e-Learning in the New Zealand Curriculum
Transform your teaching role through strategic and deliberate planning for the use of digital technologies.
Build your students' digital fluency by integrating the effective use of digital technologies into their everyday practices
Embed digital technologies into needs-driven planning and practice.
Reflect on the way your learners can develop higher order understanding of the curriculum through the effective use of digital technologies.
These pages provide NZ classroom examples of successful teaching and learning approaches to using digital technologies. Each page contains collated resources to support teaching.
Why use digital technologies to support learning?
Shifts and improvements in students’ learning occur when teachers use digital technologies to support:
- multiple learning pathways
- personalised learning
- self and peer assessment
Multiple pathways promote agency and cater for diversity
Providing students with multiple pathways caters for different student learning needs and preferences. Learning is reinforced by exploring the curriculum from different angles, using different approaches. Students have more choice and variety in the ways they engage with their learning. Having multiple learning pathways helps to foster motivation in students because their interests and strengths are used as a vehicle for exploring new concepts and reinforcing learning. Using digital devices to construct and share their learning, students are able to develop competencies in authentic contexts.
Learning is rewindable, personal, collaborative
By having easy access to a digital device students are able to interact with their learning, for example using video shows rather than tells students how to do something. Students can return as often as necessary to information anywhere, anytime if it is online. They can learn at their own pace and have a lot more control and agency over their own learning. Digital devices support student collaboration and reciprocity with peers, teachers, and beyond the classroom.
Digital technologies support assessment for learning
Because students can easily modify their work in a digital format, they are more open to seeking feedback and making improvements. This facilitates more interaction between teachers and students, and between peers in the assessment process. Because students can replay work, or view and change work immediately, they are more inclined to challenge themselves. Assessment is no longer the responsibility of the teacher but a shared responsibility, where learning and improving alongside others goes hand-in-hand.
Effective teachers use digital tools to:
- create new learning environments using technologies, allowing students to:
- explore and experiment
- think critically and work creatively
- reflect and plan
- use feedback and self-assessment
- create new knowledge
- make teaching and learning more effective and efficient by using customised tools that aid preparation, programming assessment, and reporting
- customise learning experiences to recognise individual, cultural, and developmental differences
- enhance communication and collaboration to build partnerships beyond the classroom, expanding the community of learners and enhancing the quality of learning
- create new education communities by increasing the modes of teaching and learning, and the range of people who can be involved.
Teachers and students at Finlayson Park school share how using technologies is benefiting student learning in the classroom by providing more flexibility for learning.
Identify how technologies can be integrated into curriculum areas
Use the discussion starters in conjunction with the e-Learning Planning Framework to identify how technologies can be integrated into curriculum areas for students and teachers at your school.
For principals and school leaders
- How can you support staff to understand how technology can enhance learning across the learning areas?
- How can technology enhance rich, higher-order thinking in the learning areas?
- Who are the school’s e-learning leaders who can help staff plan rich, authentic, and relevant e-learning experiences that align with the school’s curriculum and e-learning plan?
- What kinds of technologies and resources are available school-wide to support specific learning areas?
For teachers
- What do you already know about the kinds of activities that can help students engage in higher-level thinking in specific learning areas?
- How do you make appropriate decisions about how digital technologies are used as part of your planning, teaching, and assessment?
Practical steps for integrating technologies into learning and teaching
Use these practical steps in conjunction with the e-Learning Planning Framework to integrate technologies across the curriculum.
For principals and school leaders
- Support staff, through a range of professional learning activities, to understand how to use technologies to foster deep learning.
- Check that classroom practice across the school is aligned with the vision for e-learning and strategic direction.
- Encourage staff to regularly share innovative e-learning practices to support learning within and beyond school.
- Through cycles of reflection and review, collect and analyse data to show impact on the attitude and achievement of all learners, particularly Māori and Pasifika students.
For teachers
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Based on students’ strengths and needs, co-construct the learning intentions and activities, then select appropriate technologies that will enhance or enable the learning.
- Plan for learning experiences that use technologies to promote problem solving, communication, collaboration, and higher order thinking.
- Make sure all students have access to good quality e-learning experiences that best suit their learning needs.
- Provide e-learning opportunities where students can:
- collaborate
- personalise, interact with, present, and create their own content
- deliberately build understandings about how to use technology appropriately and meaningfully, for example information literacy
- reflect on their learning
- understand how to be a responsible digital citizen, including making responsible decisions about how to share their work, who with, and acknowledging the source of images and others work.
Nigel Mitchell, HOD English at Tawa College, and students in his class talk about the benefits of using Prezi to collaborate and take control of their own learning. Using the Internet and solo taxonomy, students are involved in thinking about and selecting the information they want. Using this tool has allowed him to guide what students are doing rather than be the expert. Nigel reflects, "Students found much more information and it’s a lot more efficient and engaging for them as well because they own that stuff."
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