Student voices

My presentation at the 2014 BETT Show is a little different from my normal presentations. It features several significant contributions from my students on video and also live on stage. I can only say so much myself about what goes on in the learning environments I work within. After a while, because it comes from me, it tends to sound like hyperbole, and I'm sure some of my audience leave with a 'so what?' response. I wanted to add another dimension at BETT this year. What better way then to emphasise the amazing things I witness every day while I'm teaching, than to get the students to say it themselves?

So, in preparation for my BETT Show talk, I asked some of my second year education students to take part by helping me to make a video. The short excerpt embedded in this blog post features three - Alex Druce, Tyla Elworthy and Aaron Fisher - who articulate far better than I ever could exactly why they bring their own technology into the classroom, and how they use it to enhance and enrich their learning experiences. They talk about student autonomy, and the need to collaborate and to be able to question their teachers. They also emphasise the importance of interaction during lessons, with each other, with their tutors and also with additional content. Alex, Tyla and Aaron highlight the need to extend their experiences beyond the wall of the classroom, connecting and creating, as they make sense of the content and its context within their professional practice. More videos of my students talking about how they have helped to change learning at university will follow in future blog posts.


Photo by Pedro Ribiero Simoes on Wikimedia Commons


Student voices by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.