Engagement Theory and how we can apply this to formulating our lessons

Greg Kearsley & Ben Shneiderman wrote a paper on Engagement Theory. They proposed that "By engaged learning, we mean that all student activities involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. In addition, students are intrinsically motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the learning environment and activities.

Engagement theory is based upon the idea of creating successful collaborative teams that work on ambitious projects that are meaningful to someone outside the classroom. These three components, summarized by Relate-Create-Donate, imply that learning activities:
occur in a group context (i.e., collaborative teams)
are project-based
have an outside (authentic) focus"

The use of a Voki will fulfill some of the components needed especially if students then embed them onto their own Blog. I was even thinking they could have a Biology Blog for our class and upload all assessment items to it utilising our ICT ideas. They would be creating.. Say if we were doing anatomy and dissecting a frog or something similar. They could create a voki of a frog and have it give the introduction. Then research info on what they need to do for the experiment. Also find pictures of the instrumentation they will need and the parts of the body they are exploring. They could then film a student performing the experiment (maybe?) and put that in the Blog and lastly write up their results and findings and post them
References:

Kearsley,G. & Shneiderman, B. (1999) Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning from http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm