Tree of learning
Video transcript
Voiceover:
Tutors talk about the different uses of the tree of learning and how it has helped them.
Tutor:
The tree of learning has helped me to make my tutoring more relevant and the fact that I found out that what the hobbies and interests were of my learners. I found out for example that two of the learners wanted to write a cookery book, another one had got children at school and she wanted to help her children with homework. We've got a few people who wanted to use the internet, etcetera etcetera like that. The ESOL students were actually doing literature, English literature, as part of their ESOL course and they bought poetry, they word processed some poetry, and actually they took it back to their ESOL group and they showed them 'Look we did this on our word processing' — so that was nice interaction with other things that they're doing.
I use the tree of learning with the desktop publishing course to establish objectives and to help learners identify why they would use desktop publishing in their own lives. Some of them were not too sure about everything that desktop publishing could help them achieve so it was very useful using the tree of learning to give them ideas as well as to stimulate their own understanding of how they could use desktop publishing in their own lives.
The preparation that I had to do to use the tree of learning with this particular desktop publishing course was that I used a picture, a drawing of a tree and put that onto a screen and put text boxes on it with a few ideas of what I would like to cover but I didn't put all my ideas of what I would use the tree for. I used different ideas for the text boxes for the tree, things like making posters, making newsletters, other things like that but I didn't put too many because I wanted the learners to also think of others.
Emma, Community ICT manager and tutor at South Nottingham College, talks about how she used the Tree of learning to explore the hopes, fears and expectations of her new group and how she used it later on to review their learning.
Aisha, a community ICT tutor at Bolton Community College, explains how she used a different variant on her desktop publishing course, including how it was used for individual learning plans.