Archive for April, 2007

Last week UNE hosted the Narrowing the Gap Conference. The purpose of this conference was to look at ways of ‘narrowing the gap’ and helping improve the learning performance of disadvantaged students.

One of the presenters at this conference was a principal whose school was about to embark upon a podcasting project addressing literacy issues for aboriginal students. Specifically, the aim of the project was the enhance literacy development in the Middle School. It was making use of the Quality Teaching Framework elements of Substantive Communication, Connectedness and Engagement.

As an aside, this framework is worth looking at but hard to get hold of if you’re outside DET NSW (that includes us here at UNE) however one article that lists the elements of the framework can be accessed from:

http://www.acel.org.au/conference2006/presentations/suestanford.doc

In regards to these elements the issues being targetted are:

• Substantive communication - both oral and written language.
• Connectedness - this was not only to get the aboriginal students reconnected with school but also their own culture both within and outside their local communities.
• Engagement - providing relevance for students beyond school

To help support this a number of technologies will be used. Firstly voice recognition software is going to be used to help students actually see what they are saying helping them improve their literacy skills making stronger links with written texts. Secondly, and this is the reason I’m talking about this, the school plans to use podcasting to help reconnect students with both school and their culture.

What’s so cool about this program is it will be the students responsible for the creation of the podcasts. This involves activities such as writing scripts, arranging interviews, recording and producing the podcasts. As Aboriginal culture has such a strong oral tradition, podcasts are a great way to capture stories both personal, and those of the local community.

What the school hopes to develop within their students is the concept of a ’student voice’. The creation of these podcasts for distribution should help students see that their ’stories’ and culture are valuable and worthy of a wider audience. The school is also hoping that this project will engender a greater sense of collaboration as students work together to develop these podcasts. Putting the podcasts together should also help enhance generic problem solving skills. So here’s wishing the school well!

At the end of the day though the tool is just a tool. It’s the philosophy behind its use that the critical factor here. And what’s behind that is the philosophy of how students learn held by the teacher. In regards to podcasts, like other tools, they can be used to support two very divergent styles of teaching and learning.

For example, I’m currently trying to learn Chinese - I’m learning it by podcast. The little experience I have in teaching languages I know the importance of practice and repetition. So in this respect the podcasts have been invaluable in supporting a largely behaviourist mode of teaching. In defence of the authors there are extensive notes and the language learning is embedded in meaningful contexts.

So certainly podcasts can be used to support a very didactic style of learning and reading a few of the posts people have been expressing some concern over this. You might be able to argue that having a teacher talking at students in some respects has got to be better than simply having the podcast doing the same thing. However let’s move beyond this and look at the use of podcasts from a constructivist perspective. I mean listening to a podcasts doesn’t take up much brainpower but certainly creating one should. Great questions like: “Who is going to be my audience?” “What do I want to say?” “To what purpose?” “What’s the idea I’m trying to put across?” “What’s my motivation for saying what I’m saying?” “Will I include all points of view or simply my own?” “How am I going to say it?” “What order am I going to say it in?” “Should I formal language or informal language?”

These are all great questions that require a fair bit of cognitive grunt to nut out. So creating a podcast requires a fair amount of good intellectual activity on behalf of the authors, so why would you allow your students to miss the opportunity to experience this by creating podcasts for them?

These type of activities also help students learn that language is something that is used for a purpose within a variety of social contexts and for a variety of reasons. By allowing the students the opportunity to create podcasts they can learn some powerful lessons about language and how it can be manipulated to achieve a particular purpose. Everybody has an agenda! We need to give students skills to be able to go beyond what’s simply being said.

Could we get similar outcomes without going to the trouble of creating podcasts? Probably, but would the kids be as engaged and motivated? They’re the people largely hooked into the mp3 players listening to the content and ideas of others, wouldn’t it be great to give them the same capabilities? It’s about empowering students and getting them to take control of their own learning. It’s also about keeping school relevant by placing it in the centre of these new social computing tools.

To wrap this up, we can really miss the boat on this stuff and we have before. Educational television was once hailed as the “next great thing” to help solve all of education’s ills. For one reason or another it failed. (To read about this and other examples have a look at Larry Cuban’s book Teachers and Machines.). Now it seems kids watch the television with little ability to understand or critique what’s being shown. We’re paying for this as well through what I think is pretty ordinary and banal programming. What happen to the good old days? I mean, I learned everything I needed to know from Roadrunner cartoons namely -

1. Gravity only applies when you realise it should be acting upon you.
2. Never buy anything from the ACME Supply Co.
3. The light at the end of the tunnel IS an oncoming train!

The picture? The Temple of Heaven and Earth, Beijing.

There’s a lot of good arguments about having an acceptable use policy (AUPs) for the use of blogs in the classroom. While not a big fan of a list of do’s and don’ts, I like the idea of a document outlining rights and responsibilities. For every right there might be a commensurate responsibility. I also see value in creating such a document with the students who will be working with it. You’d be surprised about how astute kids can be around developing this type of stuff. You might also be surprised about how draconian kids can be in deciding upon sanctions for breeching such guidelines.

While on the subject I’ve read a lot of policy documents and often the most common response to breeches of guidelines particularly with computers and the Internet is removal of user privileges. The question is if computer based resources are really so essential to each child’s learning should using them be considered a privilege? I’m not saying whether or not this is right or wrong; in some cases I imagine it can be quite effective for a quick consequence for a wrong action, but might we be sending mixed messages here?

Anyway, in regards to AUPs in my experience it’s good to be proactive in these areas. In one school I worked at I had developed and implemented an Internet AUP that I felt was fair, balanced and was working well. When the controlling authority of the school produced a ’suggested’ Internet AUP which I thought it was heavy handed and unwieldy, I was able to go to my boss and say, “Look we’ve already got a policy that’s been in place and has been working well so we really don’t really need to run with this other one”. My boss was cool with that and so we kept the policy we already had in place.

If you want to explore the issues of polices for blogs in particular or other issues on blogs in general sus out Bud the Teacher’s wiki at http://budtheteacher.com/wiki/

The picture? Pearl Tower in Shanghai

Sometimes technology has been called a solution in search of a problem. So I’ve been trying to nut out some uses for blogs in the classrooms. Especially for face to face classrooms. A lot of the blogs I’ve seen have their authors engaging in a great deal of reflection. This wouldn’t be a bad thing for classrooms I think. All too often we’re so focused on getting the work done we often forget to sit back, relax and reflect on what’s been done, what worked, what didn’t and generally how we feel about it. Getting kids to be reflective is also about helping them become metacognitive.

I suppose the trick is trying to convince kids of the value of being reflective. Perhaps this is the medium to do it. A blog is a bit like computing in casual clothes. I’m here at my office, in bare feet, listening to The Who and typing out what’s running through my head. I mean, it doesn’t feel like work! I’m not too fussed that the stuff I’m typing doesn’t sound that “academic”. This doesn’t mean I don’t care what I’m typing, quite the contrary, I’m probably closer to this stuff than anything I’ve probably written in unit notes or journal articles. So maybe that’s what kids need; a place to be real. I dunno (see that, I typed dunno).

Anyway back to the classroom. The RSS feeds from blogs offer a great opportunity for teachers who can subscribe to their students blogs so when anything is posted they get an update. This is called “push technology” as the information is being pushed out to us subscribers. The old fashion “pull technology” meant we would have to go looking for this stuff. So imagine you’ve got a classroom of 25 kids all blogging. If you’ve subscribed to each of their blogs you can check out what each kid’s up to in one fell swoop through an aggregator or live bookmarks. I reckon I’d rather do that than lug home 25 exercise books for marking.

Another opportunity would have the students commenting on each other’s blogs. When I thought about this my first reaction was what if kids posted comments that were hurtful and offensive? I suppose the first defence is that all comments can be moderated so anything that got sent would only go public with the permission of the author. This doesn’t stop the stuff being sent in the first place but it can limit any potential damage. Besides you wouldn’t let kids on this technology without clear guidelines about what is and what isn’t appropriate.

Anyway a little food for thought. The picture? If you haven’t guessed it’s The Great Wall of China. UNE does a trip for a TESOL Practicum every year. I hope to be going back again to China this year for a wedding.

Zaijian!

Hi, welcome back I trust you had a relaxing Easter. This cycle of discussions looks at some Social Computing Tools. The purpose of this topic is to make you aware of and start thinking about how you might use such tools in your classroom. Exploration will be the main teaching method used to help familiarise with the topic’s content.

This Blog is structured as follows:

1. Post such as these which are displayed in chronological order
2. Pages which are more permanent locations for information
3. Weblinks directing you to the various resources.

I’d encourage you to explore all the resources provided on this Blog and read all the articles supplied as they will help give you a better idea about how these tools developed, what makes them different from other technology tools, and applications for them in the classroom.

In terms of the sequencing of topics read the Introduction, About Web 2.0, Blogs, Podcasts and Wikis.

But most importantly explore this blog, post comments if you wish and consider starting up your own Blog.

Welcome to the EDIT 413 Introduction to Computer Mediated Learning Blog. This is the first time I’ve used a blog to supplement my teaching of this unit. We will be working off this blog for the topic Social Computing Tools.

Check the menu bar on the left hand side as it provides the content for this topic. More content will be added to this blog as time progresses. That’s one of the characteristics of blogs - they’re organic. By subscribing to this blog (see below) you can be brought up to date with further changes that occur. As for the Starters a list of the readings you will be required to summarise can be accessed from here.

First things first though, read the material titled Using an Aggregator as this will help you get set up in order to get the most out of this part of the unit.