing the Landscapes of Learning. Below, I share ten critical points for designing. With this guide, students will know what is expected of them, complete the activities, and under what conditions.

Ten key points for designing Landscapes of Learning                                              

1. Title: what the activity is called.

2. Which Intelligence and Bloom’s category work?

3. What learning goals are pursued?

4. Challenge: what needs to be solved?

5. Result or final product to obtain.

6. Materials and documentation required for the activity.

7. Activity time.

8. What evaluation criteria to consider.

9. Which rubric or assessment tool will be used to assess the final result.

10. The relationship it has with other activities in the matrix.

Many of our students are digital natives. Using digital tools like Genially helps them move from being digital natives to being digitally trained. Creating Landscapes of Learning involves set-up work. However, once completed, the landscapes allow us to free ourselves from routine to develop more creative tasks, generating classroom time to guide and track our students in a more personalized way, with all the benefits they hold for their development and learning.

Free training for teachers

From my experience of creating resources with Genially, I recommend using its editor to create content that educates based on your students’ needs, whether the contents are Landscapes of Learning, teaching units, games, infographics, or video presentations. Anything you can imagine! Whatever the content, there is the opportunity to generate resources that employ concepts from transversal or multidisciplinary perspectives, facilitate critical thinking and information retention, and experience meaningful training that prepares students for real life.

We also have the opportunity to be part of the Genially Academy learning community and master the creation of communicative experiences. This is essential for people who are dedicated to teaching. They must continue to train in the use and management of digital tools to keep up with ICTs and improve digital teaching competencies.

Genially Academy offers courses and tips to apply them and teach them how to master Genially and realize their full potential. It trains educators to be specialists who participate in the generation of new content in interactive visual communication. I invite you to access a free course in Landscapes of Learning available on your schedule where you can continue to learn about this exciting and useful subject for the educational community. Once you have the notes and finish the challenge, you receive a certificate of completion.

About the author

Margarita González (marga@genial.ly) is a professor, biologist, scientific communicator, and designer, and is certified in Visual Thinking. She works as Head of Training at Genially, helping hundreds of companies, teachers, and universities worldwide communicate and train visually through interactivity. Dr. González conducts innovative training that mixes different scientific, technological, and artistic doctrines in her trainer-of-trainers sessions.

References

Saad, Nor & Jaffar, Ahmed & Abdullah, Nik & Hassan, Razali & Kasolang, Salmiah. (2014). CDIO Framework in Strengthening the Student-Centered Learning Approach. Accessed from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280546694_CDIO_Framework_in_Strengthening_the_Student_Centered_Learning_Approach

Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Observatory of Educational Innovation.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Margarita González del Hierro

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0