Descriptive analysis of PLEs: a case study in Compulsory Education
Abstract
There is nowadays a need to explain how we learn in formal, non-formal and informal contexts, in autonomous ways and supported by the available technological resources. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are a new theoretical construct about learning that has received the attention of both researchers and educators in the last few years and that tries to give an answer to this issue. Applied studies about PLEs are much less frequent than theoretical ones; the PLE research corpus needs to be complemented with a number of works that give some insight on practical examples of PLEs.
In this field we present this case study, designed following the quantitative approach of investigation and where we show the descriptive analysis of PLEs of students from 5th Grade in Elementary School up to 4th Grade in Secondary School, with the aim to provide the school Administrators with a comprehensive action plan to improve teaching strategies.
An ad hoc questionnaire was used and we collected data from 188 students. The main conclusions we have reached are the following: the sample analyzed claims to know and apply all the dimensions of their PLE equally, although this is done in a limited and superficial way; a key factor for the success of these kind of projects is the quantity of devices available, and not so much what type these are; age is not a problem for Elementary School students to work on their own PLEs; students feel more comfortable working traditionally rather than in more innovative ways; and last, the dimension related to sharing and communicating online for learning is the least developed one in these students’ PLEs.
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