Educational discoveries

The use of technology in the classroom can often be isolated rather than integrated into all KLA areas. To assist with in the implementation of more meaningful e-learning experience in the classroom I have found a brilliant website! Quest Atlantis is an incredibly virtual world where students can be involved in KLA lessons without it feeling like school work! Based around an intergalactic planet called Atlantis, students need to enter virtual worlds and share their experience and knowledge of subjects such as water conservation and healthy living to help the people of Atlantis survive in their decaying planet. The virtual world also allows students to create their own avatar, and impact on there virtual world in a way that they may not be able to in the real world. The website not only integrates KLA’s but also provides teachers with the means to implement lessons in a constructionist manner. The website provides PDF units of work for teachers to use in their classrooms to facilitate this learning. This website was so exciting to explore!!!

In my hometown, I grew up with a family whose youngest son had cerebral palsy. He was similar to Melissa in this youtube clip, in that he iwas a really smart young man, with an incredible sense of humour, and yet he could hardly speak in an understandable way. His mother and brother could understand key words and know what he was talking about, yet most other people never could understand him. When he was able to begin using assistive technologies to write emails and communicate, it was as if he had been given new life. He would write emails with the funniest stories of being trapped in his body with people assuming he couldn’t understand a word they said, his sense of humour in the toughest of situations was amazing. After having seen how his world was opened up by the use of assistive technologies I can only imagine the possibilities for many children like him, who are being educated in a totally new way thanks to technology. Watch this video, it truly is inspiring!

After spending many weeks exploring different technological advancements and their specific uses in the classroom I have come to realise a complete dichotomy in pedagogical practices. It seems that whilst the majority of research and theories surrounding the need for technology to be an integral part of the primary school curriculum, there are still a majority of teachers who simplify the teaching of technology to a checklist of basic skills to be developed in the weekly computer classes. An interesting commentary on this particular aspect is the document entitled ‘A modern day fairytale.’ This skit shows how the phobia of technology can slow down progress dramatically by illustrating a potential reaction to the pencil when it was first developed. Whilst the example does seem ridiculous I think one important key point is that the pencil was eventually integrated seamlessly into the school environment where there was no longer a need for pencil specialists!! Isn’t that ideally how technology should be integrated? However, to quote a concept that my lecturer has often said, technology shouldn’t be used for the sake of using it, there should be clear pedagogical reasons for the application of technology, transforming the way that teaching, discovering and learning occurs.

To achieve this, teachers need to be attending professional development courses, have an adventurous spirit (never being content that the job was done well enough but constantly searching for new ways of integrating technology) and most importantly the support of colleagues and schools. Maybe in the future we can look back and laugh about how long it took for such key technologies to become a part of everyday life!

After writing the previous blog based on smartboards, I was interested to find out what my peers had discovered about the interactive whiteboards either through experience or research. Penny wrote an interesting piece based on her research through the article Interactive Whiteboards: Boon or Boondoggle? Her main conclusion was similar to what Loren discussed in her blog. The argument for smartboards is not actually whether they are useful technology, but rather if teachers are USING them effectively. I know personally that technology can be difficult to approach and I am a young student teacher who has grown up with more technological understanding than the majority of the current aging australian teaching workforce!! The provision of training and workshops can assist with the appropriate useage of smartboards in schools, but I think it would also require vigilance on the part of the teacher to constantly evolve in their use of the whiteboard so that it remains new and exciting for students and holds firmly with constructionism values.

I was checking through my fellow educational students blog postings when I came across Loren’s blog posting on her first prac experience. This particular posting was interesting to read. Firstly because I am yet to teach in a school that uses smart boards and so haven’t seen how they work, and secondly, I have heard mixed responses to this technology. Some teachers I have spoken to who have them in their classroom are of the opinion that they are just an educational ‘fad’ and do not really improve learning at all. Others (who do not have smartboards) have said they are too expensive for little benefit and so other resources should be purchased instead. I was pleased to hear Loren’s enthusiasm in regards to this technology and in particular the professional training and support being given to the teachers so that they can effectively use them in the classroom. I still haven’t even seen a smartboard and so am now even more intrigued as to how they can be used to integrate technology with all KLA’s.

Teaching with an online medium differs from how you teach purely face to face without technological aids. I explored this idea with the assistance of the article Lessons learned teaching online by George Siemens. This article provided a very helpful summary of lessons that the author has learnt about teaching and learning online, all of which were helpful when Bridie and I were creating our online WebQuest with online learning capabilities.

There were twelve ‘tips’ for developing lessons using the online medium. One particular tip that caught my attention was based around the understanding that online lessons should not create the feeling of isolation from the teacher or peers, but should be used in a way that it facilitates ‘connectedness’ with a wider audience which is both liberating and motivating. I guess that when this is translated to the classroom, a great example of this connectedness is the collaborative learning projects that I have already discussed. These projects allow students to connect with peers in a way that was previously a slow process (through normal mail) but is now just a click away with the use of blogs, emails, vodcasts and podcasts.

As teachers we should be encouraging our students to connect with the rest of the world, and motivating them to learn from the plethora of resources now available to them because of the online medium. I encourage you to read the rest of the tips that George Siemens has provided. I am certain that there is something there for everyone to learn!

Whilst creating a WebQuest with my assinment partner, Bridie More, we found the most important part of the quest was the development of a rich task to be completed by the user. The Taskonomy page written by B, Dodge was invaluable in developing this task. Reading throungh the many varied possibilities of webquest tasks helped us to pinpoint the more constructivist task which we wanted to develop and how best to achieve it. We focused mainly onthe development of a ‘design taks’ where the user has to create a collaborative learning website based on the research they complete through the WebQuest. There was an aspect of ‘persuasion task’ involved in the WebQuest due to the development of a website proposal, where the team must justify the aspects of their website based on research and their own educational backgrounds. Take a look at our ‘Discover With Me’ WebQuest to see how we ended up devleoping and presenting those tasks.

through searching through the blogosphere I came across Rachel’s blog which contained an interesting piece on the world Maths day which was held on the 5th of March. As a student teacher it was helpful for me to gain insight into the the online Mathletics program and how this seemles IT integration has been successful in the classroom. The children that were involved in this mathletics program were given the chance to comment on their mathletics experience. Wouldn’t it be great to have such enthusiasm after every class???

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Seymour Papert discusses the difference between constructionism and instructionism in an extremely helpful way. This article was enlightening for me, giving me a better understanding of what constructionism is and how learning by doing is an important aspect of the e-learning subject. Skills already displayed in my blog such as the vodcast, podcast and comic strip can all be used within the classroom to carry this constructionist theme. Children can create and publish their own works, using existing knowledge and understandings to construct applications and further knowledge. Papert’s view that children learn best when they are active in the role of designer and constructor makes sense as you examine ther examples on  his website. The examples provided by Papert are definitely exciting, a little intimidating, but exciting. Papert stresses that he doesn’t want teachers to just copy these examples but to create their own examples of constructionism specific to their own students. I will certainly be thinking this through more!