Jane’s Blog

One of the benefits of LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) and other LMS (Learning Management Systems) and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is that they increase teacher productivity in the long term. Once the teacher has captured the lesson online they can reuse it, remix it and share it, even globally!

This type of software provides an authoring platform for creating, storing, distributing and sharing online educational activities.

LAMS has 4 environments (profile types):

Learner (to participate in a learning task), Author (teacher authors the learning tasks – or you could get students to design tasks for their peers), Monitor (where you can monitor each student’s progress as they flow throught the task’s steps) and Systems Administration.

LAMS is based on the output from an EDUCAUSE project. It focuses on ‘context’ in that the tasks created should be activity-based and encorporate collaborative pedagogies.

LAMS differs from other LMS with its “graphic workflow model” – it is a bit like my old days of programming where you create a flowchart – but in LAMS it is done online and the students click on each component of the flow to work on each task with their progress and work recorded for the teacher to monitor.

Teachers can share lessons via the LAMS Community Website.

These are useful scaffolding tools where a task can be individual or collaborative (vote, discuss, debate).