This post is a reflective synopsis of a series of analyses of selected learning technologies. The post begins with a brief discussion of my
teaching context and the characteristics of a contemporary effective learner in
order to contextualise the use of the digital tools examined in this blog post.
This is followed by a description of my (emerging) personal framework for e-learning
design. The first reflections and conclusions are based on participating
in two learning activities: Mobile Phones Wiki; and Learning Theories Quiz
Wiki. The next four reflections are a synthesis of the exploration of
four groups of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the
selection of one tool from each group to support learning in my teaching
context. Each reflection is organised around three main components: my
exploration of the tools; learning theories and thinking routines (scaffolding
activities); and application to my teaching context. These
reflections are followed by a brief discussion of the legal, safe and
ethical guidelines that should be employed when using digital tools
in a school environment. This blog post concludes with a discussion
on the implications for my praxis. The reflections and conclusions are based on
a series of blog posts at http://joluck.blogspot.com.au/
Teaching Context, Contemporary Learners and Digital Pedagogies
Personal Framework for e-Learning Design
Working with Wikis
The learning theory quiz was the second wiki activity completed in week 2. For this activity we were asked to self-select into smaller groups and post our thoughts on how best to answer four multiple choice questions (MCQ) on the topic of learning theories and using ICTs in education. There was little scaffolding in this exercise and some people chose to insert their comments into the MCQs themselves and others wrote their thoughts and responses underneath the relevant MCQ. Some people used coloured font and their initials to indicate their comments and others just wrote theirs using the default font. I found this a little frustrating as I was late in completing this task and in the first six quizzes I looked at I found it hard to work out what words represented the original questions and what were added by other people. Being a sequential and sensing learner I had difficulty coping with this activity. As these MCQs were also preparation for completing assessment item 1 I felt I had to know the correct answers so pragmatically I cut and pasted the MCQs and my responses into an email and sent them to Wendy asking for feedback on my comments. I could not cope with this collaborative confusion!!! For more detail on my personal reflection, what I learned from participating in both these wiki activities and how I would apply wikis and deBono’s Six Thinking Hats in my teaching context please read my Working with Wikis blog post.
Group 1 - Blogs, Wikis and Websites
Group 2 – Images, Audio and Video
(Source: http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2013/03/14/radvertising-french-toilet-paper-ad-is-solid-gold-video/)
Education Queensland. (2013). Contemporary Effective Learner Retrieved April 8, 2013 From https://staff.learningplace.eq.edu.au
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2008). Introducing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, New York) (pp. 1-16). Retrieved March 14, 2011, from
http://punya.educ.msu.edu/presentations/AERA2008/MishraKoehler_AERA2008.pdf.
Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivisim: A learning Theory for the Digital Age. April 4 Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm
Wikipedia (n.d.). Various definitions Retrieved March-April, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/
Teaching Context, Contemporary Learners and Digital Pedagogies
Mishra and Koehler
(2008, p. 2) argue that designing “solutions that honour the complexities of the
situations and the contexts presented by learners and classrooms” is an
important factor in successful e-learning design. At this point in time, I have
very limited knowledge about the context within which I will be teaching. All I
know is that my teaching areas are Information Technology (IT) and Mathematics
and my first prac experience will be teaching year 8 & 9 students at an all girls school. My engagement with the digital
tools for e-learning design is constrained by this limited knowledge. Until I
fully understand my teaching context and my learners I will not be able to
effectively integrate the technologies I am reflecting on in this synopsis into
my teaching praxis.
I have examined the
complicated nature of modern schools and classrooms and what is meant by the concept of a contemporary effective learner in this ICTs
in Queensland Classrooms in the 21st Century blog post. This post highlights the complexity of teaching in modern classrooms and that I have much to learn from my mentor teachers while I am on prac. The reflections in this
blog post about the uses of digital technologies for teaching contemporary
learners will be a work in progress for many years to come.
Personal Framework for e-Learning Design
Please read my Personal
Framework for e-Learning Design blog post where I reflect on what I have
learnt in this course and how it will influence the ways that I use digital pedagogies in
my teaching.
Working with Wikis
The learning theory quiz was the second wiki activity completed in week 2. For this activity we were asked to self-select into smaller groups and post our thoughts on how best to answer four multiple choice questions (MCQ) on the topic of learning theories and using ICTs in education. There was little scaffolding in this exercise and some people chose to insert their comments into the MCQs themselves and others wrote their thoughts and responses underneath the relevant MCQ. Some people used coloured font and their initials to indicate their comments and others just wrote theirs using the default font. I found this a little frustrating as I was late in completing this task and in the first six quizzes I looked at I found it hard to work out what words represented the original questions and what were added by other people. Being a sequential and sensing learner I had difficulty coping with this activity. As these MCQs were also preparation for completing assessment item 1 I felt I had to know the correct answers so pragmatically I cut and pasted the MCQs and my responses into an email and sent them to Wendy asking for feedback on my comments. I could not cope with this collaborative confusion!!! For more detail on my personal reflection, what I learned from participating in both these wiki activities and how I would apply wikis and deBono’s Six Thinking Hats in my teaching context please read my Working with Wikis blog post.
Though I recognize the value of
using wikis for collaborative learning the activities we undertook were not
completed without encountering some problems. These problems highlighted the possibilities of technology producing adverse
effects on learning. For example, there were two problems that I observed: the instructions
were unclear and ambiguous; and the students’ limited knowledge of the technology
and its affordances. I have explained the confusing instructions in the Working with Wikis blog post. These problems had a
negative impact on the attitudes and perceptions of many students, and as
Marzano & Pickering (1997, p. 13) suggest, when attitudes and perceptions
are negative, learning suffers. The limited
experience among students of how to use a Wiki through collaborative authoring
led most students to adopt approaches to the task that limited the benefits of
the technology. For example, many people, myself included, wrote our initials/names
next to our postings so that readers would be aware that we had participated in
the activity. Furthermore, instead of editing and adding to what others had
written (collaborative authoring) many of us just added an extra paragraph to
what was already written. There was also little evidence of Connectivism at work as people contributed their own
thoughts but did not link them to other sources on the Internet and elsewhere.
Read more on Connectivism in my blog post.
Group 1 - Blogs, Wikis and Websites
In Week 3 I explored how the Group 1 Tools could support
digital pedagogies (see my Blogs, Wikis and Websites blog post). Without a complete understanding of my teaching
context it is difficult to argue for the use of one technology over the other
two. I can imagine using all three as they each have affordances that would be appropriate
for differing contexts. All three tools have the capability to demonstrate Connectivism in action for the students. Connectivism is based on the
proposition that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections.
Blogs, Wikis and Websites all have the affordance of helping the students learning
constructing and traversing those networks of connections all over the world
(Siemens, 2004).
The Group 1 tool that I currently feel most comfortable
about using in my teaching is Blogs. A Blog, or Web Log, is a website that is
commonly maintained by a single-author (but can be many authors) and usually
contains regular entries of personal commentary on news items (ABC blogs) or other subjects (for example, parenting). Some people use blogs as personal,
online diaries. Blogs can contain materials such as images, audio or video and
link to other blogs or websites. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological
order. Interactivity of blogs is afforded through the ability of readers to
leave comments on a blog post. This allows a dialogue to occur between
individuals. The ability to leave comments and make hyperlinks on other
students’ posts encourages self-learning as it creates a learning community
that goes beyond the classroom (Downes, 2004). If using them for teaching Blogs are owned by the students.
They have full control over the content and therefore ideas expressed in their
blogs. I have critically reflected on my experiences with using blogs using a PMI tool
and examined their affordances as teaching tools in my Blog post for Week 3.
One thing I would like to add to the reflection on Blogs is
that when using Blogs in class or for my own use in the future I will move to
the WordPress platform. I found the editor in Blogger to be problematic and
unforgiving at times. I have experimented with WordPress and I think it would
be a better tool to use in my personal reflection and my teaching.
One teaching strategy that I would implement when using
Blogs for teaching is to encourage the students to work with a small group of Blog Buddies. Being overwhelmed by the expectation to read more than 100
student blogs in EDED20491, I invited five of my fellow students to be my Blog Buddies. The Blog Buddies post has been the most read and heavily commented post on
my blog to date.
Other Group 1 tools that I explored were Wiki’s and Websites. I did not choose Wikis because at
the present time I don’t feel confident in setting up a Wiki to use in a
secondary school class. As discussed in the preceding section of this post I
had mixed feelings about the use of Wikis in EDED20491. I do however engage
with Wikis on almost a daily basis through Wikipedia. I have set up my own Wiki site and I plan to encourage my fellow students to add to
so that we can use it as a resource for the use of ICTs in Education while we
are student teachers. My critical reflection of my experiences in setting up a
wiki and how I would employ it in my teaching is available on my Wikispace site.
I can foresee that I will use
Websites in my praxis but more as a tool to store teaching materials for my
students than getting students to create their own websites. As discussed in my
blog post where I evaluated Websites,
I see value in using websites as a ‘hub’ to store and link to interactive
activities for the students to complete. Having said that I think getting
students to create their own websites would be a fantastic way to get them
working at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy where they would be their designing, developing, and creating
skills to produce a new product from their original ideas.
Group 2 – Images, Audio and Video
We were tasked with
examining the Group 2 Tools in week 4. I
have compared these three tools in a reflective blog post on digital images, audio and video. I also wrote
three separate blog posts, Images, Audio and Video where I explored each of these digital tools, reflected on their
ease of use and discussed the implications for my learners. Each post used a SWOT analysis to scaffold the analysis and each post includes
a brief discussion of the ways each tool could be used purposefully in my
teaching context.
I was asked to select one tool to
further explore. As with the reflection on the Group 1 tools I found that
without understanding my teaching context it is difficult to argue for the use
of one technology over the other two. I can imagine using all three for
differing teaching contexts. Nevertheless, the Group 2 tool that I selected for
further exploration was Images. At first you might think that the images is the
‘least sexy’ option of the three tools. But I chose Images because pictures and
graphics are easy to create or obtain and you can make them animated and clickable (interactive). You do not have use static images. I also believe in the less is more
principle. Images (if they have been made smaller with a tool such as Mobaphoto) require less bandwidth and the tools to take images (devices
with cameras) are more freely available. In addition, there are many sites on
the web where you can obtain free images that you can use on a non-profit
webpage—with due acknowledgement.
Images have a range of uses in
education. They can be used as a topic for analysis, they can be used to
illustrate a point. They can make teaching materials more engaging. If the Images are used in conjunction with a tool like Glogsters they can
be made clickable and as such they can be used for interactive activities with
the students. The uses of Images in education are endless and subject to the
teacher’s and students’ creativity. When using photos of students care should
be taken if the photos are placed on a webpage that is accessible to people
outside the school, either obtain parental permission for the release of the
photos or blur their faces.
Group 3 – Presentation Tools
The Group 3 tools investigated in
Week 5 were all presentation tools: PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster. To choose one of these tools to over
the other two was a difficult decision without a comprehensive understanding of
my teaching context. I know that all three tools will be useful additions to my
technology toolkit. I have explored each of these tools and critically
evaluated them for teaching purposes using a PMI
tool in my PowerPoint, Prezi
and Glogster
blog posts.
Though I love Prezi and was
completely rapt in Glogster (a tool I had not used before) I believe that I
have to select PowerPoint as the tool that will probably be of most use to me
in the classroom. I can imagine using it more for preparing my teaching materials
than I will the other presentation tools. PowerPoint has the ability to
make it interactive so if I design a task well enough I will be able to use
PowerPoint in a manner that encourages students to use their HOTS (Bloom’s
Taxonomy). I can also picture that PowerPoint is a tool that I can get the
students to use themselves to create learning artefacts. The ability to add
images, audio and video to PowerPoints mean that the students can use their
creativity skills (HOTS) when designing PowerPoint presentations.
There are three
reasons why I believe PowerPoint will be used by me in my teaching more than
Prezis and Glogsters. Firstly, because I am a PC user and am familiar with
MS-Office I find it easy to use PowerPoint as the menus are similar in all the
MS-Office Suite of programs, hence using PowerPoints will save me time.
Secondly, PowerPoint has an advantage because of its widespread availability.
If the school is PC-based then they will most likely have MS-Office on all
computers. Even if the students do not have access to PowerPoint at home they
would still be able to download a free reader to be able to play PowerPoints at
home. The third reason is because you do not need access to the Internet to use
PowerPoint. To use Prezi to create presentations you need to be online unless
you pay to use the software. Similarly Glogsters need access to the Internet to
be created and used. You can read more about my comparison of the three
presentation tools in my Presentation Tools blog post.
Group 4 – Word Clouds
The Group 4 tool I explored was Word Clouds or Tag Clouds which are weighted lists used as a visual representation of
text data. In my Word Cloud blog post I explain how Word clouds are simple tools that
could be used to great effect in my teaching and provide several examples of
how I could get students to construct them in the classroom. Word Clouds could
be used for a simple analysis of a block of text and to give feedback to
students about their writing. As Word Cloud tools create infographics which visualise
data they can be used as a tool in scaffolding student learning. Word Clouds
could be used to motivate students to using their HOTS (analysing, evaluating
and creating skill levels in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy). I tried several of the
free tools for creating Word Clouds. My recommendation would be to use Tagxedo as it provided more options in the
look and feel of the graphic image produced including making the Word Clouds appear
in a shape of your choosing.
Gary Holmes made a comment
on my Word Cloud blog post where he described the ideas I presented as “very
timely…[at] my recent meeting with the assistant regional director in this EQ
region. He really pushed the need for schools to focus on vocabulary and stated
the link to research suggesting this was a way to improve our student
performance data”. Hence, Word Clouds could also be used to create meta data about
student learning and their achievements.
Legal, Safe and Ethical Guidelines
It is essential that as
a teacher I create a safe, legal and ethical environment for my students to
work within digital spaces. This will be achieved by me modeling good practice
as I have done in all my blog posts and in the artefacts that I have created in
this course. I have acknowledged my sources, cited people’s words using the APA
referencing style and not breached any copyright laws. When writing my blog
posts, the discussion forums and commenting on other students’ blog posts I
have used language that is polite, encouraging and supportive of other peoples’
ideas. When teaching I will explicitly teach these skills to my students. In
addition, I will set up safe environments for the students to work within and
will teach them skills such as the THINK strategy so they can self-manage working in a safe
environment. I have posted a blog entry where I critically reflected on creating
a Legal, Safe and Ethical Environment for Online Learning.
This blog also includes a list of resources that I can use when teaching.
Implications for my Praxis
One aspect of embedding ICTs in my teaching
that concerns me is the amount of time it takes to do it well. There is extra
time required in the preparation of teaching materials and ensuring the
technology in the classroom is working, the time it takes to execute the lesson
and the time it takes to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. In addition,
there is the extra time needed outside of class to monitor work and provide
feedback. When on prac I will be engaging my mentor teachers in discussions on
what resources they use and how they manage their time when working in digital
environments. I have also reflected on other aspects of teaching with ICTs in
my Incorporating Digital
Technologies into my Teaching blog post.
When reflecting on what
I have achieved in this course over the last five weeks I can relate to
opinions expressed in a recent blog post by Mark Fijor a Technology Facilitator
in a primary school in Chicago entitled The Ugly Truth of Technology Integration. Fijor (2013) argues
that “integrating any technology into the classroom can be messy, clumsy, challenging and downright frustrating” (n.p., emphasis
in original). His blog post describes how when presenting new tools and
concepts to teachers the presenters often leave out the stories of the struggles
and learning that occurred when working out how to use the tool for “fear of
not appearing as an expert” (n.p.). Fijor (2013) asserts that using the TPACK
model provides a mechanism to provide educators with the essential knowledge
needed to integrate a tool into the classroom. Fijor (2013) provides a list of
questions that educators need to be able to answer before integrating a new
technology into their classroom. As well as being a very helpful list of
questions this blog post also actively demonstrated to me how TPACK can be used
to increase the likelihood of success when integrating a new technology into
the classroom. This connects with Mishra & Koehler’s (2008) description of
an expert teacher as someone who is able to “flexibly navigate the space
defined by the three elements of content, pedagogy, and technology and the
complex interactions among these elements in specific contexts” (p. 10).
Mishra and Koehler (2008)
describe an expert teacher has someone who has a “deep, pragmatic, and nuanced
understanding of teaching with technology” that enables them to effectively
solve the wicked
problem
of using ICTs in their teaching (p. 2). Through preparing for and writing this
assessment item I have identified a number of future tasks that I need to
complete:
1. Develop effective methods of using TPACK to determine the most appropriate technologies and pedagogies to teach content knowledge in my teaching areas of Information Technology and
Mathematics.
2. Spend more time thinking about learning theories and thinking
routines and relating them to my teaching.
3. Learn more about my teaching context.
4. Adopt a more exploratory approach to my use of digital tools in my
teaching.
5. Learn how to use a Promethean Interactive White Board.
6. Explore
what is meant by ‘Differentation’ in school and how I can employ digital tools
to support differentiation in students.
7. Explore the use of videoconferencing such as Blackboard Collaborate
as a tool for learning.
The last point I would
like to make is that a bit of humour will always help to create a positive
climate in the classroom for teaching. This French advertisement illustrates that technology will not completely replace paper...enjoy!
(Source: http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2013/03/14/radvertising-french-toilet-paper-ad-is-solid-gold-video/)
References
De
Bono, E. (n.d.). Six Thinking Hats. Retrieved April 11, 2013, from http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm
Downes, Stephen (2004, September-October). Educational Blogging. Educause Review. Pp. 14-26.
Retrieved March 19, 2013, from: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf
Education Queensland. (2013). Contemporary Effective Learner Retrieved April 8, 2013 From https://staff.learningplace.eq.edu.au
Fijor, M. (2013, March
18). The Ugly Truth of Technology
Integration. Retrieved April 6, 2013 from http://www.newschooltechnology.org/2013/03/the-ugly-truth-of-edtech/
Marzano, R. J., &
Pickering, D. J. (1997). Dimensions of Learning (2nd ed., p.
352). Aurora, CO: McREL.
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2008). Introducing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, New York) (pp. 1-16). Retrieved March 14, 2011, from
http://punya.educ.msu.edu/presentations/AERA2008/MishraKoehler_AERA2008.pdf.
Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivisim: A learning Theory for the Digital Age. April 4 Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm
Wikipedia (n.d.). Various definitions Retrieved March-April, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/
