Constructivist teaching and learning with technologies in the COVID-19 lockdown in Eastern India.

This paper reports a study on teaching and learning strategies during the COVID-19 lockdown period (CLP) that were used by the secondary government school teachers and students in Eastern India. These teaching and learning strategies were analysed in relation to their engagement with an initiative called Integrated approach to Technology in Education (ITE). ITE engagement in the pre-CLP involved using project-based learning (PBL) with technology and continuous, practise-based professional development for teachers focusing on integrating constructivist use of technology in their curriculum and pedagogy. A survey and interviews of teachers revealed that teachers with higher ITE engagement in the pre-CLP were more likely to use PBL with technology during the CLP. Students' interviews indicated that this PBL involved deep research and technical skills that were also practised during the CLP using distance technologies. Thus, the study demonstrated adaptation of ITE innovation into a distance mode; the introduction of WebQuests during the CLP improved the likelihood of teachers engaging in project-based teaching and PBL during the CLP. Policymakers, practitioners and researchers are recommended to adopt and continue to study the sustainability of ITE approach in new contexts such as the CLP.

New alignments for the digital age: insights into connected learning.

In an age of ready access to people, online spaces and information, canonized formal knowledge acquisition is being disrupted. The emergence of socially constructed knowledge based on connected learning is democratising education and re-framing how formal and informal learning is considered. What we currently understand connected learning to be is limited to a combination of individual interests, networked and interdependent relationships with interconnected experiences that transcend temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. Connected learning does not reduce learning to a phenomenon that takes place exclusively in the restricted spaces of formal education, neither does it focus exclusively on the online learning phenomenon. As such our conceptualisation of connected learning needs to deepen to effectively be able to rationalise how people learn in a digital age. This paper begins to unlock concepts and ideas associated with connected learning using current examples, setting out to build a theoretical model which begins to frame the complexities of conceptualized self-driven global learning interactions.