Jane’s Blog

A mindmap I created for Mathematics based on Jonassen’s types of thinking with technology and what we have learnt in this course.

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I read the first 2 UTS Online mLearning Sample readings – Prensky “What can you learn from a cell phone” and FutureLab (see page 11). They discuss using mobile phones in education.

Here are my comments via podcast…

jane-morgan-mlearning

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WebQuests have been around since 1995 as the brainchild of Professor Bernie Dodge and Tom March.

Lamb (2005) gives a good summary of the 1995 – The Birth of the WebQuest in

Lamb, Annette & Teclehaimanot, Berhane (2005). A Decade of WebQuests: A Retrospective. In M. Orey, J. McClendon, & R. M. Branch, (Eds.)”. Educational media and technology yearbook (Vol 30). Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Dodge thought of them as a way of encorporating the Web into classroom activities. They now make use of the Web and are becoming even more appealing to students due to the influence of the social nature of Web 2.0. This allows further embracing of student-centred pedagogies and constructivism.

Like all buzzwords, everyone claims to be able to create WebQuests but Tom March reviews webquests to find that less than half are “real WebQuests”.

Tom March’s list of Best WebQuests is a very useful resource.

A Real WebQuest must not just collect new information but the learners must transform the information.

One simple test for a Real WebQuest (March, 2003) is – Can the results be created by “copying and pasting”? If the answer is yes then it does not qualify.

You can find many useful WebQuest links on TeacherTap (Locate and Evaluate WebQuests).

Like all quality lessons, Real WebQuests should make use of authentic tasks and open-ended questions, collaborative learning.

WebQuests have their own search engines eg. WebQuest.org and here are the secondary maths WebQuests it found.

I think doing WebQuests for our Assignment 2 is a very good way to learn about engaging students with technology as a taken-for-granted, not-to-be-ignored tool!

One of the benefits of LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) and other LMS (Learning Management Systems) and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is that they increase teacher productivity in the long term. Once the teacher has captured the lesson online they can reuse it, remix it and share it, even globally!

This type of software provides an authoring platform for creating, storing, distributing and sharing online educational activities.

LAMS has 4 environments (profile types):

Learner (to participate in a learning task), Author (teacher authors the learning tasks – or you could get students to design tasks for their peers), Monitor (where you can monitor each student’s progress as they flow throught the task’s steps) and Systems Administration.

LAMS is based on the output from an EDUCAUSE project. It focuses on ‘context’ in that the tasks created should be activity-based and encorporate collaborative pedagogies.

LAMS differs from other LMS with its “graphic workflow model” – it is a bit like my old days of programming where you create a flowchart – but in LAMS it is done online and the students click on each component of the flow to work on each task with their progress and work recorded for the teacher to monitor.

Teachers can share lessons via the LAMS Community Website.

These are useful scaffolding tools where a task can be individual or collaborative (vote, discuss, debate).

I just read Bryan Alexander’s “Web2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning“.

He suggests the label “Web 2.0″ is unimportant as it suggests quantifiable progress from Web 1.0 but many of these tools have been around since the 1990s (eg. Wikis).

The major component of “Web 2.0″ is social software (eg. blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasts, videoblogs, MySpace & Facebook). In fact there are so many that there is an acronym “YASN” (Yet Another Social Network).

I thought it was interesting what he said about Web 2.0 – that it puts an extra perspective on the Web – it is no longer just a book (with web pages) but is all about “microcontent” and “openness” (more than just 2-way flow) and using the “wisdom of crowds”.

The article educated me in “social bookmarking” (eg. del.icio.us) and how “folksonomy” (metadata of user generated tags) can be useful in the classroom. Being able to personalise the way you categorise bookmarks supports collaborative information discovery and can help teachers assess their students understanding (by seeing what sorts of links, websites and blogs they have amassed as important.

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Dr Geoff Romeo talks, like Papert, about using technology as the tool or scaffold. He thinks that the teachers who originally encountered technology in the classroom did a great job. However, today and tomorrow’s teachers need to do a lot of work to get it right.

I think one thing that is vital is that schools. like business, need an IT strategy. This should be at State Government level. This should not drive the core business of teaching & learning but should support it. School equipment is often out-dated and poorly maintained. If teachers want to use a particular technology tool they should have IT support to ensure it is available and working for all students and not have to waste valuable time sorting out start-up issues. There has to be a planned yet flexible approach. In many state schools, IT support is a secondary responsibility of a full-time teacher. When they can’t fix the problem sometimes schools must wait for days or a week before a Department IT person attends.

If we want technology use to be seemless, productive and enjoyable then teachers need support. They also need ongoing training (not just pre-teacher training). They have daily planning for up to 5 lessons a day and this must be combined with keeping up-to-date with new technology. It must be made easier and more accessible for teachers.

I have listened to Papert’s 2004 keynote speech at the Computing Conference in Sydney.

He really is a very persuasive speaker – “appealingly” logical. He is a mathematician, the developer of the computer language LOGO, a key figure in “Constructionism” (he worked with Piaget).

He asked controversially in 1990 – “We don’t have conferences on the use of paper and education, so why do we have conferences on computers and education?”, and is still explaining this valid question today.

I agree totally with his dilemma about the two sides of thought:

1. What will education be like in 20 years? (Visionary view) VS.

2. But what shall I teach on Monday morning? (Practical View)

We feel this conflict in our BTeach – we don’t even know how to teach our KLA in the current fashion and now we are being asked to redesign the curriculum – a big task … but someone has to begin it and we are in a good position to have open minds. However we still have to get the students to pass the exam… there it is again!

He stresses that you mostly hear HOW we can use technology to teach the same Maths differently… when we need to rethink WHAT we are teaching. This also resonates with Green & Hannon “the mistake of trying to prepare children for today’s jobs” (a great quote).

I had not thought about the current emphasis on the “get information” aspect of computers at the expense of the “computers as construction” aspect. Education should be focussed on active learning rather than retrieving information. This is the heart of the problem of technology and education – by constructing with technology, students achieve “deep understanding” (rigorous thinking). Papert’s ideas help allay a common fear regarding technology and curriculum (see the comments page about SMH’s article “Phone a Friend: the exam revolution”).

He inspires me to look at how we can get students to understand Mathematics in a different way. This is what I hoped to achieve when I enrolled in this course. Practicum surprised me with the rigid, busy curriculum and what a rush it is to cover it – and how students are conditioned for direct instruction.

A new quote to use on the students and children from Claudia Wallis.

“It’s not so much that the video game is going to rot your brain, it’s what you are not doing that’s going to rot your life”. While the children are sitting at the computer screen or texting and so on, they are not outside, they are not having face-to-face interactions, or family time…

Parents and teachers can learn from Gen M about uses of new technology but they must learn from us “that there is life beyond the screen”. This is obviously written by a digital immigrant perspective but some of it is commonsense. We can’t step back and smell the virtual roses.

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The impacts of multi-tasking

This article echoes many of our concerns about the Gen M(ulti-tasking). Can they really do so many things at once? Not according to this article. They will not be successful in the long term as they have only learnt to surface learn. Net Gen/Gen M are very good at finding information but the more “windows open on the hard drive” the more mistakes are made and the longer the task takes. Performing 2 tasks at once can often take more than twice as long as doing them both sequentially.

These are the concerns, but I think the important concept here is that our learners have changed and we have to adapt and engage them with technology and innovative pedagogies. They prefer graphical images to text and collaborative learner-centred work to direct instruction.

We have to teach them when and where to use technology, how to pursue learning deeply, to have mental downtime and get out and experience life as well.

Just watched Pay Attention

It is an important, worthwhile message to digital immigrant or analog teachers …

…but was it set at that speed and in that boring colour scheme so that digital immigrants not used to twitch-speed, graphical images, multi-tasking, quick pay-off would be able to keep up, not get distracted and understand the message?

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The Pros and Cons of Communicating via Instantaneous Technology

I am excited by the prospect of integrating technology into teaching high school students but I believe we also need to teach a new bag of social skills to go with the technology. We all know that teens are Net Gen’ers but we also know that there is a whole new world of social problems out there as a result of cyber-bullying, take for instance the Meier suicide in US.

I have been reading the Teen Culture articles and in particular Oblinger and Oblinger and am reminded of two things.

One, a Net Gen teen tells me how she is tired because her friend keeps texting her after midnight! “Turn off your phone when you go to bed…?” I suggest. One problem solved? Maybe. But this solution is not really appealing to Net Gen teen. Next, the same friend who texted at 1am and woke her is now an ex-friend due to the sleep-hazed terse reply to an invite. “You could try speaking to each other on the phone or even in person. Intonation and body language can help when communicating”…!

IM is useful but it has it’s place – maybe we should teach the Net Gen more about communication and social skills and what forms of communication are appropriate for what purpose. One acquaintance was complaining that she did not receive the SMS Wedding Invite from her friend who was upset that she had to ring her the week before the wedding due to her lack of RSVP!!!

Two, a play given by a public high school drama group at the ArtsNorth Drama Festival 2007 (held at UTS) about all the problems with technology and cyber-bullying – very insightful as students stand in line and get rearranged and depressed or elated depending on their new “friendship rank” based on IM amongst the group.

How effective is the learning when a person’s life is lived as “continuous partial attention” (Linda Stone, 1997 as quoted in Rainie)?

Next problem – we don’t all want to look like Mark Vaile with his cap facing backwards as he skateboards in his tie. How do we, digital immigrants, not look out of place to the digital natives?

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