Tag: technology

Ever so slightly (very) intimidated

Since this is my M. Ed capstone course of course the bar has been set high for our final project – a case study. I’ve spent the week being intimidated – firstly reading the case-study research of other people, and then the Colloquium with Pip Cleaves – where my brain and my writing hand lost sync with each other as I was in awe with what she’s doing in her classroom and school.

I think my main takeaway is that I need to take baby steps and to limit, limit, limit my ambitions as to what is possible in a few week’s case study.  One of the most interesting case studies, and one that was exemplified by Pip’s talk was by Hofer & Swan (2006) – primarily because they unravelled the strands of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge that teachers need to bring to bear when attempting to introduce technology in the classroom.

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_pedagogical_content_knowledge
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_pedagogical_content_knowledge

Back to the case study. As long term readers will be aware, I’m really interested in language, bilingualism and maintaining and sustaining mother tongue. Ideally I’d like to do something along those lines, but the area is just so huge I’m going to have to be very specific. One of the things I was considering was the information seeking behaviour of ELL families. There is so much information inherent and implicit in a school / schooling system, and how do students and their families tap into the explicit and implicit information where the dominant language is weak or absent?  Most international schools are adamant in not translating materials (erroneously in my opinion) – is there any way to prove this one way or another? What specific interventions or availability of information and in what form would make a difference? And how to realise this?

 

Another alternative would be about reading.  Early in my first position as Teacher-Librarian I quickly realised that we were just not meeting the needs of a whole segment of ‘reluctant’ readers. Unravelling reluctance is worth of tomes of research – is it a skill issue, an identification of suitable books issue, a time issue or a combination of them all or something else entirely? In response, with the excellent assistance of a very cool young male teacher, we formed a “blokes with books” club.  The uptake has been great with a core of around 10-15 boys attending the weekly meetings. They’ve invited their friends and it’s a rowdy, exuberant crowd who now feel much more at home in the library.  Together we agreed on a rough program of highlighting various genres, different authors and types of books in the hope they’d find “the magic key”. But did it make a difference really, or just anecdotally? How would we go about finding out the efficacy of the program generally and which aspects if any are particularly efficacious?

 

Other things that have caught my fancy recently is the concept of the “customer journey maps” in the library (perhaps linked to the information seeking idea) and the use of virtual badges for teaching information literacy – (teacher? student?)

 

Those are my thoughts that need refining and consideration at the moment. I have another 2 weeks to investigate and consider more!

 

 

Hofer, M., & Swan, K. O. (2008). Technological pedagogical content knowledge in action: A case study of a middle school digital documentary project. Journal of Research on Technology in Education (International Society for Technology in Education), 41(2), 179–200.

Open, social and Participatory Media in Education

In this week’s module we were posed the following questions:

  • How would curriculum change if our priority approach was on critical, creative, and collaborative thinking?
  • What does the reality of the modern age of information– this age of Google –suggest that we “teach”?
  • Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?

I was forwarded this very provocative article from the Atlantic by my boss this week = “The deconstruction of the K-12 teacher” It ties in quite nicely with the theme of this module, but it also turns the questions on their heads.

  • how would the curriculum change if they were in the hands of learners and not educators?
  • What does the reality of the modern age of information suggest as to who should be teaching?
  • Will “updating things as we go” enhance or delay the obsolescence of the current collective practice?

Or at least these could be the questions IF and only IF all the glory day assumptions on technology and education were true. As so many of my cohort have pointed out, the reality on the ground is very different from the theory and assumptions made up in ivory or silicon towers.  There are brilliant teachers who don’t touch technology and will never need to and their students are not any the poorer for it.  There are physical tools that are just as effective or more so than technological tools (see this great blog by Buffy Hamilton on writeable tables). There are pathetic teachers who wow and woo with their technical powess, and there are self-absorbed  #SoMe educators who p*** the hell out of their colleagues and students. There are teachers who are genuinely passionate and engaged with their students AND technology and how the combination can optimise learning and reach students in ways that traditional teaching may not be able to. There are those who have experimented and been rewarded and feel empowered to continue and those who have tried and failed or tried had had their fingers smacked by threatened superiors or administrators or frightened parents.

There are children who are naturally curious and respond to any and every stimulus be it text or video, paper or screen and dive right into everything and those who hang back, those who are scared of failing. Those who’ve seen it all, can do it all and more and those that need a lot of help.  A LOT OF HELP. Will technology be the panacea?

I’m not sure that education has ever moved forward by revolution (and it is usually at the behest of entrenched power structures that it does so). Rather it seems to have fits and starts and intermittant warfare (remember the reading/phonics wars?)

The question I think is really, in whose interest is it that education changes, and do they have the power and control to institute those changes?  And this is where it gets interesting. Coming back to the Atlantic article – it would appear to make economic sense to only have “super teachers” and to gain economies of scale, so that would benefit local / state governments wanting to save money. It may even be attractive to those wanting to pay less tax. It’s certainly interesting for commercial educational interests (Pearson etal. the most hated kid on the block it seems) to support this.

Who is driving this bus? I get the feeling that many educators are feeling like passengers, some willingly paid for the ride, some were forced to embark, some think they’re the conductor or the ticket collector,  But who has set the itinerary, and is there a driver or is it a unmanned ground or cloud vehicle?

I see the changes benefiting students as they can delve deeper and go further than the curriculum would allow. Go beyond the geographical and age limitations set by traditional classrooms.  I also see some of them them drowning in content without being able to absorb, internalise or think about it before moving on. I see them learning to use fabulous tools and I see them being sucked into a time-blackhole where the tool and the look of the product becomes more important than the content, the analysis, the thinking or the learning.

I don’t have answers, I just have observations and thoughts and questions right now.