Cool in school

From the earliest days of Internet access in schools, teachers have exercised care to minimise the risks of exposure of children to inappropriate material. More recently, as Internet connected computers have become widely available in homes, some significant risks to the safety of children have emerged. Several high profile cases in various parts of the world have demonstrated that there may be physical risks in addition to the problem of inappropriate content.

Teachers and schools need to approach the use of ICT in ways that maximse the educational benefit while minimising any risk. They may also need to be able to offer sound advice to parents and carers.

In Australia, the federal government has established NetAlert to provide “independent advice and education on managing access to online content”. Similar services have been established elsewhere, for example, Parents Online in the UK.

Phoebe has also commented on the article ‘Kansas launches tuition-free online public high school’. The idea here is to make the most of the internet for delivering lessons at a high school level. Phoebe discusses its potential for remote, home-schooled and disabled students in the Australian Primary School system and how beneficial it would be if the government may be able to subsidise it.

I can also see benefits here in a less involved strategy that involves a teacher dedicating maybe 1-2 extended lessons a week to online studies. Programs such as LAMS which we are currently using may be utilised to undertake learning students simply cannot achieve in the classroom.

A teacher who would like to take this one step further may then make links with home-schooled and remote students, making them feel apart of a broader class by encouraging students in class to make comments about their work online and vice-versa. The motivational benefits for both students in and outside the classroom would be huge.

My fellow blogger Phoebe Windsor has written an interesting blog that opens up the mobile phones in the classroom debate all over again. This time the argument is in favour of bringing mobile technology into the classroom for use in video making, connectivity etc.

Phoebe raises a good point “Allowing children to self discover their learning using technological sources generates student abilities and reflection within their learning.”

Unfortunately looking at it from my perspective this technology has some major limitations in the classroom. For a start the mobile phones with technology that may be handy in supporting learning range from $400-$2000, something the government and most certainly not parents will cover.

Being the hands-on practical male kind, I can see the benefit for boys – unfortunately in class a lot of boys will not be able to see the benefit past playing games and fidgeting with the mobiles.

The impact of home computers has attracted interest from researchers over the past decade. In presenting a conference paper on the subject, Downes (1996) noted that children who researched information for projects from electronic sources and were able to ‘cut and paste’ text and illustrations into a word processor document were often constrained by a school requirement to present the project handwritten in an exercise book.

She described one instance, in which a child prepared and presented a project as video – a format which was appropriate to the task – but the teacher was uncertain how to assess work other than that presented in conventional written form and the ultimate compromise was to mark the script rather than the video.

It is up to the individual teacher to develop an effective criteria for marking the range of skills used in ICT by students. 

After recently completing an online task requiring the use of LAMS, the question has been posed – could students create their own online learning tasks?

I struggled at first to find much relevance behind a student building a task, would they not benefit more from undertaking the task? In actual fact building the task themselves would expose students to twice the amount of information on the topic which they must sift through themselves to find the most important facts.

I then came across this statement “If we believe… that knowledge or intelligence are a mere reflection
of a child’s surrounds, then we are likely to “pass on” our own solutions, rules,
and values, to our youngsters” (Ackermann, 2001)

It got me thinking that if a student was in charge of directing learning then the teacher is now facilitating the development of that students ability to teach others, rather than just imbuing them with knowledge. It is for this fact that students developing tasks themselves would be highly beneficial.

Ackermann, E. (2001), Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the
difference? Retrieved 28th May from:
http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf

In coming to terms with the effectiveness of using ICT programs to expand student learning by providing experiences not readily available with a pen and paper I came across a definition of “Type 1″ and “Type 2″ applications.

Type I applications of ICT make it more efficient (quicker and/or easier) to teach in traditional ways. Examples might include using ICT to create worksheets, using a computer instead of the blackboard for presentations, and so on. “These may be beneficial but they represent more of the same rather than change.”  (Maddux, Johnson & Willis, 1992).

Type II applications of ICT offer new ways of teaching that would not otherwise be possible. Examples include student created media and various forms of simulation. This links to my post regarding the relevance of students creating their own LAMS tasks. Students gain more from this type of application as they employ higher order thinking to synthesise a range of activities.

Maddux, C. D., Johnson, D. L., & Willis, J. (1992). Educational computing: learning with tomorrow’s technologies. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Despite their decreasing cost in relative terms, laptops are still regarded as too expensive in many educational applications. They also present problems in relation to their bulk, weight, power consumption and fragility.

Handheld computers and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) are cheaper, smaller, lighter, less demanding on power and more robust than laptops. “Increasingly they have the capacity to perform many of the computing tasks that might be required in a typical classroom.”(Brown, 2001). 

 As a consequence they are being used in a variety of contexts in the classroom, often in syncs with mobile technologies.

“Computers and Talk in the Primary Classroom” By Rupert Wegerif and Peter Scrimshaw gives an insight to how children interact whilst working with and around computers in the classroom. They discuss Vygotskian theories of sociocultural interaction as helping to shape a community feeling of learning on computers, with student “chat” used to clear up misunderstandings among students.

“Language is a vital means by which we represent our own thoughts to ourselves.” As teachers dealing with ICT we must always remember not to ‘shut-down’ students who put forward wrong answers. ICT language is probably the most jargon-filled children will encounter and time and care needs to be taken to ensure all students understand, because if a wrong meaning goes through a grape vine of students you may easily have half the class not understanding your lessons.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QS48CIS8yy4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=%22Wegerif%22+%22Computers+and+Talk+in+the+Primary+Classroom%22+&ots=0ahML8N8eI&sig=E0HUt44p3bBVSi6R9tuteW_nI50

Indeeed when we look at programming creative lessons in ICT we must also consider how we are going to assess the work for understanding and overall achievement. In the article “Open Book Testing in Online Learning Environments“by Glenda Rakes it is stated “A variety of performance assessments, including examinations, should be employed to assure quality in online instruction.” The onus here is on the teacher to co-develop criteria for specific skills acquired and used in the online tasks that may then be assessed in a variety of ways.

Whilst most ICT classes won’t use a text book, if students are asked to do an online examination Rakes suggests the teacher let students have access to notes handed out to them during the learning experience. Rakes reflects this method of open-book style testing as being more effective as Feller (1994) believed that “closed book examinations test only what students can memorize, while open book examinations have an increased potential to measure higher level thinking skills and relate more closely to real-world work environments.”

This also benefits school stakeholders such as local business as (through reporting) they can see students from that school developing into computer literate young adults.

Most web-based instant-messengers generally give bosses and teachers a headache – students distracted from work and workers not working. However in an educational context web-based messengers could be THE tool to make online learning experiences truly worthwhilse for students. In her article “The Effects of a Synchronous Communication Tool (Yahoo Messenger) on Online Learners’ Sense of Community and their Multimedia Authoring Skills” Shiang-Kwei Wang reflects that “developing a community of learners is the key to a successful online-learning experience.” The massive benefit of this is that this community of learners could be at 38 different corners of the globe.

Students chatting to students from other sides of the globe will give them a first-hand look at the similarities and differences they share, both in and out of school. An 8-year old with knowledge of the world is a powerful tool for change.

However the implications of this don’t even have to have a global extent. Students sitting in the same room can motivate and help eachother with online chatting tools, Wang also reflects that each “learner should have opportunities to work with at least one other learner: together, they can monitor each other’s learning progress.”