Assessment 2 – Analysis of digital technologies

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are an integral component in the world today. Will this change the way we teach? Will this change school curriculum and policy? Will this change student learning outcomes and environments? Will this change pedagogical ideas?

E-Learning is an imperative in pedagogical design in schools today and there is substantial evidence that ICTs and digital technologies can transform, support and enhance the learning environment for K-12 students.

Will this change the way we teach?

ICTs and digital tools are scaffolds for e-Learning and they enable students to transfer skills across a range of contexts which develops life-long learners. Through my own experience with creating and publishing e-content in online spaces, I have come to realise that “… technologies should not support learning by attempting to instruct learners, but rather should be used as knowledge construction and representation tools that students learn with, not from. In this way, learners function as designers, and the computers function as Mindtools (ICT tools) for interpreting and organizing their personal knowledge” (Jonassen, 1996, as cited in Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, State Government of Victoria, 2007, para. 8). ICTs facilitate student-centred learning where teachers manage and guide the relationship between digital tools, content and student which allows students’ to freely express themselves and create authentic work.

Students routinely use ICTs out of school because it is “the sensory world and it is up-close, technological, connected, visually rich, emotional, and immediate … It’s also where the senses and the imagination live...and frequently, it’s in direct contrast to the world of school that is, by design, linear, expository, abstract and detached” (Marcus, 2005, p. 9). In order to teach, we must understand our surroundings, our curriculum but most importantly our students. The way in which we teach has to change from the traditional classroom of ‘chalk and talk’ where students where passive learners to incorporating ICTs and digital tools to engage students to become active learners; a key idea of the learning theory constructivism. It is not about the content that we can regurgitate for assignments or tests but the way in which we learn and the process of how to learn for life. ICTs support this notion and allow students to explore and format their assignments their own way and give students opportunities to express themselves through research and project-based assignments relating to a meaningful real-life context.

Connectivity and globalisation is the way of the world and students are connected to the world like never before, teachers’ need to be aware of how ICTs facilitate inclusive learning and acceptance. These digital tools can broaden students’ horizons on what makes the world work and how doing things can be done in different ways to what they do. Teachers need to acknowledge the importance of ICTs for creating a well-rounded generation of digital natives who are accepting and tolerant of other cultures and beliefs.

Will this change school curriculum and policy?

I must admit I was a sceptic about using ICTs and technology in the classroom because I believed they would distract students and students would lose the important social skills of human development. But I have been converted because I now realise that ICT’s and technology in the classroom is a collaborative experience that engages all learning styles (Smith, 2008) and is inclusive for all students; the struggling to the highly gifted; the shy and the outgoing.

However, there are barriers and limitations that face eLearning in a secondary school context. There are limited resources, not enough computers for students, to participate in a digital learning environment or low socio-economic families may not be able to afford certain ICTs which indicates, the ability to access information and online spaces anywhere at anytime is diminished. Also, there are apprehensions that students will spend too much time learning how to use the actual technology and formatting their pages rather than providing high-quality content. Some digital tools do not encompass complex thinking skills if the curriculum is not suited to that particular technology in that particular context.

One of the most significant implications is the “institutionalized resistance to change” (NMC: The New Media Consortium, 2005, p. 11); schools, curriculum and some teachers not willing to change from the ‘old knowledge economy’ to the ‘new knowledge economy’. There are times and places for ICTs to be employed in the classroom and in some cases ICTs might not fit the curriculum package but there is sufficient evidence researched and recorded to identify the positive effects that ICTs are having in the 21^st Century classroom and in today’s society. ICTs and technology are the future; we see it everywhere, all the time, everyday. Schools need to cater for these changes rather than resist these changes and use ICTs to teach students the relevant content of the new knowledge economy, encourage students to explore ICTs and by engaging school curriculum with ICTs is a forward step for life-long learning.

Will this change student learning outcomes and environments?

ICT’s and digital tools have had an immense impact on the transformation of learning in the classroom. Compared to the traditional learning environment of teaching then assessing, ICTs is transforming learning; learning is more authentic, learning is more diverse, learning is more flexible, learning is more engaging and “the interconnectivity of the internet changed modes of distribution, the nature and availability of audiences, and created incredible new opportunities for collaboration” (Woolsey, 2005, p. 5). With effective eLearning design frameworks like Blooms taxonomy theory (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), productive pedagogies and the learning engagement theory (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999), students can achieve high standards in creativity, innovation and authentic designs in a real-world context. This, in turn, motivates teachers to practice digital pedagogies for successful learning outcomes.

As ICTs are introduced into the classroom and learning environment so are the legal, safe and ethical guidelines of publishing works to online spaces. There are a few concepts to be aware of and understand; firstly copyright rules and regulations. Copyright is a slippery slope and you should make it clear to students that if they have used a third parties ideas, images or specific text and quotes then they must attribute the source material. As smartcopying suggests that “students can use any material protected by copyright under fair dealing” (Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008, para. 7), however, they still need to attribute the source of the material.

There are also ethical stances to consider on child safety and their exposure to inappropriate material, physical danger, harassment and cyberbullying and confidentiality breaches (Fasso, 2011) while participating on the web. Students are digital citizens and need to advocate responsibility when using technology and consider the implications and consequences.

Teachers need to take swift action if they have any suspicion that a child is being exploited and portrayed in an unfair and negative light. One key point to remember is that teachers get permission from parents, guardians and/or students to publish student work and that teachers take all precautions to ensure that students are not in danger from others on the web. There is a table of other tools, policies, ethical, safe and legal guidelines on my blog.

Will this change pedagogical ideas?

Schools and the curriculum have the opportunity to go “beyond a focus on knowledge of school subjects to explicitly include the 21st century skills that are needed to create new knowledge” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 8) and there are four eLearning technology groups that can give students the opportunity to do so. These technology groups influence how we teach and learn in the classroom. I will explore one digital tool within each of these four eLearning technology groups and demonstrate how they could be implemented into a secondary school context and how they enhance, transform and support students learning compared to the rigid, linear traditional classroom.

Students are digital citizens and have the opportunity to explore and learn anywhere, anytime, within a range of contexts and there are “a variety of networked devices, digital resources, and electronic environments to create and support this community in its production of knowledge and anytime, anywhere collaborative learning” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 8). I have chosen to extend my knowledge surrounding the Web 2.0 tool – wikis for collaborative learning, digital video tool and the presentation tools Glogster and Dipity.

These digital tools highlight and are aligned with the learning theories; behaviourism, cognitivism, contructivism and connectivism. Students will practice with ICTs, will critically analyse within ICTs, will become active learners in experiencing ICTs and will learn to network and connect with sources, organisations and filter data. These digital tools place emphasis on the process of how to learn in a digital age. Media literacy and digital literacy are an important factor in today’s society, however with these new literacies comes access to a large amount of immediate data and as I familiarised myself with these digital tools, I realised they scaffold these new literacies and can facilitate “teaching the processes of learning…learning how to learn … will be better able to navigate the floods of data” (Marcus, 2005, p. 4), through quantitative experiences involving ICTs.

Wikis are one of the Web 2.0 tools and online spaces owned and updated by you, students, teachers, parents. The other two Web 2.0 tools that I investigated were blogs and websites. These online spaces allow students and yourself to publish, to collaborate globally, share ideas and upload other tools to your own designed pages. Each Web 2.0 tool has a distinct purpose and different formulae of presenting information and content. The reason I choose wikis is because they are a powerful space for acknowledging interactivity and collaboration on ideas and can be shared and edited by other students in the classroom. “Wikis are more collaborative because they enable visitors to modify content posted by others and contribute new content” (Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008, para. 4), a digital tool which not only caters for students cognitive abilities and skills but educates students to appreciate and become tolerant of others’ ideas, justifications and reflections. View my blog to see how I will use wikis in my secondary school teaching context.

In the second group of eLearning technologies I chose digital video over images and podcasting because of the pedagogical uses for digital video in my classroom context. Access my blog to view how I will use digital video in my teaching area, Media Studies and reflect on its learning opportunities for students. There are multiple reasons why digital videos should be applied in the classroom context and on my wiki page Digital Video in the classroom the thinking routine, de Bono’s thinking hats, scaffold my justifications and reflections on this matter.

The third group of eLearning technologies captures the essence of how information and learning are presented to students which cater and appeal to a range of learning styles and intelligences. The three digital tools I investigated where Powerpoint, Prezi and Glogster and they all were interactive, multimodal digital tools which would enhance and transform student works. I chose to explore Glogster, an online scrapbooking tool which enhances and emphasises the importance of visual literacy. Visual stimuli are everywhere in today’s society and so it is an imperative skill to learn. Visual literacy has been reinvented in a range of contexts; advertisements, movies and the internet, to observe, critique and deconstruct images; a visually literate viewer “looks at an image carefully, critically, and with an eye for the intentions of the image’s creator … to gather the information and ideas contained in an image, place them in context, and determine whether they are valid” (Thibault & Walbert, n.d, para. 2). Glogsters are visual ‘eye candy’ and visual literacy skills are essential for high order thinking to occur.

I have created my first Glogster poster and embedded it into my website which could relate to a Year 8 or 9 Social Studies class. In my blog, I have further discussed the capacity of this dynamic and multimodal engine which enables students to be creative, diverse and to be able to freely express their formation of ideas.

Dipity belongs to the fourth group of eLearning technologies which are open-ended presentational tools like animations and simulations, google earth, docs and maps, online concept mapping and zooburst. I have decided to reflect upon dipity, an online timeline tool because it enables students and teachers to timeline events with the ability to embed images, video and text. This was one of my favourite tools, an effective pedagogical idea to learn specific facts, declarative knowledge and elaborate and synthesise them in a creative manner. The Dipity Timeline I have created would suit a Year 8 English class studying the birth of the novel, ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’ written by an Australian author John Marsden.

My initial conception of ICTs in the classroom was that they would be time consuming and distracting, however, in experiencing the new technologies I am learning to use, I have become fluent in applying them. One of the most significant advantages of these digital tools is the ability for them to format ideas and make work look well-organised, neat and professional. Now, I believe these digital tools give students and teachers more time to construct complex content.

“Humans are wired to learn. When learning is pleasurable, it can happen even more rapidly. The vocabulary and tools of 21st century literacy are appealing to young people, connected to their world outside school, and related to their interests” (NMC: The New Media Consortium, 2005, p. 3). It is apparent that implementing eLearning technologies is essential and crucial in the classroom context, whether students use digital tools to create content or present content, the digital tools all interact and intertwine with one another.

All in all, ICTs and digital tools are the digital natives spoken tongue, there is “a shift to a consideration of a “new language community” … acknowledging that these media are becoming fluid and rapidly shareable, always available and casually used, quite like spoken language” (Woolsey, 2005, p. 11). Teachers must embrace ICTs like the digital native generation has and use them to promote the concept that “involves active, constructive interplay between the child and his environment” (Marcus, 2005, p. 7), which means the student is enveloped in their own learning development and with the teachers guidance and eLearning design frameworks, students can solve problems and make decisions within complex thinking realms.

There are new literacies evolving due to the saturated inclusion of media and technology in the 21^st Century and as teachers it is our duty and role to provide students with effective digital tools and methods to succeed in the 21^st Century and through effective pedagogical content knowledge and eLearning design frameworks teachers will acknowledge the imperative use of digital technologies in their learning environments. A new language has arrived and it is enriched with ICTs; it is a language revolution that must be taught and learnt.

Appendixes

Appendix A – legal, safe and ethical guidelines blog

http://nadinenewmandempster.blogspot.com/2011/04/legal-safe-and-ethical-guidelines.html

Appendix B – wikis in my teaching context blog

http://nadinenewmandempster.blogspot.com/2011/04/wikis-in-my-teaching-context.html

Appendix C – my movie: leap of faith blog

http://nadinenewmandempster.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-movie-leap-of-faith_04.html

Appendix D – digital video in the classroom

http://nadinenewmandempster.wikispaces.com/Digital+Video+in+the+classroom

Appendix E – Glogster poster

http://nadinenewmandempsteredu.weebly.com/

Appendix F – Glogster: Where in the world blog

http://nadinenewmandempster.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html

Appendix G – Dipity Timeline

http://nadinenewmandempster.blogspot.com/2011/04/dipity-john-marsden.html

References

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Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth

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http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/945

Fasso, W. (2011). Working legally, safely and ethically online : the issues. Retrieved

5 April 2011 from: CQ University e-courses, EDED 20491, ICT’s for Learning and Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=163843

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http://archive.nmc.org/pdf/Global_Imperative.pdf

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Retrieved from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm