Teaching & Learning in Changing Times

It was with some coincidence that only a day after reading Annie’s post with the accompanying clip that I happened into the Apple store to have a look at the new MacBook which incorporates much of the same technology (albeit without the same WOW! factor) as the intelli-table in the clip.

The new MacBook makes use of a single buttonless touchpad that recognises single, double, triple and quad finger strokes to perform different tasks from page scrolling, zoom, crop, flip, rotate, switch slide etc. Combine with a single piece alloy frame, 128GB solid state hard drive with 38sec shutdown/reboot time with a full MacSuite of programs and the future certainly is getting closer at a very rapid rate of knots! ((the only reason that little beauty stayed in the store was the $4100 price tag… ouch!)).

OK so maybe this post has very little to do with where in the world is Carmen Sandiego however Geoff Romeo’s reflection of his early experiences with technology in education and the late 80′s game made popular by Apple was enough to spark my interest to read on. I have fond memories of many hours spent searching for Carmen Sandiego and perhaps it was not time completely wasted as through playing the game by around the end of year 8 I could identify and label most of the recognised countries and capital cities in the world (at this stage the soviet block was still the USSR).

Romeo says in his paper, “…computers in education in Australia is and always has always been, more about teaching and learning, rather than technology.” Absolutely how it needs to be.  The focus must concentrate on how technology can help us create new types of engaging learning experiences that were not possible earlier.

Students using podcasts and vodcasts to present assignments, the student centred use of interactive white boards, student created websites to showcase their learning, digital media galleries, the use of applets to investigate scientific problems and the use of content free software as mindtools are but just a few of the was technology is supporting the meaningful learning of students (Jonassen, 2008, p. 9).

The important thing is that we focus on how the learning and/or teaching experience is enhanced. 

Reference:

Jonassen, D. et al (2008). What is meaningful learning? In Jonassen et al.(Eds). Meaningful learning with technology. 3rd Ed. pp1-12. Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall: New Jersey.

Made available under Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ Available here

If there was any doubt as to why integrating technology into the classroom is a necessity to enable our students to continue to actively participate in the world around them into the future then this clip is a Very Powerful justification… we are living in exponential times.

The clip by Karl Fisch, is the ideal justification for his award winning post “Is it OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher ” about why its not ok for teachers of today to be technologically illiterate. If he had of included the clip as part of that post I doubt many would argue the case that it is OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher.

Did you know that:

- The top 10 jobs in demand in 2008 didn’t exist (or weren’t in the top 50) in 2000.

- We are educating students for jobs that haven’t been created yet, to use technology that hasn’t been invented yet, to solve problems that we don’t yet know exist.

And for those that doubt the above, just think back to were technology was at while you were still in school  compared to today. I have a strong recollection of an entire class moaning to our teacher about why we had to travel to a nearby school to view a demonstration of this thing called “e-mail” because it was irrelevant to us and we would never use it. That was 1994, and by the following year at University I would not have made it through the year without it.

Made available under Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ Available here

While I have having a play around with Blip.tv I came across a series of clips with practical advice and tips from a range of teachers who had been awarded “Teacher of the Year” in New York State. Such a powerful professional development opportunity available in short 30sec-5min presentations to view at anytime and without the price tag that often comes from listening to professionals of this calibre present at conferences.

OK, so tertiary students have been doing it for years- recording lectures to listen to as part of their study later either using pocket cassette recorders or more recently digital voice recorders. Its not something that ever really caught on with secondary students, come to think of it I can see many teachers and schools frowning upon it for one reason or another.

What did become popular, even a lucrative market, about the time I was finishing highschool was Study Guides. Well the people at Pearson Education have cottoned on to the multimedia fetishes of the current generation of students and have started to market Podcrammers (TM) as a study and revision tool. Essentially they are a tutorial session in a podcast which students, for a fee, download in MP3 format from the internet and can listen to on their computer or their MP3 player.

My younger brother is using them currently to revise and thinks they are great and having listened to one I can understand why.

The use of projects as a learning and assessment activity is by no means a new strategy, however new and exciting options for studnets when creating and presenting their product are becoming available everyday through advances in technology. No longer are students constrained to reports and posters for the presentation of their completed work. More and more students are turning to creative multimedia options such as movie maker, web design, interactive quizes and edited audio to present their work (Han & Bhattacharya, 2007).

All of this new technology fits in perfectly with Papert’s (1991) view of constructionism that new ideas are most likely to be created when learners are actively engaged in building some type of external artifact that they can reflect upon and share with others.

Indeed Papert has been forecasting the potential uses for technology in classroom teaching. His “The Future of School” discussions with Paulo Friere in the 1980′s predicted uses for technology that are only recently beginning to see in mainstream education such as the use of internet to promulgate information and display work achievements, widespread use of interactive CD-ROMs and other digital media.

Han & Bhattacharya in their article about Learning By Design and Project Based Learning suggest a number of strategies for planning and implementing Project Based Learning which allows students to make use of available technologies if they wish. Unless the use of such technologies is an essential element of the assessment its use should be optional, although they note that most students will actively engaged in the use of such technology.

As a key policy of its (very successful) 2007 Federal Election campaign the ALP ticket of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard promised an Education Revolution with the promise of high speed internet to every primary school and a committment that “every child from years 9 to 12 would have access to a computer.”

The now Prime Minister’s original words became a little twisted in the heat of the election campaign to the point that it is now widely understood that every child in years 9-12 would have access to a laptop. You don’t need to be an actuary to realise the budget implications between the two subtley different statements. Everyone who has every gone shopping to purchase a computer will now that a desktop can be purchased for around half the cost of a laptop. And most people who have owned both laptop and desktop will know that the through life maintenance cost of a laptop is considerably higher than a desktop. At one independent school I was at this year that did provide a laptop for every teacher and a computer lab (with wireless laptops) for each faculty the IT Manager noted that the annual cost of replacing just batteries was $65000 (and the school only had 400ish students).

The point is while laptops have some great advantages to them perhaps the huge amount of tax payer dollar being spent on this promise could have been better used? Noting that a strict condition of the funding is that the computers are for student not teacher use. I agree with Toby, the focus should be on looking at whole of class solutions such as data projectors, more interactive whiteboards and wider roll outs of some of the other technologies the NSW Centre for Learning Innovation has been trialling. Significant funds could have been made available for additional technologies by ensuring all schools had adequate IT systems for teacher use and that all schools had at least two computer labs with 30+ desktop computers in each rather than a hasty mass rollout of laptops without the due consideration to through life support and infrastructure requirements.

A demonstration Paul gave to the Maths Methods class yesterday presented one of the more interesting and creative uses of technology I have seen applied to the classroom. Although it had some stiff competition from Taxation Cluedo I rate it as the most engaging resource from our class.

Using “Comic Life” software from PLASQ, Paul had used a South Park theme to present 2U Mathematics content in comic form and having observed his creations I have no doubt the students would have loved it!

It is not too much of a challenge to see why this posting by Karl Fisch was voted the most influential of the year on Edublogs. He posts a carefully balance personal observation combine with one very bold statement and acknowledges that he himself sways back and forth on issue himself.

The statement: If a teacher today is not technologically literate – and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more – it’s equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn’t know how to read and write. (Fisch, 2007)
is deliberately provocative, it is intended to capture our attention and spark debate.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the above statement I do agree with much of what Fisch discusses in his post and so I will take up Basil’s challenge and play devil’s advocate.

So here goes, my three reasons why I think being technologically illiterate teacher today is the equivalent of a teacher who couldn’t read or write properly 30 years ago:

1) 30 years ago the principle means of recording information, of giving instruction etc was through written language. A teacher who struggled with reading would also struggle to communicate effectively with their students. Today as the plethora of digital mediums rapidly take over as the preferred communication, data storage and retrieval methods a teacher who struggles with the most basic of technology such as MS Word and e-mail will also struggle to communicate effectively with their students.

2) 30 years ago if a teacher wanted to do some research they went to the library and did a paper search. IF they struggled to read then it followed they would struggle finding information. Today vast amounts of information are at our fingertips but for the technologically illiterate working out how to access information is hard enough let alone getting one’s head around search optimization, and differentiated search engines.

3) A teacher who couldn’t read and did nothing about it 30 years ago is a teacher who displays a lack of interest in lifelong learning and continual improvement in their teaching. The same applies today with a teacher who is proud to be technologically illiterate, although now the stakes are higher because our students are more widely engaged in the use of technology than they were with reading 30 years ago. Lets face it when we are talking about technologically illiterate we are referring to teachers who struggle with even the basics such as e-mail, setting up a data projector, using anything more than a basic word processor and those frustratingly slow 2 finger typers and all of this technology has been readily available and utilised in schools for around 15 years now.

With all this talk about technology, the technology this and technology that has been beaten into our heads since the day we started the course what seems like an eternity ago, what happens to the modern (possibly even Digital Native) graduate teacher when they arrive at their first school to find there is no technology to use?

It was with some astonishment that I started my practicum to find the school had less in the way of technology than even my school when I completed Yr 12 some 14 years ago. There were 2 x OHP in the school, 3 x TV with VCR (and one had a DVD), all of the classrooms had either blackboard or 50/50 blackboard & whiteboard. There was a computer lab with 14 computers running Windows 2000 and an internet connection slower than on my phone, the staff room had 2 computers. The school internet policy was that students were allowed 20MB of download per cycle (not even a decent youtube clip in that- although youtube was blocked by the proxy-gate) and teachers 50MB (metered through each person’s login). It took me three weeks but I did discover there was a dataprojector in the library but it wasn’t allowed to leave the library. Even items such as graphics calculators were non existent.

Which brings me back to the question, what does a graduate teacher who has had the major part of their training focussed on using technology in the classroom do when they find this technology isn’t available? The answer according to Dr Valdez is simple, they do what teachers have always done- make do with what they have and use some creativity to engage their students.