Digital Natives ... Are Changed: An Educational Scenario With Lams Integration That Promotes Collaboration Via Blended Learning In Secondary Education

The aim of the current paper is to present a didactic practice, the design and the implementation of a blended learning educational scenario with Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) integration, entitled "Digital Natives. are changed" that aims to promote students' collaboration and active participation via blended learning, in Secondary Education. The educational intervention was implemented via web, inside and outside the classroom, with students of the 3rd Grade of the 2nd Experimental Lyceum School of Thessaloniki, Greece in the context of the optional course "Multimedia-Networks". For the implementation of the proposed educational intervention LAMS was used via the server of the Educational Content, Methodology and Technology Laboratory of the Hellenic Open University. LAMS is a "Learning Design" system which focuses on sequences of collaborative learning activities and participants (students and teachers) access an activity sequence with a different role (Learner and Author/Monitor). The suggested educational scenario focuses on educating students face-to-face (f2f) or from a distance, individually or in groups and collaboratively and with their own pace of study. The main aim of the activities sequence is to lead students to co-operate via LAMS and use Windows Movie Maker. Moreover, it aims to improve students' creativity, reflective thinking, ability to compare their own experience with conclusions of a research work on digital natives' changes and presentation skills. The implementation of the proposed blended learning intervention via LAMS showed that teachers and students are supported. Teachers can design their course and re-use their digital lessons/sequences; they can complement their teaching with web-based tools and support their students' learning from distance. Also, they facilitate themselves with new tools for assessment and tracking students' progress and they can prepare their lessons in a way that promotes interactivity, collaboration, group-working and self-controlled studying. Students collaborate in groups in the LAMS environment and use the basic tools of Windows Movie Maker environment in order to synthesize their own movie. With that movie, they express the results of their reflective discussion about the changes of digital natives according to their experience and the conclusions of a published research paper. Moreover, students have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with LAMS, with distance and self-learning, with self-assessment and writing a text using language properly, with synchronous and asynchronous discussion, with uploading and submitting files to Web, taking into consideration their own safety. After the completion of the educational scenario the students are prepared to collaborate in future educational scenarios with more complicated Movie Maker application and generally with environments that use multimedia elements, like editing of video, combination of sounds, images and video. Also, they are introduced to critical discussion and they can express their conclusions after comparing their experiences with conclusions of a published research (written in different than their mother tongue). Additionally to all the above, the blended learning mode promote students to learn how they can learn, to organize their time according to their assessments and activities, to act collaboratively.