Learning Library - Creation

The Learning Library is about Creation as much as it is about completing challenges. While there exists a range of challenges that cover many different subjects and topics, chances are that educators and students have something to share and contribute to the Learning Library. Although we welcome educators and students to create all types of challenges, our field research has shown that certain elements seem to work well in the Learning Library. Learning Library - Creation is based on the experience of Vinitha Nair, an educator and co-founder of Zoey's Room, an educational initiative aimed at developing confidence and competence in STEM among Middle School girls


Although there is a variety of challenges in the Learning Library, and these challenges represent many different combination of media types and learning experiences, one core framework that guides the New Media Literacies approach to creating a challenge is a four-part model: Concept - Concept in Context - Your Turn - What about you?. This model has been tested with both students engaging in challenges created with this framework, as well as educators and students creating challenges using this framework. When we demonstrated to Vinitha this particular approach, she was ready to try it out with a new lesson on "Getting Fizzy with It."

The four-part can be summarized in the following table:

Concept	Introduce and define the core concept, skill, or idea
Concept in Context	Demonstrate the core concept, skill, or idea at play in the world
Your Turn	Provide an opportunity for learners to explore and practice working with the core concept. This may involve referring them to another website, working in group projects, or participating in sharing of ideas and discussions.
What about you?	A prompt for students to reflect is important in helping students bridge what they learn from different parts of the challenge. Reflection also encourages students to find personal relevance from what they just completed in the challenge.

To begin thinking and organizing her ideas around this four-part model, Vinitha began by searching for media elements from the web related to her learning objective: to illustrate the chemical reaction when salt interacts with carbon dioxide. By uploading and link what she found on the web to the Learning Library and then creating a collection of these various elements, she could then utilize these elements to create a learning challenge.

However, a challenge is not just a series of elements. It is crucial to think about how to organize and link these elements together in order to develop a cohesive lesson grounded in real life example.

To do so, Vinitha in collaboration with Erin Reilly from Project New Media Literacies developed a set of challenge templates to assist in the planning process. Much like a lesson plan template, these templates are useful for organizing different pieces of materials together. These templates are available here. As an example of how this could used to facilitate planning of a Learning Library challenge, please review Vinitha's completed storyboard of her challenge, "Getting Fizzy With It," which you can find in the Learning Library Application.



Learning Library users are encouraged to give the storyboard templates a try. After creating a few challenges, some with success and some needed a lot of revisions, Vinitha has the following tips to share:

• Use a combination of different media typess to catch different students' attention
• Real life examples are important, but so are clear descriptions to relate examples to learning objectives
• Remind students the learning objectives every few pages in a challenge to keep them on track
• Elicit reflection and discussion using clear prompts in the Your Turn

We encourage you to try creating a challenge on your own. You can begin by basing a challenge on a lesson or activity that you are familiar with, you may decide to choose a new topic and do some research to find relevant media elements on the web. Use the video tutorial, How to Build a Challenge to help you begin putting together a challenge in the Learning Library. Share with us below your challenge building experience.