IWB: The Blackboard of the 21st Century

Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) are the Blackboard of the 21st Century.

Schools throughout Central Queensland are rapidly adopting the technology, with Parkhurst State School (in Rockhampton) featuring an IWB in every classroom.

Dysart State School (DSS), where I attended most of my primary years (and where my mother is currently a teacher), has also embraced IWB technology - with almost all teaching spaces housing an IWB. Late last year I visited the school (volunteering as a 'class helper') and was amazed to see how the classrooms had transformed since I was a student there in the early 1990's... air-conditioning, IWBs and no painfully uncomfortable wooden chairs!

DSS has two types of IWBs – Soft boards for the lower school (as they are essentially giant touch screens, ideal for children to interact with) and Hard boards for the upper school (as they include an electronic pen and are ideal for tasks requiring greater accuracy).

At DSS, the IWBs have access to everything on the school network, internet access, the ability to play DVDs and access to software programs on the schools network specifically designed for IWB use including; Super Spell, Google Earth and Art Rage. IWBs have become integral to daily lessons at DSS, with teachers frequently using the IWB to visit educational websites (such as Enchanted Learning and Music Lab) and display pictures and documents.

IWBs offer a host of benefits, for example:

- Teachers can plan and save lessons in advance on the computer.
- Class work can be saved, printed and emailed.
- ICT skills can be seamlessly integrated into the syllabus and learning experiences.
- Various media, software and internet applications can be displayed and used on the one teaching board.
- Students are exposed to and can use various technologies and programs in the classroom which, without an IWB, would be difficult.

Most importantly, learning in a classroom with an IWB becomes a visual and interactive experience which facilitates hands-on, student-centred learning. Referring to Dale’s Cone (below), IWBs promote active, deeper and more effective learning through demonstration and direct, purposeful experiences (Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence, 2000). For instance, teachers can easily demonstrate content and activities on the IWB and students can use the electronic pen to interact with the board or search internet sites (e.g. Google Earth or Wikipedia) themselves during class discussions to find the answer to their question – becoming an active participant in their own learning. IWB's also enable students to 'practice by doing' and immediately apply what they have learnt, which according to the Learning Pyramid, further promotes active learning and higher retention (Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence, 2000).

Later this month, our internal class will be visiting Parkhurst State School and I am looking forward to seeing their IWBs in action and learning about their ICT program.




Images courtesy of: Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence.(2000).

RSS & Google Reader - A "Followers" Best Friend

Like me, you may have noticed a bright orange icon (featured right), when visiting blogs or websites, but haven't been sure exactly what it is or what it is used for. It is an RSS icon, and as I have learnt, RSS aggregators and feeds are extremely helpful for online users, teachers and students alike.

RSS is an acronym for 'Really Simple Syndication.' RSS enables users to easily follow frequently viewed blogs, podcasts and websites using an RSS aggregator. Prior to RSS, web users needed to firstly remember, and then visit each website or blog of interest to check for new information. However, thanks to RSS feeds (a ‘behind the scenes’ code generated by blogs and websites), updates can be brought directly to your computer and accessed via an RSS aggregator (Pearce & Bass, 2008, p. 2).

In my ICTs course, I set up an RSS aggregator in Google Reader to follow the blog postings by my colleagues, education professionals and websites related to the course content in ICTs. The process of setting up an RSS aggregator is user friendly and would be easy for both upper primary and secondary school students to use. To follow the RSS feeds/ postings of my peers, it was simply a matter of creating a Google account for my blog, accessing the Google Reader website, logging into my Google account and copying and pasting the feed URL of blogs I chose to follow into the “Add a subscription” field in the top left corner of the Google Reader page (as show in the image below) and then clicking “Add.”

With a list of subscriptions in place, I have since been able to monitor, link to, and comment on the blog postings of my peers, all from one point – my Google Reader page. Without RSS and an RSS aggregator, I would have needed to record my peers URLs separately and continually check their blogs to see if new postings had been made. Thus, RSS has made the process of following blogs much more efficient.

Using RSS and an RSS aggregator in this course has prompted me to consider how RSS technology can be utilised by teachers for their own professional use and in the classroom with their learners (and other stakeholders in learning process such as parents).

Professional Applications

Firstly, RSS is an invaluable aid for professional development online. An aggregator such as Google Reader allows teachers to keep abreast of the latest in pedagogical practices and technologies world-wide by following the blogs of other professionals and leading technology/ education websites. RSS can also be used to monitor sites for upcoming professional development opportunities, as many presentations and conferences are now conducted or available online. Google Reader is ideal for this purpose as it can be accessed from any computer and allows you to sort sites you are following into categories, and view a list of updates or an expanded plain text summary. RSS aggregators also make the process of following the reflective blogs of colleagues and other professionals simple, and aids in the establishment and maintenance of a ‘community of practice’ for teachers.

Classroom Applications

RSS aggregators can be used in much the same way to keep up to date with student work and their progress. The process of tracking a set of class blogs or wikis can be done via an RSS aggregator and teachers can easily link to a student or groups work to read further or leave a comment. Imagine how difficult the task of tracking your learners posts would be, if each student in your class (or classes), had a blog as a part of their assessment. RSS aggregators would also be of benefit to staff, students, parents and the community following a school of class webspace. Parents for example, could subscribe to your class’ RSS feed and easily keep track of class activities, daily updates and timetables.

Many students already use RSS in their everyday life (for example through Facebook) and some will use RSS feeds when they enter the workforce. It is therefore essential that students are given the opportunity to apply RSS technology in their school work. This is also important since understanding and using a web application like RSS is great for learners to enhance their digital literacy skills as they discriminate, monitor and manage feeds in an RSS Reader. On a practical level, RSS could be used by students as they engage in collaborative activities such as developing a wiki space or to follow the learning blogs of their peers. Teachers could also use RSS with their learners to ‘feed’ information about homework task, timetable changes or due dates.

Plug-ins & Gadgets - Enhancing the Learning Experience

Over the past few days I've been customising my e.journal.  Today I added a 'gadget' in the form of a Sudoku game. You will find the game towards the bottom of my sidebar on the right, so please feel free to give it whirl and break up your blog following!

After discovering the various gadgets available online, I started considering how various ICTs, gadgets (be it a Sudoku game or a virtual pet) and plug-ins (such ‘voki’), can be used by students to express themselves and feel a sense of ownership.

The ability for students to personalise their blog or wiki for example (with different 'gadgets,' layouts, colours and the like), enables them to be creative and inject some of their own personality into their work, which would in-turn foster a sense of ownership. Moreover, the hands-on and customisable nature of digital tools such as blogs, enables students to become more invested in the learning process through active participation.

As I will discuss in a future post, vokis are one plug-in available to students to personalise web pages or emails, stamping their own personality on their work.

The video below explains how blogger account users can add gadgets.

Interesting Viewing - The Importance of Technology in Classrooms

I came across an interesting YouTube video today. It was created by Carl Anderson in 2007, and highlights the importance of using technology in modern classrooms.

Watch the video embedded below, and feel free to share your reactions and thoughts....



The video really resonated with me and I found the mix of text, images and music quite engaging.

In one section, the text reads "Digital tools improve motivation and are appropriate tools for active engagement in authentic learning tasks." Given what I have read regarding Learning Engagement Theory and Dale's Learning Cone, Anderson's statement about digital tools in this video certainly reflects the academic literature and popular thinking about e-learning.  Furthermore, by actively engaging students in authentic learning tasks as Anderson recommends, the average retention rate would be higher, as learners 'practice by doing' with ICTs and can immediately use what they have learnt.

"They [children] want to learn with the tools that will shape their future" was another key statement for me. Children use computers and digital media, including blogs, mobile phones and i-phones everyday. So, why not enhance and motivate student learning by engaging kids with the tools they; regularly use, enjoy and are familiar with? Particularly when we, as teachers, are preparing them to live and work in a 'knowledge economy' where digital tools are the foundations for the knowledge and information, society so greatly values.

ICTs and Diversity: Program Sucess at a Gladstone Primary School

During a tutorial in 'Supportive Learning Environments' on 22nd March, the course co-ordinator Ken Purnell, mentioned an ICT reading program at a public primary school in Gladstone. The program involved interactive reading/ literacy software and had achieved significant learning gains among aboriginal students in the school’s year 7 classes.

Given that I’m also studying ICTs, I was interested by his story and asked Ken Purnell why he thought the program had been successful in bridging the diversity learning gap. Our tutorial class then discussed why this may have been.

Included below are some of the points our tutorial group came up with:

- 21st century learners brains are not ‘hard-wired’ to learn via ‘chalk and talk.’

- Aboriginal students have a tendency to be disengaged learners and can find it difficult to remain attentive. Introducing computer software helped engage and involve students in their own learning.

- The program used quality, software from the United States that included various sensory elements – video, visuals, audio etc. It may have been more expensive for the school to purchase, but the investment was ultimately justified given the positive learning outcomes.

- The students didn’t feel pressured by their teachers or peers, they could learn at their own pace and at a reading level suitable for them, without the threat of humiliation due to their perceived (or real) poor reading ability.

- The reading software created a one-on-one learning experience in a classroom where it is usually one-to-twenty odd students.

- The software was age appropriate, culturally appropriate and offered positive reinforcement for the students as they progressed through the various reading levels in the program.

This is just one example of how ICTs are being used in our region to enhance learning for all students, including those with varying forms of diversity.

A Blog on Blogs...

The World Wide Web and the Internet first came onto the scene in the late 1980’s. However, there were, as with most new technologies, only a handful of internet users when the web first emerged, namely researchers and governments sharing data via HTML code (Richardson, 2006, p. 1). The way we use the internet today is vastly different. The advent of web browsers and user friendly publishing tools, coupled with the mass adoption of internet technology, faster bandwidths and computer ownership, now means that virtually any literate person with basic computer and internet skills, can publish to the web. From its beginning as a means of data and information transfer for the few, the internet is now a communication tool (among many other things) for the masses.

The term blog is short for Web Logs. Blogs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog are essentially a web page used to record regular commentary (via ‘posts’). They can also include other  non-text based elements such as; graphics, audio, music and videos. Blogs are most frequently used as an online personal journal by individuals. For an introduction to how blogs work, click here or view the video "Blogs In Plain English" below.

Blogs have been widely adopted by various groups of internet users (including journalists, businesses, school students, professionals and other individuals) and the number of blogs online has grown exponentially over the past decade. This is due in part, to the fact that blogs are easy to use (no knowledge of complex HTLM language is required) and are most often available free through sites such as blogger and wordpress. An internet Search Engine for blogs - Technorati (a clever play on words, combining Technology and Literati), has chronicled growth and trends in the Blogosphere since 2004 and has some great articles and blog links for those interested.

The important questions for teachers and pre-service teachers are: What do blogs mean for education? Why should teachers consider designing learning experiences that include blogs? How can teachers utilise this technology in the classroom?

Blogs have gone “mainstream.” With so many children and young adults either familiar with the technology, or using blogs outside of school, they present an incredible opportunity for teachers. There are numerous reasons why teachers should include blogs and blogging activities in their learning design. Firstly, blogging promotes the cultivation of independent learning skills as students become active participants in their own learning (Ahrenfelt & Watkin, 2008, p. 64). This is a key tenant of active learning theory, Dale's Cone and the Learning pyramid.

A reflective blog (or learning journal) for example, develops students’ abilities to review, record and reflect on their learning. Secondly, as blogs can be personalised (e.g. via layout changes, vokis, images and ‘gadget’ additions), they promote a sense of student ownership. Thirdly, as blogs are potentially read (and commented on) by a world wide audience, they motivate students to produce their best work and to be critical of the work they are producing - promoting higher order thinking among students as they critique and evaluate their posts and the posts of others.  Overall, students are likely to be interested in the technology, more engaged in the learning experience and further motivated to learn, read and write.

It is also important to note that ‘digital literacy’ is becoming a fundamental component of the literacy curriculum and indeed, within society today (Pearce & Bass, 2008, pp. 21-22; Winch et al., 2009). Authoring your blog and reading and commenting on others’ blogs, can only serve to enhance student’s digital literacy skills.

So how can we use blogs in education and the classroom?

There are several ways in which teachers can include blogs in their pedagogical approaches. Blogs can be used for creative writing, to document and present class/ assignment work or as a tutorial or homework space. The course co-ordinator in ICTs for Learning Design at CQ University (Scot Aldred), offered an excellent example of how blogs can be used for tutoring individual students outside of school hours, from any internet enabled location.  The example given, related to a blog created for tutoring ‘Natalie’ who was requiring assistance with her high-school mathematics content. Scot Aldred, her tutor, posted a question on a blog he had set up for Natalie, where she recorded her answers and Scot replied with feedback using the comment function. Pearce and Bass (2008) offer ten practical applications for blogs in education which I found to be a great summary of the various uses for blogs in teaching and learning.

The ten applications are outlined below:

1. BLOGS AS A CLASS SPACE

A web space where teachers and/ or students record and present information about activities and events happening within the classroom and school (for example, a school camp). Individual students post to the class blog (each student can have their own ‘category’/ sub-listing on the blog) and classmates read & respond to them. The blog entries could then be displayed on an interactive white board and used to stimulate discussion in class.  Using blogs as a class space would promote a sense of belonging (Kunc, 1992).

2. BLOGS AS A WRITING SPACE

Blogs can be used by students as space for writing drafts of their work (accessing them at home or school) and teachers can comment on student posts, offering feedback before ‘good copies’ or final assignments are submitted. Blogs are also ideal as a space for sharing creative writing, for example poetry or stories.

3. BLOGS AS A REPOSITORY

A place to embed content such as slideshows, audio and video (e.g. by using slideshare or teachertube) for others to explore and comment on.

4. BLOGS AS A REFLECTIVE SPACE

Blogs are an ideal platform for recording one’s thoughts and feelings through writing and promoting personal development. Student journals are one use of blogs 'as a reflective space.'  Blogs are ideal for; encouraging children to write, developing their literacy skills and teaching students about the ethics and responsibilities of publishing online.  These activities require higher order thinking by students as they analyse and critically evaluate the information they are sharing and reading.  Using blogs as a reflective space also inspires life long learning in children as they come to realise (by reflecting on their own learning and reading the blogs of others) that learning is an ongoing, lifelong process. 

5. BLOGS AS A PERSONAL PROJECT

A space to compile and present a project – either the whole project or just a portion of the project (i.e. to store artefacts). Plug-ins and applications such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets can be used to enhance the presentation of the project. The comment functionality also means that the teacher or peers can offer feedback as the project is developed.

6. BLOGS AS A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT SPACE

Geographically distant classes can collaborate on a project (promoting global awareness among students). Groups within a class could also collaborate on a blog site to produce and present a project.  Considering engagement theory, blogs as a collaborative space demonstrates the 'Relate' component as students collaborate with a group and the 'Create' component as students are working on creating a product (depending on the intended audience, the 'Donate' component may also exist).

 

7. BLOGS AS A COMMUNICATION SPACE

Student work (e.g. artworks) can be added or imported to a blog – serving as a means of communication between the teacher and class or community.

8. BLOGS AS A DISCUSSION SPACE

Blogs can be used as a makeshift discussion forum. Teachers can poll their class to gauge their opinions on a topic, post questions (to which their students comment on and discuss) or insert links to other sites or relevant information.

9. BLOGS FOR RESEARCH

Blogs can be used to record qualitative research findings. A student or teacher could gain insights from a group of people (for instance, members of the class or school) by asking them to share their thoughts on a blog or respond to a poll or question/s on a blog. This would be particularly useful for TAFE or secondary students undertaking primary research for an assignment. As an example, a student could create a blog for a SOSE assignment on how teens use the internet, publicise the address within their school and record postings and comments from their peers relating to a discussion question.

10. BLOGS FOR THE TEACHER

Blogs can also be a powerful tool for teachers. Increasingly, educators are utilising blogs for their own reflection and professional development - interacting with other education professionals on a global scale and thus becoming involved in a ‘community of practice.’  My learning journey in this course (ICTs for Learning Design) has seen me become a member of a online community of practice - consisting primarily of my peers in the GDLT.

The uses for blogs in the classroom are limited only by the imagination of teachers and given the opportunity, the students they teach. By and large, children are inherently eager to learn, and they want to learn with the technologies that they use in their everyday lives. Blogs are one such tool that teachers can employ in their classrooms (and in their own professional development) to support and enhance the learning experiences of their students.

Learner-centric and Teacher-centric Education

What does it mean to be a Teacher in the 21st Century? There has been a paradigm shift within the teaching profession over the past decade. The role of teachers has changed to reflect the current focus on learning management and learner-centric approaches to education. As a pre-service teacher at CQUniversity, my education and professional preparation will be underpinned by the learning design process, the dimensions of learning, as well as other concepts and approaches we now know to be integral to the achievement of learning outcomes in 21st Century classrooms, including; learning engagement and information communication technologies.

Teacher-centred (direct instruction, deductive or expository) learning, dominates the traditional view of what teachers ‘do’ (Killen, 2003). Here, the teacher controls what is taught and how information is presented (personified by a ‘chalk and talk’ approach). There is minimal student interaction or substantive conversation between teachers and students. At this end of the teacher-centred – learner-centred spectrum, it is easy to see, that with such minimal participation, students would find it difficult to engage in learning experiences. From what I recall of my own primary education in the early 1990’s, the teaching of curriculum generally gave way to my individual needs and preferences as a learner. My teachers had the class copy information from a blackboard and their pedagogies tended to concentrate on imparting the knowledge they deemed important. In relation to Dale's Cone, my primary education in particular was quite passive, as verbal and visual symbols dominated. Mind you, I was generally more interested in sport and athletics when I was in Primary school. At the bottom of this post you will find an image of me when I was in Year 5.

In a learner-centered approach to teaching, teachers (or more precisely, ‘learning managers’) act as facilitators of student learning, negotiating with students what path their content learning will take. In devising learning design, teachers take into consideration what their students already know, what their students want to know, and how their student’s best learn and want to learn (Lynch, 2003). Nonetheless, as Scot Alred, pointed out in an ICTs tutorial earlier this month, teacher-centred practices have their place in modern classrooms and can be used alongside more learner-centred approaches.

For example, in a Year 11 IT class, a teacher might ask their students what they would like to know more about and the class responds, basic HTML. The teacher might then proceed to outline how HTML codes are created for websites - writing an example on the whiteboard. Although the explanation of HTML in this lesson was essentially didactic in nature, the teacher was responding to their student’s learning request. Thus, the students were at the centre, and the learning experience can be deemed learner-centric, even though didactic teacher instruction was included.

As learning managers, we must keep in mind that the ultimate goal of education is learning (and indeed, learning for understanding). As Killen (2003, p. 2) puts it, “[our learners] should be at the centre of all teaching.” This learner-centred approach is reflected in the process of learning management, Learning Engagement Theory, Lynch’s 8 Learning Management Questions and Marzano and Pickering’s 5 Dimensions of Learning.

So what is learning management? Over the past decade, learning management has emerged as a dominate approach to teaching. Smith (2000) describes learning management as the capacity to design pedagogic strategies that achieve learning outcomes in students. The Learning Management process involves asking 8 learning management questions (LMQ's), spanning three stages (Profiling, Strategising & Delivery, and Ascertainment). The emphasis of the learning management process is on achieving learning for students, and the teaching strategies we use, are the keys to successfully achieving these learning outcomes. But what teaching strategies should we use to teach the youth of today, and how can we apply them in a motivating and engaging way? Are purely teacher-centric teaching strategies a ‘thing’ of the past?

As teachers of the 21st Century, we are teaching the youth of generation X, the ‘I want everything I want it now’ generation, children and young adults who were born into a digital revolution, people who seemingly can’t live without their mobile phone or the internet and not to mention a multitude of other emerging technologies. To successfully achieve student outcomes, learning managers need to learn how to spark the curiosity of young minds, connect with our students, and cater to their diverse learning needs. This can be achieved through the integration of ICTs. My future blogs will address the issue of learning engagement and ICTs can be applied in the classrooms of today.

Image source: Personal Photo

I have entered… The BLOGOSPHERE!!

Do, do, do, do, do… well, that sounds very sci-fi, doesn’t it?

A term you might encounter while watching; Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Gate or come to think of it, practically any show with the word ‘star’ in the title!.

This is my first ever blog, and this year is sure to be a year of ‘firsts’ for me. You see, I have embarked on a new and exciting journey into the world of a pre-service teacher. My teaching focus is Primary, and this time next year, I hope to be teaching students in the early years of learning (ideally Year 2 or 3), within a Central Queensland school.

My employment and tertiary background is in advertising and marketing; having completed a Bachelor of Business (Advertising/ Marketing) and an Honours Degree in Marketing at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, in 2006. Employment wise, I’ve worked as; a market researcher, marketing assistant, a university tutor at QUT, an advertising account manager with APN News & Media and most recently as an advertising representative and administrator at The Rockhampton Morning Bulletin.

However, I have always been attracted to a career in the teaching profession. Even when I was studying at university, I found myself tutoring other students and undergraduate classes! After being in the workforce for a couple of years, I’ve come to the realisation that, I need to follow my heart, and become a teacher or as I’ve recently come to know it, a 'Learning Manager.' Consequently, I'm now enrolled in a Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching at CQUniversity Australia.

I look forward to exploring the digital tools and learning design and pedagogical theories in the course ‘Information Communication Technologies for Learning Design’ - discovering how ICTs are being harnessed in classrooms, and sharing my thoughts with fellow GDLT’ers (and anyone else who happens to read my blog). Most of all though, I’m keen to engage with students during my EPL days (which is in just 2 weeks time now), as I’ll most likely be learning more from them, than they will from me!

Thank you for visiting this weblog, I hope you find the postings here of interest. Please feel free to share any comments you may have. I’d love to read your thoughts and feedback, and inturn visit your blog.

Best regards,

Karlee

(Image above courtesy of Flickr)