Do you want to engage your students in a sequence of personalised, coherent, meaningful and connected learning experiences that are scaffolded across their entire program (or course) experience?

Did you reply yes? Great! PebblePad provides a suite of tools that allows you to design very powerful scaffolded learning activities for your students

How can PebblePad support Scaffolded Learning Experiences?

PebblePad offers a number of exciting benefits for both student and teaching teams, as well as contributing to institutional goals.

Benefits for students include the ability to...

• Have a structured framework for learning.
• Engage with their learning within a clear, organised and scaffolded framework.
• Take ownership of their learning by having a platform and suite of tools to create, control and curate an organised evidence-base of their work.
• Make connections between learning goals, learning activities and competencies for professional accreditation.
• Provides a mechanism to demonstrate standards and professional competencies acquired across a program of learning to employers and industry.

Benefits for the teaching team include the ability to...

• Build a structured program of learning, which is readily understood and is meaningful to the learner.
• Offer students a framework for their learning, which can lead to increases in student engagement and satisfaction.
• Provide students with a documented process and creative platform allowing them to demonstrate standards or competencies across a program of learning (Sibson, n.d.).
• Offer scaffolded activities, e.g., a weekly laboratory workbook, which showcase students’ work over a period of time.
• Document and evidence student achievement in program outcomes.

Benefits for the institution...

• By embedding scaffolded learning experiences in our teaching practice, our students will be well grounded in 21st century critical thinking and problem solving preparing them to compete globally in their chosen field (“Our Students”, 2018).
• Provides physical documentation and evidence of student achievement in program outcomes related to professional competencies, work integrated learning and employability.

Examples of PebblePad in Action Scaffolded Learning Experiences

The following are real-life Griffith examples of academics using PebblePad to enhance the Scaffolded Learning Experiences for students.

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  Lecturer, Nutrition and Dietetics - Dr Lana Mitchell

  Scaffolded workbook for student tutorial activities

  Click here to learn more.

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  Lecturer, Dpt Employment Relations & HR - Dr Susan Ressia

  An early adopter of PebblePad to allow her students to develop their reflective skills in a scaffolded workbook.

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  Program Director, Fine Arts, QCA - Dr Bill Platz

  Using eportfolios for students to document their work, reflections and in-class observations throughout their program

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  Dpt Tourism, Sports and Hotel Management, GBS - Dr Elaine Yang

  Dr Young uses a scaffolded PebblePad workbook and templates to support Group Work assessment.

Related Readings

• Greaves, L., Bradley, C., & Holley, D. (2015). Learning journeys: Exploring approaches to learner digital literacy acquisition, Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 4:2, 1-17, doi: https://doi.org/10.11120/elss.2012.04020003
• Our students: Providing an engaging and personalised learner’s journey. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.murdoch.edu.au/Learning-and-Teaching/Learning-and-teaching-strategy/Our-students/
• Sibson, R. (n.d.). Scaffolding the learning journey: Designing eportfolio assessment items across a program. Retrieved from https://www.newcastle.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/249780/Workshop-Eportfolio-Sibson.pdf
• Taylor, J. (2013). Learning journeys: The road from informal to formal learning. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2013 (2). doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/2013-08

Consider

• Undertaking a program mapping exercise which will help identify the components that will form the scaffolding framework.
• Organising information within workbooks so that students can carry the workbooks and their learning across courses within their program.
• Reducing the scaffolds as students become more proficient.

Learning More...

• By reviewing Faculty Sparks from your peers relating their use of PebblePad
• By attending PebblePad workshops

Programmatic Approaches...

Consider collaborating with the Program Director and other Course Convenors to implement a Program-wide approach to the use of PebblePad. While this is not necessary, PebblePad allows students to access the content and activities over the length of their program.

Conducting Research...

Consider conducting research related to your use of PebblePad for publication in discipline specific journals or those with a higher education focus.