«Video-based learning to teach job related skills to students with cognitive disabilities»
Estefanía MartínUniversidad Rey Juan Carlos
Abstract
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide different opportunities to students with cognitive disabilities and to those professionals who work with them. In recent years, lots of research has been done about the potential benefits and applications of using technology, both software and hardware, in the classrooms. In this sense, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones has been proved suitable in learning environments due to their portability, accessibility and touch-interaction which helps the students to express themselves through direct interaction. This talk presents a learning experience where active methodologies such as collaborative work are combined with the use of technologies, specifically, a learning management system oriented to support video-based learning. The videos are created by the own students and discussed by all the classmates. Students are working on topics related to job skills using iPads. There were 15 participants with cognitive disabilities involved in this learning experience. They were enrolled in the first course of a job training program. The results obtained from this learning experience shows that the combination of active learning methodologies with the use of learning management systems and tablets is beneficial for students with cognitive disabilities, improving both the motivation of the students and their learning process.
Bio
Estefanía Martín is an associate professor of technology-enhanced learning at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) LITE lab. Currently, she is Vice Principal of Promotion and Research (Subdirectora de Promoción e Investigación) of the URJC School of Computer Science (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenería Informática – ETSII). Her research interests include Computer Support Collaborative Learning (CSCL), e-learning, blended learning, video-based learning, recommender systems and authoring tools. She leads DEDOS project (http://aprendecondedos.es), which provides authoring tools for creating educational activities on multiple devices, and ClipIt (http://clipit.es), a video-based social network platform that has been developed in the context of the European Union project Juxtalearn.
