Last Thursday evening my wife (Ingrid Kopke) and I were reading one of the assigned articles for the MSc(ITE) 6024 module titled Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail and learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P.Adler (2008). After reading this article we started to discuss the points that it had addressed and I happened to mention that although I believed in the benefits of technology as an incredible tool for learning, I still felt that interaction through a keypad and screen was somewhat sterile. Ingrid, who is nine years younger than me pointed out that she did not feel that this would be unusual for me as the first time I had ever interacted with a computer was when I was a teenager (she knows me very well), whereas computers were always in her life from an early age. This conversation carried on for some time but it started to raise the question, when did I start using technology for learning?
My first ever computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K. My parents bought it when I was in Secondary School. They had no idea on how to use the thing and neither did I. For most of the time I used the Spectrum to play Daley Thompsons Decathlon which took 45 minutes to load up from tape and this was only for 5 of the events. Mossley Hollins High School, located 11 miles outside of Manchester, England had purchased 15 BBC computers at the same time as my own Spectrum. However none of the teachers at my school knew how to use them and for most of the time we taught typing skills on them although I do remember one kid showing me how to scroll my name on the screen using two lines of programming. For most of my education I recall very few times where technology played a part in my own learning. At university I mastered the skill of low level language programming and spent countless hours writing simple lines of hexadecimal numbers for EPROMS. High level language programming was a course that eluded me and I was amazed the day a friend showed me how to send a message from one computer to the next in the same room. Apart from this I rarely interacted with technology for learning benefits and it was not until I started teaching Physics in 1996 that technology started playing a key role in both my teaching and my learning.
Over the past 14 years I have seen the use of technology grow steadily within the classroom. Woodchurch High School in Birkenhead, Merseyside, England was my first teaching position. Each classroom had one PC that if we were lucky if sometimes it connected to the Internet. For the most this PC was used to show Doring Kindersley CDROM’s and to print out labels for posters. The reason for this lack of use of the PC was because nobody really knew how to use the things and the teaching staff at the school had never been taught how to use them properly. Sure we knew how to use Microsoft Word and some of us Microsoft Excel but none of us had been shown the power of the PC as a learning tool. I started working at the Colegio Anglo Colombiano, Bogota in 2001. This was my first International Baccalaureate School (IB) and this was also the first school I worked in that attempted to introduce a wireless internet connection and a learner management system called Edline. Both of these had relatively little success for several reasons. Connectivity was very unreliable, very few of us (teachers and students) had access to a computer and very few of us (teachers and students) knew what we were doing. It was also at this time I was introduced to vernier data loggers. These are electronic sensors that connect to a Texas GDC and can be used to collect data from scientific experiments. Again my first introduction to this technology did not go very well and although we had tutorials on using the devices, the calibration and setup procedure that was needed in order to use them required a degree in IT and took most of the class time before we used them. They also required additional PC software and with only one portable PC in the Science department this made them very ineffective.
My technophobia was broken by two people:
The first person is my wife whom I was very fortunate to meet whilst teaching at the Colegio Anglo Colombiano in Bogota. Ingrid is a fantastic Biology teacher and she was my driving force in helping me to understand how to use technology effectively in Science teaching with a particular aim to data collection and processing which is an internal assessment requirement for the experimental sciences in IB. We both currently work at the Diocesan Boys’ School here in Hong Kong and we have managed to implement the use of technology in scientific research effectively by using various software packages as well as using the newer plug and play data loggers by PASCO. We have also been using various platforms such as moodle and managebac to enhance online learning. Not only is Ingrid my partner and best friend but she is also an amazing work colleague whom I owe much of my current understanding and success in technology to.
The second person is a fellow Physics teacher called Chris Hamper who works at the Red Cross united world college in Norway. He is an experienced workshop leader for the (IBO) and is the author of Higher Level Physics (Heinemann) and co-author of Standard Level Physics (Heinemann) both books which have been published for the IB Physics syllabus. Chris is also an active believer in sharing his expertise and knowledge with the world. On his third generation website Chris Hamper (2010) states
As teachers we put a lot of effort into developing resources for our own students, it's a simple thing to share them with the world. Physics teachers are a rare breed often working alone, it's always useful to see what others are doing even if it’s not the way you'd do it yourself and it is in that spirit that I have put together this website.
I have personally used and applied a lot of Chris’ ideas from his website into my lessons and I was also very fortunate to meet the man in person last February at and IB endorsed In-thinking workshop for Physics teachers. I have also frequently emailed Chris for further ideas and he was instrumental in assisting my wife and I when we were selecting data loggers for our current school.
In the modern classroom it is obvious that the modern student in technologically savvy. As a Physics teacher my job is made a lot easier in my current school where students are fortunate to own their own laptops, wireless is reliable and students are not startled by using and manipulating new software in the classroom or laboratory. On a number of occasions they show me how to use our new toys. However I am pleased that as a teacher I can provide them with some guidance in the use of technology for learning and one of the reasons for taking the MSc(ITE) is to further my understanding and to make my teaching much more effective.
Bibliography
Brown, J.S & Adler,R.P (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 Educause Review, 43, 1, (January/February 2008). Retrieved 9th September, 2010 from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/MindsonFireOpenEducationtheLon/162420
Hamper, C. (2010). In thinking subject sites. Retrieved September 12, 2010, from In thinking: http://www.physics-inthinking.co.uk/
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