Reflections: On technology in teaching and learning

These are our group's initial reflections on how we have seen/experienced technology being used for teaching and/or learning.

Reflections

Posted by: Christopher Fulton

Reflections

The train slides into Fanling Station, and I jot down ideas coming to me.

What's is it about this course that is somewhat frightening? For someone who has given such assignments, I suspect it's the challenge of creating or innovating. We are being asked to design learning activities; this means creating, innovating and possibly imagining something new. A real challenge.

In a traditional course, I might be required to analyze or synthesize ideas or arguments. Such ideas of education appear to have emerged from Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of the educational objectives.

What is being asked of us, willing participants, is that we develop five learning activities. I am reminded of Sir Ken Robinson's talk on TED (https://myhkusu1.hku.hk/owa/redir.aspx?C=700272ef889b46ecbf9922b4025e5e2a&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ted.com%2fspeakers%2fsir_ken_robinson.html). His position is that education systems that prepare learners for the future will prepare students to be creative. Arguably, understanding, knowing, analyzing, and synthesizing information or ideas is quite different from creating.

I should add that I do see technology as a catalyst for change, and cost-effective change. As private companies make mobile devices and networks more readily available and affordable, the opportunity for educators to scale up education on mobile platforms is, I believe, inevitable. I see an opportunity for educators to get a jumpstart on the technology that will be used in future learning environments. In addition, I think this technology could greatly improve the chances of poor and underprivileged people to receive an education -- or opportunities to participate in society -- that they may not otherwise receive.

The train now jostles into Lo Wu station. Might my next blog entry end with "sent from a mobile device"?

Technology in My Teaching Career

Posted by Malcolm Drew

The first school I worked in was a typical Canadian public school of the time. “Technology” meant an overhead projector in every classroom, whiteboards instead of chalk in some classrooms, and one interactive whiteboard on wheels with a projector that would sit on top of a desk positioned roughly in front of the screen. The interactive whiteboard was housed in the Tech classroom where students learned how to use its drawing tools during 1 or 2 of their lessons in their approximately two month tech course. Later on, the school received an interactive whiteboard for each floor (3), all on wheels. Despite the wheels, the department heads held the boards hostage in their classrooms to become the experts on their use. The mathematics head was learning to use the board with Texas Instruments software when I left the school.

In officer military training I underwent around this time period, courses with a classroom component were conducted through PowerPoint presentations. The students in these courses coined the phrase “death by PowerPoint”.

Another school I worked in had the boards mounted in each classroom, with projectors mounted from the ceilings. This was a private school, and the owner wanted to showcase the boards. Teachers were required to have lessons using them every day, and upload the lessons in pdf format to the school website for students and parents to view. This lead to many teachers using the boards in a PowerPoint slideshow fashion, including myself. As much as possible, some teachers, including myself, working to add interactivity to the lessons with varying degrees of success. The highest degree of success came from students using the boards themselves. This lead to a “My turn, my turn!” environment with younger students. Other students, who were more prone to shyness, there would be difficulty in motivating participation.

Grades 9 to 12 at this school were in a 1 to 1 Macbook program. This put technology into each of their hands, but unfortunately many used the computer socially during school which lead to website blockages and discipline issues. The students wanted to use the computers in ways that did not conform to what their teachers wanted. Most teachers wanted the computers used for note-taking, making presentations, and doing online research.

In my present school, the classroom is structured much the same way. The toys are mainly developed for the teacher. We have 1 interactive whiteboard, and 1 visualizer per classroom. The visualizer is a device for projecting a real object onto the board. You can also take a picture or a video of the object with the visualizer’s camera. The school is currently grades 6 to 10, and will age to 6 to 12 one year at a time. All students are in a 1-1 MacBook program. Similar discipline issues arised for much of our first year that also lead to website blockages and discipline problems. Now in our second year, our focus on students making proper choices seems to be having a good effect. Teachers again largely focus on note-taking, presentations, and online research. The presentations have explained into video and podcasting, but they’re still presentations rather than students and teachers just telling or showing each other things.

From these experiences I would reflect that technology works best in meeting learning outcomes when it is in the hands of the students and the teachers are planning activities that do not simply replace normal classroom activities (like note-taking, and making linear presentations). One of the reasons I am in this program is to develop my own ability in using technology to its fullest extent in the classroom.

I asked a few of my students to briefly explain how they perceive technology in education, Satchet's response in particular raised some of the more physical demands of using laptops in school.

Samuel:

Technology is a tool to better help my understanding and to make the work simpler and quicker. So you work smarter rather than harder. I use laptops, use youtube videos, Word, and other programs.

Satchet:

It has brought down my attention span and does make my eyes hurt a little because I used to use the laptop for every class which makes me feel tired from staring at the screen almost all day but it’s improving now because I don’t use my computer for each and every class. I find the internet very useful because I can find out about different people’s opinions and pick out what information is reliable, it has helped me in finding out what is lies and what is not.

Theo:

It (laptop) is dependable, and worth working on. Saves paper, allows you to keep a copy of your work. You can search for things you’ve never seen before. Using a computer makes me feel like I’m getting useful skills.

An initiation into technology usage in teaching and learning

Posted by Ingrid Kopke Donado

A reflection on the beginnings of my use of technology for teaching and learning

A few years ago, I walked into my Friday afternoon Biology class ready to give a talk on Biochemical Evolution, only to be jumped on by one of my quietest student saying “Hey Ms. K, saw you walking to school this morning, yelled at you to see if you wanted a lift but you totally ignored me”. I was a bit startled by this accusation of “rudeness”, but then realized I had had a reason to ignore my student -I was wearing my new ipod, listening full blast to Guns N Roses.

As I explained this to him, he smiled and said “thought it would be something like that, what kind of ipod do you have?” What kind of ipod? There were KINDS of ipods? It never occurred to me that ipods, like biological species, received a taxonomic classification of their own; at the store, I had simply picked up one that attracted me.

“I don’t know”, I said in complete honesty, “It is just an ipod”.

“I bet you don’t have a nano or a mini and definitely not a shuffle”, he answered back (obviously not aware of my absolute ignorance on ipodology) “I bet you have classic”.

My face must have looked absolutely blank because then he went on to say “well, let’s get this right Ms. K, considering how much you like things to be clear and obvious I just don’t see you buying an ipod without a screen, and the screen on the nano or the mini is just too small for you –no offense to you being myopic and all, so I’m guessing you have a classic”.

I shrugged, smiled and pulled out my ipod from my pocket.

“See? I told you it was a classic.” He said.

I stared at this Knowledgeable Being holding my newly baptized ipod and smiling. This had been the most I had ever heard him say in a single lesson. A century suddenly crept between this 1991 model and myself, his outdated teacher. Where was my Scientific credibility now that it was obvious that I couldn’t even name my own ipod?

The issue however petty, bothered me for a few days, yet I wasn’t sure why. It was not the fact that I couldn’t name the little gadget, after all I have more than once in class admitted not knowing something with the promise of a research for the answer. What was really bothering me, was that I had walked into the class, convinced I had all grounds covered though absolutely unaware I was functioning at a completely different level to that of my students; I had a student who could from a hazy outline (correctly) establish the most fitting ipod for his teacher and yet in over 7 months of knowing him, his teacher had failed to find a way to engage him more in class.

My years at University and all my teacher training had prepared me to know the content of what I was supposed to deliver, but had left me in a time warp when it came to effectively delivering it to this techno-centered generation.

Sure, we used webcity at school to communicate with both students and parents and sure enough we looked at websites and research of others when it came to subject matters, but somewhere along the way I felt we were still not stepping into these teenagers’ ground.

I approached my boss at the time and expressed my concerns (and frustrations). I could see him and I were not synched in the subject, but he suggested I undertake an ECDL/ICDL course and considering “How important technology is”, as he put it, he even offered for the school to pay for it.The purpose of the ICDL course, as quoted from the ECDL website, is to “support the continuous development of ICT skills through the use of structured training and certification programmes”. I endured over 60 hours of lectures on how to maximize the use power point, excel and access (amongst others), completed a series of multiple choice answer tests (for which the answers could be memorized beforehand) and obtained a white and blue diploma stating I was “ICDL certified”. I hardly learned anything new from the course itself, but the experience led me to unlearn many things I thought about teaching and learning with ICT. I realized that the ICT skills I was looking for, had to come from elsewhere.

In the subsequent days, I walked around the school field during recess informally chattering with some of the kids. I realized that although I was only a few years older than them, in reality they were miles ahead of me. When I asked how they spent their afternoons, the name “Facebook” was unanimously expressed, together with “MSN” and “blog”. These were rated top in their activities, and if I wanted my passion for Biology to be extended to them, I had to find a way to integrate myself into this cyber-ecosystem.

The journey started with a simple forum on the webcity, Q&As I called it. My original idea was to open a space in the Friday afternoon Biology class webpage to allow for students to ask questions which they came across. I had reevaluated my Molecular Evolution course and instead of my ever prepared lecture had given my students a series of sources on the topic –some less reliable than others- to read and evaluate. It was their responsibility to analyse them and arrive to some conclusion responding to some guiding questions.

The first week a few questions were posted in the forum, factual in nature. The second week, the forum received more activity (as expected, given the deadline for submission was being approached), but now the questions were a bit more open ended. I did my best to try to keep up with everyone’s inquiries, which wasn’t easy considering the more extensive nature of these questions and my tight work schedule.

One afternoon, however, I got held up at a meeting and could not check on the forum until the next day. I was worried about the number of unanswered questions that would now be posted, and was incredibly surprised to log in and realize that my students had not waited for me to provide an answer, but had started answering –and arguing- themselves based on their own postings, research and ideas. I slowly began to change my participation in the forum (after all, this too was a learning curve for me!) and became less active in giving straight “answers” and more active in providing new questions and offering links. After 4 weeks of project activity, I was sure my students had learnt a lot more than I could have ever “taught” them, but I was even surer I myself had learned –and unlearned- a lot more than any of them.

When the time came around for teacher/parents day a few weeks later, I met up with over 100 parents. 10 of those, were the parents of my Friday afternoon Biology class. 10 of those parents, I am proud to say, were extremely grateful at how I had managed to involve their children in an activity that fascinated them: I heard parents say it was great to see that the many hours their children were spending “on the computer” had an academic purpose to it and how they felt this forum established a healthy competition into being more knowledgeable. I also heard concerns from parents, who although interested by the activity felt a bit confused and outdated in their roles as mentors and wanting –like me when face with ipod ignorance- to learn more about these forums and how they worked.

A week before the end of the school year I asked all of my students to fill in a review for the class. It is an anonymous survey done after reports are handed out which provides me an insight on the students’ perspective of the course. My Friday afternoon class reported the class that been challenging and interesting and surprisingly indicated that “many of the postings on the forum were those interesting things that would come back to memory in the middle of a test” and that “the forum allowed students to ask questions without the need to be face to face”[1].

I felt proud of myself, I had extended my passion to my students, and had heard and read proof of it. Technology now offered me a whole new range of teaching and learning skills that I needed to develop –and incorporate- into my own teaching, so that the incoming year it would not be just a class, but all of my classes, who could benefit from their inclusion in teaching and learning.

Some 6 years later, what I am aware of, is that although friendlier with technology, there is so much still for me to learn, to explore and to incorporate into my own teaching and my own learning. This IS why I'm here.

[1] I have loosely translated this from spanish, language in which these comments were originally written.

References:ECDL Foundation. (2010). About ECDL Foundation. Retrieved September 8, 2010, from ECDL Foundation: http://www.ecdl.org/index.jsp?p=93&n=94

Breaking Technophobia

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/

Reflections on technology being used for teaching or for learning.

OK I'll get the ball rolling - not to sure what to write but here goes...

In the presentation that was given on our first evening the use of IT in teaching and learning split into 2 categories ‘Learning from computers’ and ‘Learning with computers’.

In my experience teachers who are new to using IT in teaching & learning find it natural to plan activities where students learn from computers. An example of a typical task could be ‘research about a planet in our solar system’ and so they simply use IT as a replacement for a text book or a library.

Teachers may then progress to using IT as a tool to assist them to teach the students; maybe an animation of a heart pumping is shown on the white board whilst didactically explaining how the circulatory system works. Personally I still classify this as learning from computers since it is again being used simply as a replacement for a diagram, but the activity of the students (sitting and listening) has not changed.

The first step towards students learning with ICT seems to come when a teacher stops focusing on the IT resources and starts to focus on what the students are doing.

In this case simple changes to activities can occur which suddenly allow the students to learn with IT and not from it. For example the solar system activity could be changed to:

‘Create a 2 minute advertisement for a travel agency about why people should visit Jupiter. At least 1 minute of this advert should have been recorded with your webcams (ie. you should be the presenters of the advert)’

This changes the students’ activity from indiscriminately scooping up facts to interpreting the information they have viewed, making critical decisions about its validity and then presenting it to others.

I have experienced colleagues in the UK resisting the introduction of IT into a school with arguments of its just a fad / it won’t improve anything / not as good as a text book. I would agree with all of these points IF teachers are unable to embrace the process of students learning with computers.

I spent a few years in Kenya working with teachers there and the vast majority of them were extremely excited about the prospect of using IT in the classroom, but due to lack of exposure their vision of the use of IT was limited to learning from computers.

It takes time and training to encourage teachers to make this transition from making students learn from computers to allowing them to learn with computers. In my view this transition is critical if a school is to use IT in a meaningful way.