LAMS 2.3 has a lot of new features in its latest release.  One of these is the Activity Planner:  an alternative way to create educationally solid learning designs.

The LAMS Activity Planner is designed to produce runnable learning activities that can be readily used with students.  It guides authors or teachers through the design process to enable them to add their own content to educationally sound learning activities.  Existing learning designs, resources, and learning objects can be reused, thus, assisting teachers and lecturers in the process without requiring them to become experts in learning design or theory. 

• To share methods used by others;
  
• To inspire teachers to adopt a new teaching strategy and support them in doing so;
  
• To Provide design ideas in a structured way — so that relations between design components are easy to understand;
  
• To Combine a clear description of the learning design, and offer a rationale which bridges pedagogical philosophy, research-based evidence and experiential knowledge; 
  
• As a database of existing learning activities and examples of good practice which can then be adapted and reused for different purposes; 
  
• To encode the designs in such a way that it supports an iterative, fluid, process of design and/or
  
• As a mechanism for abstracting good practice and metamodels for learning.

The LAMS Activity Planner provides lecturers with step-by-step guidance that helps them make theoretically informed decisions about the learning activities, tools, and resources they will need to attempt e-learning with some confidence. 

There are two parts of the Activity Planner:

1. Wizard, which helps teachers find the right sequence

   
   

2. The actual Activity Planner editor, which gives teachers a cut-down, simplified version of authoring presenting most of the content for all the activities that are part of the sequence in one page.
   
   

The author or teacher first identifies the type of activity that will be used for a class or group. Then, he/she will be presented with one or more templates available for the selected activity. As soon as the the template has been selected, the editor comes in to guide the author in designing the sequence.

Teachers and authors can choose a planner from one of the following 4 activity categories:

1. Teaching Strategies
   Authors and teachers can explore a variety of effective teaching styles
   
   
   
   The following are the activities included:
   
   
   • Exploring Alternative Perspectives.  A style that provides students with a balanced view of a controversial topic .
     
   • Problem-based Learning which builds a lesson around a central question that requires students to either solve a problem or make a decision.
     
   • Project/Case Study Focus which emphasizes on the creation of a product or artifact.
     
   • Jigsaw
     
   • Predict-Observe_Explain where students predict what they think will happen in a given scenario, then observe what actually happens, and further explain what they see and how it relates to their earlier prediction.
     
   • Role Play which will involve each student playing a role in a given scenario.
     
   • WebQuests which is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that students work with comes from the Web.
     
   • WebDilemma which is more simply structured, less technically demanding to design, but has many of the inquiry learning benefits of a WebQuest.
     
     
2. Teaching for a specific purpose
   This will enable teachers to help their students achieve a particular task. 
   
   
   
   Includes the following activities:
   
   • Action research, an interactive inquiry process.
     
   • Brainstorming, designed to generate a quantity of wide ranging ideas.
     
   • Building consensus.  Techniques designed to allow groups to move forward.
     
   • Debating, which develop the students' ability to argue from both positions of an issue.
     
   • Developing an online discussion, which help make online discussions worthwhile.
   • Evaluating webpage content, which helps students establish the quality and authority of a webpage.
     
   • Icebreakers, which helps a group become comfortable working together.
     
   • Introducing a wiki.  Creating a collaborative writing environment.
     
   • Jamie McKenzie's Slam Dunk Lessons.  Building brief lessons with digital resources that inspire a high level of engagement while challenging students to interpret, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.
     
   • Large group activities, which include activities that work well with groups of 50+.
     
   • Using online chat in a classroom, which implements class/group conversations via the internet.
     
   • Writing a biography, which teaches students how to comprehensively document someone's life.
     
   • Introducing new concepts, which help students to be able to compile a bibliography and to define a concept.
     
   • Exploring areas of knowledge, which help students to manage, analyse, and critise resources from the Internet

Interesting information? Stay tuned for the 2 remaining activity categories in my next post.