teaching and technologies

I’ve published a podcast on Podomatic that reflects on my learning in DLDG. To listen, click on this link to Podomatic.

Thanks to this Flickerer for the microphone image.

The kids at my local primary school are blogging. I’m just back from a school council meeting where one of the Year 2 teachers gave us a tour of her class blogsite. The DET launched blogEd – a secure blogging tool – in late June and 8 classes at our school are now enthusiastically blogging, with more to jump on board as word in the playground spreads. The kids are very enthusiastic and madly blogging and commenting on each others’ posts about insects, right angles and the environment. The teacher showed us some posts which had generated 50+ comments and kids are lining up to use the library computers at lunch – plus blogging from home after school, with parents looking on.

In another example of life imitating UTS DLDG, I jumped into the car yesterday and James Valentine on ABC radio was taking calls from listeners on the topic of  new technology in school. Listeners’ comments ranged from excitement about the opportunities available to kids today to make their learning more relevant to reactions of “it’s stupid, why can’t they just read it in a book?”.

Digital technology is something that increasingly teachers will have to get to grips with – opting out because it’s too hard will soon not be an option.

Thanks to this flickerer for the above image

Last semester I went to the e-skills workshop Intro to Digital Storytelling. Here is a link to the digital story I made about books and travel. (I tried to embed the video in my blog, but apparently Edublogs no longer support this function unless you go Edublog Pro.)

I had zero skills in iMovie and, not being particularly techno-savy, was a bit apprehensive about my ability to make a digital story. However, I really enjoyed the process and found the software easy to use. Telling a digital story involves many of the same processes as telling a written story – the difference is in writing a script and meshing it with visual elements and then using the iMovie software to make it come alive and fine tune the finished product.

I can now see that getting students to make a digital story would be a great assessment task. In Stage 6 it’s a requirement that assessment tasks be spread across the different modes of reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing and representing. Producing a digital story certainly ticks the box for representing. It would be a great form for students to explore the Area of Study in the HSC syllabus, which at the moment is Belonging, but previously was The Journey. For students in earlier stages too, digital storytelling would be a good way to engage them in a subject. Visual literacy is an important part of the syllabus and students will learn much more if they are making their own movies as well as analysing others’.

Mira’s video interview with Silvia Tolisano of Langwitches fame is really worth checking out. Silvia is an inspiring teacher who totally integrates digital technology into her teaching, so that the technology is no longer the focus, but rather the learning that takes place when her students make use of the technology. As she says, “It’s not about the tools, it about the skills they learn from using them.”

Skype, Twitter, blogs and so on are an integral way of how Silvia teaches and also learns. She makes the point that she couldn’t teach the way she does without being connected to a worldwide network of techno-aware teachers. Her students use blogs and Skype to find out information they can’t get from books and to receive authentic feedback from a real worldwide audience on their learning. “Without my network my students would have the possibility to make those connections,” she says. “I believe it is the responsibility to grow and maintain and nurture their own network in order to make this possible for their students.”

Her advice to us is to get a Google Reader account (tick) and start reading and connecting with other pre-service teachers and teachers out there in the blogosphere who are using digital technologies to connect their students to the world. There’s so much going on out there, I guess the thing is to keep reading about what teachers are doing and pick something you feel comfortable about “getting your feet wet” with. A lot will depend on the kind of school you end up teaching in, as to how much technology you employ in your teaching. I think the key thing to keep in mind is: it’s not the technology, it’s the skills. Decide what you want your students to learn and then figure out how you’re going to get them there – rather than starting from the idea of the technology itself and designing the lessons around it. The technology should disappear into the background, letting the learning take centre stage.

Thanks to this Flickerer for the above image.

Something is going on in elementary schools across North America that might strike the detached observer as insane. Millions of dollars are being poured into high-tech equipment that is used mainly to produce the kinds of ‘projects’ that in an earlier day were produced using scissors, old magazines, and library paste.

This is Bereiter from Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age (2002), cited by Abbey (2005). It does seem insane, and you could say the same thing is going on in Australia and in high schools too.

Hedberg  (2006) talks about Christensen’s notion of disruptive innovations – a technology that eventually takes over the existing dominant technology, despite being radically different and that it often initially performs less successfully. Hedberg argues that e-learning has failed to live up to its early promise because it is not as yet a disruptive technology. He claims that “the future success of e-learning depends on a revolutionary move away from simply replicating traditional (classroom-based) teaching practices” (Hedberg, 2006, p. 176).

To fully harness the potential of digital technology, teachers need to teach in a different way. Hedberg states that digital technologies support a constructivist approach to learning, rather than an instructional one. According to Hedberg this is really a move back towards the Greek idea of “dialogic literacy”. Prior to the creation of textbooks in the 1500s, Socratic questioning, a dialogue between teacher and student, was the main teaching method. Compared to an instructional style where students memorise facts from the teacher or a textbook, a dialogue between teacher and learner encourages higher-order thinking, problem solving and the development of new ideas.

Dialogic literacy is defined by Bereiter and Scardamalia as the ability to engage productively in discourse whose purpose is to generate new knowledge and understanding, in contrast to ‘functional literacy’: the ability to comprehend and use communication media to serve the purposes of everyday life (Abbey, 2005, para. 8). Digital technologies make whole class dialogue – and dialogue with classes and experts all over the world – possible via websites, wikis, blogs and live Skype hook-ups. Students, with guidance from their teacher, can take control of their choice of resources (rather than relying on a textbook) and construct their own learning, in collaboration with their teacher, their peers and, in fact, other students and experts worldwide.

A pedagogical shift is needed. It seems that this is happening in some schools, with some teachers, but the technology is going in before the teacher training – not just in the nuts and bolts of how to use the technology, but why to use it, and how to use it to teach in a whole new way – the TPACK part at the centre of the mix. Hedberg (2006, p.181-2) concludes that for e-learning to become a truly disruptive technology in that it really changes how students are learning, there needs to be:

• a rethinking of learning activities;
• an exploration of how interactions are managed and facilitated;
• a choice of the right tool for the pedagogical task.

“A  disruptive influence in the classroom” has traditionally been a negative – and maybe that’s part of the problem. Teachers who are used to being in total control of the classroom perhaps find the idea of disruptive technologies challenging. Change is scary. Learning new things is time consuming and sometimes difficult. Shifting your whole way of thinking about what you do as a teacher and why is even harder is even harder. Some teachers are taking up the challenge with enthusiasm. I hope to be one of them.

Abbey, N. (2005) Developing 21st century teaching and learning: dialogic literacy, Retrieved Aug 8th, 2010, from New Horizons for Learning,http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/abbey.htm

Hedberg, J. G. (2006). E-learning futures? Speculations for a time yet to come. Studies in Continuing Education, 28 (2), 171-183.

Thanks to this Flickerer for the above image.

My Year 7 daughter has spent the day at the zoo on a science excursion. “So, how was it?” I ask.
“Okay,” she says, ” Except for the boring worksheets we had to fill out.”
“Hmm.. what if, instead of worksheets, you’d got to use some kind of technology. Would that have been better?”
“I dunno. What do you mean?”
“Well…” My mind is ticking over. “What if each group of two or three kids had a video camera and you had to research a particular group of animal – monotremes, say – and you had to make an informative presentation, answering the kind of questions on the worksheets. Then you’d have to edit your movie, add graphics and info and back at school each group would present a different category to teach the class about.”
“Yeah, that would be cool, I guess.”

Another day, we’re in the car and I’m brainstorming my ideas on how to teach Romeo and Juliet using new technologies. “So, you could get each kid to be a different character and they have to tweet about something that happens in the play.”
“That sounds kind of lame, like you’re doing it just for the sake of using technology.”
“Oh… Well, what about if the teacher set up a tribute sites for Romeo and Juliet – and Mercutio – on Facebook and you had to contribute as if you were one of their friends?”
“Yeah, but Facebook is banned at school.”
“Well, you could do it for homework.”
“Yeah, I suppose so, but it still sounds kind of lame, pretending to be some Shakespearean character.”
“Wouldn’t it be better than writing an essay?”
“Maybe. I guess so.”
“What do you think you’d learn from doing it?”
“I dunno. Not much.”
“Do you think it would make you think about the characters in the play? If Juliet was one of your friends and she killed herself because of her boyfriend and it was all a terrible mistake, would writing about it on Facebook make you think more about what had happened and why and how you felt about it?”
“Yeah, maybe. But haven’t you already thought about all that when you read the play?”
“Sometimes when you have to write something, it helps you clarify your thoughts. And, if you don’t write something, how will your teacher know what you think about Romeo and Juliet? Plus, on Facebook, you’ll get to read what your classmates think too.”
“Mmm, I guess so.”

So, from my research sample of one 13 year-old Year 7 student, it would seem that digital technologies are preferable to boring paper worksheets (which is what I was doing on excursions 30 plus years ago). However, I think that the key is to learning being meaningful is that the exercise has some kind of authentic purpose. Making a presentation for the class on research done at the zoo gives a task meaning and purpose. Writing a pretend tribute for a fictional character by contrast seems “lame” because it’s a make-believe set up.

“Why do we blog?” asks the teacher of a Year 5 class in Sydney on her class blog site. (This is the same class that had a live phone hook up with the Antarctic scientists – see Mira’s post about it and my response.)

So, what are the benefits of getting your class to blog? What do the students learn from it? There are some interesting responses from the Year 5 kids to these questions, including: “we learn how to start writing good things that people are interested in and writing is lots of fun to me and that is one of the reasons I have a blog page too… From reading a blog I learn what people do from the other side of the world and from reading peoples blogs it makes us understand more about what other people do in their lives…” from milo1011.

There’s a comment from Mitch Squires, a teacher at another school, who says:

One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that we can share ideas – I know I have seen some great ideas on this and other blogs and used them to make my days with my class more interesting, and I hope others benefit from my class blog in the same way. Another benefit is that you can get great feedback on your work from people you would otherwise never know.
Privacy and safety are very important when blogging. We should be careful about what information we reveal on our blog, as anyone can read it, so we don’t want to share too much.
The more I get into blogging with my class, the more I am convinced it is a useful skill. It helps us interact with people all over the world, gives us access to a wide range of opinions and ideas, and best of all, it makes us THINK!

All this makes me think that I want to get on board the blog bus when I am let out into a school for real.

An interesting aside, it turns out that the Year 5 blog I’ve been looking at is from the school my elder daughter goes to! Nothing like that going on in like that for her in Year 7…

I was interested in Mira’s post now THIS is engaging for students about a Year 5 class in Sydney talking to a group of Antarctic scientists. I listened to the recording of their Antarctic phone call and also had a browse around the class blog. Mira posed the question: would it have been as engaging for the students if an Antarctic scientist had come to address the students in assembly? Well, I guess not. The Yr 5 class was very excited to be talking to real live scientists all the way in Antarctica, who were able to address their questions directly.

Having said that, last year my daughter’s Year 6 class was studying Antarctica and the school organised an incursion  – a scientist who had been in Antarctica came to visit and showed some video of his time in Antarctica and answered the kids’ questions in much the same way as the kids on the phone. He also had some samples of penguin poo for the kids to smell (very stinky by all accounts) and some Antarctic ice to handle. The kids also had the opportunity to dress up in the jackets, pants, gloves etc that are needed to brave the Antrarctic conditions. The incursion was very successful and the kids all raved about it. (I know because I had to edit their accounts of it for their Year Book.) While this experience didn’t have the immediacy of kids talking in real time to scientists in Antarctica, it did have the advantage of being multi-sensory.

Maybe it’s not a question of either/or but “I’ll have that too, please”. New technology can ADD to more traditional learning experiences, rather than replace them altogether.

One thought occurs to me: what happens when more and more teachers and schools get with the connected classroom idea and Antarctic scientists get so bombarded by phone calls from primary classrooms around the world that they don’t have time to answer them all?

Another question: it seems to me there are more primary than secondary teachers setting up class blogs. Am I right and why is this? Is it because primary teachers have all day with the one class while high school teachers have a 50 min lesson a day and 4 or 5 different classes – too hard to set up blogs for all of them?

Gentoo Penguin by Lord Biro on flickr.com

Georgia, Catherine and I created this mind map in our tutorial in response to Herrington and Kervin (2007). Herrington and Kervin list 10 ways to incorporate technology into teaching that put the technology “into the hands of the students so that it becomes a key factor in the learning process, and a critical element in the learning partnerships”. (Herrington & Kervin, 2007, p.2). We related each of the 10 methods to how we imagined we could use digital technologies in the English classroom.

Taking this one step further, I was remembering my prac and in particular my Yr 10 class where we studied Romeo and Juliet. Not being at a very high-tech school, the only technologies I employed were word processing, Youtube, DVDs and Smartboard with the class. I started to try to think what else would be possible and came up with:

• Setting up Facebook tribute sites for Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet and getting the students to contribute to them
• Assigning characters and getting them to tweet in character after a particular scene has occurred
• Students make a blog as one of the play’s characters – and then interact with each other in character
  
• Set up a Skype call to an actor or director who is currently in a production of R&J
• Students act out scenes, video each other, upload to class blog and then comment and reflect on the process and their learning
• Students make a Verona Times website and create news stories on key scenes from the play (I got them to do a newspaper page about riot scene in Act 1)

Looking for more inspiration I did what we all do and hit google and found some great ideas on Digital shakespeare at readwritethink.org. Check it out!

Herrington, J. and Kervin, L. (2007). Authentic learning supported by technology: ten suggestions and cases of integration in classrooms.  Educational Media International,  44( 3),  219-236.

Learning about all this new technology engenders two simultaneous responses in me – excitement and panic.  I can see the possibilities for turning the classroom into a place where kids are engaged and learning in a way they like and, yeah, I want to be one of those hip and happening teachers on the cutting edge. But, at the same time I’m panicking because I’m a techno dumbo and the list of stuff I don’t know when it comes to  things new and techie is very, very long.

I took heart from a post on Lucy York’s blog where she talks about technology triage for teachers. If you have long list of techno skills you need to acquire, break it down into things you need to know now, things that can wait until you’ve got some free time (which would be?? next holidays?) and things that you think aren’t so relevant for your KLA and maybe you’ll forget about. Baby steps for even the longest journey, will get you to where you want to be (eventually).