Designing for culturally contextualized learning activity planning: Matching learning theories and practice

Abstract

Helping teachers in their activities has been an issue more and more explored in Computer Science. However, in order to support teachers effectively, it is necessary to understand their needs and to design tools that they can easily manage. One of those needs is undoubtedly to put in practice pedagogical principles. This paper presents the design of PACO-T, a tool for helping teachers in planning learning activities (LAs) supported by common sense knowledge, based on PACO, a seven-step textual framework for planning pedagogically suitable LAs. The design was based on the results of a case study carried out to investigate how teachers can plan LAs following PACO steps, using common sense knowledge from a common sense knowledge base collaboratively built through the web. Moreover, the interface design was ruled by a Web Design Pattern Language, attempting to improve the usability of the tool. PACO-T aims to help teachers to put in practice the recommendation for contextualizing LAs to the target group, found in several learning theories. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.