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Deciding how to teach something involves having to choose an appropriate blend of resources,
tools and activities to meet learners’ needs and abilities, to enable them to reach the
desired learning outcomes. Of course , both planning and teaching have to be done within
limitations imposed by the available resources such as time and money.
Making a good choice out of the possible combinations is difficult, so sometimes it’s useful to
take a view of the choices available which allows you to see the interrelationships between
all the potential components, and the people that will be making use of them. This is particularly
true if you are moving away from a familiar situation, for example to new topic, to a
new level, or maybe experimenting with some new technology.
One way of doing this is to sketch out how you see things fitting together. Such sketches
can help to identify problems or new ways of doing things. However, if you want to change
something in a sketch, it means losing some or all of what you’ve done. An alternative
is to use the same set of printed pictures to represent things that commonly occur in
learning activities, for example tasks, people, tools and learning outcomes. You can take
a picture to record your ideas.
Moving on from this idea, you can use mapping software such as CMap or CompendiumLD to map
out the relationships. The advantage of using computer based tools is that the representations
can be shared and edit by colleagues. In CompendiumLD you can link to real tools and resources in
your map and save the map as a prototype learning activity.
Even if you do not share it, we have found that there is value in mapping out your learning
design because the process of mapping it can help uncover potential problems and opportunities
that may otherwise have remained hidden.