Interactivity In The Classroom Essay

An attempt, therefore, to understand how teachers can incorporate the concept of interactivity within the classroom, should begin with demystifying the concept itself. Miller (2014) also says it is a two-part word made up of a prefix inter and a second part active – indicating an “active relationship between two entities” where both entities are responsive to each other. Further, England, E. and Finney, A. (2011) says the challenge of defining what is Interactive content” stems from how the “sector has quickly evolved through Phases.” The word has often been coined to reflect a phase that quickly gets obsolete when new contents are created. With the benefit of hindsight, they made reference to the word “Multimedia” that relates to the …show more content…
Technology gets its ‘life’ from how it affects the life of its users. I, therefore, proffer in the context of this question, that interactive contents within the classrooms on their own are meaningless, until there is, first, interaction among those who will use those contents. Therefore, to investigate how Interactivity works in modern classrooms, we should examine the concept of Learning By Design, which Rodney, Basiyr D. (2016) calls “The articulate or deliberate fabrication or creation of formal learning experiences and or learning products.” The teacher spearheads interaction in the classroom experience, and becomes a designer. The classrooms become “shareable designs for learning”. The learners in the classroom are like a community, culturally diverse and at different levels of cognitive abilities and beliefs, interests, motivations, and worldviews that are equally …show more content…
This is the first level of interactivity. For instance, knowing their names and learning how their cultures say those names will likely awaken interest in the students. Stories should reflect for each student, a symbol they already know, and where one is not available, a symbol that is as close as possible, should be created. Thus, to describe “snow” for an African, hail stones, or ice crushed and made slushy would be closest symbol to which they might relate. This is because the classroom of the 21st century (Mills, K., 2011 p. 5) is one that is “characterized by significant cultural and linguistic diversity in schools and societies creating the need for inclusive pedagogies.” Therefore, teaching styles must adapt to the changing climate, since “assimilating immigrants and indigenous peoples to the standardized ‘proper’ language of the colonizer…now seems glaringly inadequate.” The challenges of negotiating cultural and linguistic difference among students could, sometimes require adapting to tools that might help communicate the first levels of the teaching experience, for instance, using an interpreter of the learner’s language until he/she becomes fully engaged in a learning