Christopher Shaw

The end of the semester draws nigh, and it’s time to summarize what I learned about using educational technology to support student learning throughout our EDUC 431 course. As much as I try to think holistically these days, the fact remains that some part of me insists on atomizing and categorizing, so I’ve broken my learning down into five levels of application.

professional development

This course has made me aware of new avenues for furthering my own pedagogical and subject knowledge. In common, I am sure, with most educators I have used technology to further my own learning using the internet. I hadn’t made use of any profession-specific podcasts up to this point, so it was nice to learn what was out there in that regard. I came into the course with an understanding that twitter simplified and cheapened interpersonal exchanges, and that it was best left to people with eccentric and sometimes undesirable worldviews. I maintain that this initial impression is still partly correct, but can now see further opportunities. The layout of the twitter format is still not agreeable to me, but it does harbour a lot of valuable resources in the form of fellow educators willing to share. On a more metacognitive level, the computational thinking workshop presents a useful framework for understanding and structuring my own learning as well as that of my future students.

delivery

It was no revelation to hear that technology can help reach students who would not otherwise thrive; speech-to-text (and vice versa) software, voice transmitting / amplifying technology for hard of hearing learners, and other innovations are fairly familiar concepts at this point. As far as accessibility goes, online courses are far from a rarity and I took a couple myself this summer. For all my doubts about multi-access modality, however, Valerie Irvine’s presentation was a conceptual game-changer for me. The opportunities afforded by distance technologies to impoverished, isolated, or otherwise mobility limited learners represent a potential revolution in access to education, and this is a very good thing. I suspect it will be some years yet before the education profession settles into something resembling best practices for integrating such changes at the secondary classroom level, but the possibilities are exciting and bear thorough exploration. Used wisely, education technology can help craft learning experiences that are relevant to real life.

Computational thinking also falls under this heading. Far and away the most exciting new set of ideas I am bringing away from this course emerged from the presentation on computational thinking and coding across the curriculum. Algorithmic thinking and abstraction, among the other elements of computational thinking, are a great way of approaching problems of both the puzzle and trouble varieties. I plan to work on integrating this style of thinking into my practice and personal development.

content consumption

A distinction emerged in the course of the class between consuming and creating content, with favour typically falling more on the latter. Rightfully so, as true learning emerges from active doing rather than passive observation. That said, most learning in our school system requires the intake of some form of prerequisite knowledge, and a great many students are rather more invested in social media than in textbooks and educational videos. Given these circumstances, content created by students using technology and shared over the same medium presents an opportunity to get students consuming at least some edifying content. By enabling students to generate content using a wide selection of apps and other programs with which they may already be familiar, educational technology can make it more palatable for students to engage with and learn from the work of their peers. It’s a learning community, no reason all the teaching has to be done by the professional educator in the room.

content creation

Our presenters this term introduced us to a wide variety of apps, programs, platforms, and media that can be used for the creation of content by students. There would be little purpose from a reflective standpoint in simply reciting them all here, and I will confine myself to a few important highlights on the theme of content creation.

First, don’t overdo it. “Technology” is an extremely broad and diverse category with many beneficial applications in the classroom. That said, it’s not for everything and students still need some access to tactile experiences. Trying to integrate too much technology can also be a stressor for the teacher.

Second, feedback is key. One of the major benefits of technology in the classroom is the ease with which it can enable students to share their work with peers and teachers, and the ability to receive quick feedback from same. Feeback (aka formative assessment) is always an important part of learning, and technology makes it easier to give.

Third, there can be presentations without PowerPoint! I’m sure everyone knows this, but it was nice to get some taste of the many different alternatives from Sway to podcasts. This is an area I intend to explore as a possible vehicle for final summative tasks in my long practicum next year.

Fourth, what’s good for teachers is good for students. E-portfolios and product suites such as Office365 are a good way for professional educators and students alike to organize and reflect on their learning. A good way to form lifelong habits.

administration

I’ve used an online grading and record-keeping product in the past, and the product lines we learned about in EDUC 431 (FreshGrade, Spinndle, et cetera) were far superior to what I have experience with, and had the added benefit of building in grade sharing with students/guardians. There’s a lot out there that can improve class organization and sharing on the teacher’s end, and this too benefits students.

In conclusion

As I continue my journey to the expert end of the Dunning-Kruger spectrum, I find myself ending this course with an increased sense of just how much learning I still have to do with regard to the intersection of technology and education. In this, my awareness of educational technology is pretty much on par with my level of expertise in most other areas of teaching. Like everything else we teacher candidates learn in university, this course has been a start, an entryway, from which to explore further. There are more avenues to explore down than I previously knew.

Janet Chow seems to have a knack for expressing key principles in short, memorable expressions. More than once, she very concisely summed up my thinking as it has developed over this course in far more eloquent terms than I was able to. For example, the observation that technology is an opportunity to do better, not to replicate. That may be an exact quote; I wasn’t able to jot down her precise wording in real time. In any case, it’s a spot on observation that nicely encapsulates what I have tried to say far more prolixly across several blog posts. Likewise, the maxim that technology is a tool for doing things we can’t do without it – a succint warning against taking on too much or relying on apps to jazz up an underwhelming or pointless lesson.

The idea that we should create experiences instead of lessons is a nice one, if a little overstated; there’s no reason an experience can’t be a lesson. Better perhaps to speak of exeriential lessons, a nice point of overlap between edutech and the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Purpose driven experience is a good vantage point from which to view unit and lesson design.

Otherwise, this presentation covered already familiar ground previously explored by other presenters. FIPPA, purposeful creation of learning environments, hooks (“fire starters”), and the importance of story all came up. Good points well made, even if they are just reaffirmations at this point.

Earlier this week, Kristina Tzetzos spoke to us about her educational program Spinndle. Unfortunately, while I was eventually able to log into my temporary account, no content loaded and I wasn’t able to look around and explore or use the program. From what I could gather, Spinndle offers a very similar experience to FreshGrade, possibly with greater opportunity for peer feedback, which could admittedly be useful for certain assignments. A major goal of Spinndle seems to be to ease the practice of assessment as learning and to help student metacognition by enabling to better understand what they are learning. Spinndle is apaprently optimized for training students to take charge of their own learning and self-assessment. Worthy goals indeed.

Having not had the opportunity to actually explore the program I would be hard pressed to say more about it at the moment.

Today brought another visit from Sandra McAulay, whose heartfelt enthusiasm and desire to share knowledge and ideas are most welcome. I only wish that I could have taken more new ideas from the presentation. The analog coding activities presented were interesting, no question, but essentially the same as the coding activities presented during our earlier presentation on Coding Across the Curriculum. The emphasis on procedural thinking also closely echoed the Coding Across the Curriculum presentation. If this were not my third time going over these ideas within the last month (having attended the other aforementioned presentation twice) I would probably be quite excited by the topic.

The chance to practice with Scratch, Jr. was appreciated. I’ve seen Scratch coding used in the classroom and played around with it myself, but I didn’t know there was a simplified version available for iPads. Something to keep in mind for down the road.

The one big new idea I was able to take away from this presentation was the possibility of using coding as a vehicle for students to report their learning. It’s an interesting interdisciplinary possibility.

There’s no denying that the central topic of this presentation did not resonate with me. Mr. Carvey’s adventures in podcasting were interesting, and he himself was an engaging speaker, but it’s not a route I see myself going down in the foreseeable future. That said, even for a mere consumer of podcast content there were valuable thoughts to take away. Podcasting is indeed a good vehicle for sharing practices and ideas. Less ideal that blogs but better than Twitter, though podcasts alone, as pointed out, can be consumed alongside activities that would otherwise constitute wasted time (eg. commuting). I can certainly see the case that podcasing also prompts personal intellectual growth and the building of relationships, but for the next few years I’ll be focused on digging out from a mountain of debt and trying to spend time with my kids before they are old enough to move out.

Wisdom received: There are always difficult moments when doing something new and learning on one’s own.

Valuable professional advice: When acting in a professional capacity in the public eye beyond the classroom, teachers should not just represent the profession but work to improve it.

Stray thought: One key to a successful podcast is finding an empty niche and filling it–sort of like evolution. Marketing/biology crossover?

The avowed theme of Karen Lirenman’s presentation was iPad apps, but in practice she spoke more generally about the uses of technology in the classroom. I suspect that this was a more useful approach than a list of apps would have been. A lot of what was covered is fairly familiar ground by this point, but there were some valuable takeaways and I appreciated that the audience was given a chance to discuss amongst itself. Breaks for discussion helped ameliorate the negative effect of telepresentations on my attention span, a fact which has softened my attitude towards multi-access modality a little. Exeriencing MAM as less of a lecture and more of a collaborative exercise makes it seem more like a potentially productive approach.

Turning to the content of the presentation, I’m reluctant to fully agree with what I understood to be the presenter’s point about technology serving as an access point for all students. It seemed to me that she was suggesting that technology benefited every student as an entry point, which I would disagree with. For some students, technology represents just another learning hurdle on the way to content and competencies. I would, however, agree that technology is a way of ensuring that every student has an access point. That is to say, it won’t help every student, but it can help those who are at a disadvantage (eg. hearing/speech difficulties) access the class on a footing equal to that of their peers.

At points, the effect of technology on education was overstated. Technology does indeed open up the possibility of learning in different ways and offer an alternative to textbook learning. It would be wrong, though, to suggest that only technology can do this. Indeed, textbook learning is itself a comparatively recent innovation when measured against the stretch of time over which humans have been learning, a strange deviation from natural pedagogies that was made possible with the technology of the printing press and bookbinding. This may be just nitpicking on my part but I feel it’s important to not overstate the power and novelty of new approaches lest they come to be overapplied as cure-alls. I think Karen Lirenman would agree with me here in light of her cautioning against the use of technology for worksheet tasks that could be done just as well on paper. It was refreshing to hear someone acknowledge that technology, while useful, has a place and time in education that is not everywhere and always. I found that our previous presentation on iPads and apps tracked towards this latter camp a little too much for my tastes, and it’s good to see a more restrained approach to and assessment of eduational technology and its benefits.

A final critique before I move on to a closing summary of points that resonated with me: learning styles. The presenter made an (admittedly passing) reference to technology as a way to cater to different learning styles. I have to mention here that the scientific consensus is currently that learning styles are largely a myth and that it is the same good learning and study habits that benefit everyone. Is relying on technology to engage students according to their stated interests or preferences doing them a disservice by taking the emphasis off of less trendy but more empirically supported study skills that would improve their learning.

I conclude this post now with a summary of the concepts I found most interesting.

The difference between technology being used for consumption and creativity is one of those concepts that becomes a no-brainer as soon as it’s spelled out, and I can’t help but wonder why it never occurred to me to think in those terms. Thanks to Ms. Linerman for introducing a clearcut way to distinguish between how technology should be used in the classroom and how most students (and probably , lets be honest, teacher candidates) use it at home.

The reality of language acquisition is that everyone’s receptive vocabulary is more advanced than their productive vocabulary. Thanks to our presenter for the reminder that oral production outpaces written production in many people (all of them? I certainly feel like I write write more coherently than I speak.), and thus that recording devices are a great resource which allow students to speak their reports without exhausting the teacher’s time and ability to comprehend.

Technology puts students in touch with the world. Yep. Lots of great examples given: reaching out to authors, crowdsourcing the answers to scientific inquiries, exploring far away places. One can easily imagine setting up a realtime penpal network with an affiliated school elsewhere in the world.

Informed consent and the teaching of responsible digital citizenship as prerequisites: agreed.

One of the frustrating recurring themes in the UNBC Ed Program is the repeated requests for students to identify “aha moments” that they have experienced. I don’t typically have trnsformative cognitive breakthroughs or perspective altering spur-of-the-moment realizations, my thinking instead evolving slowly over a period of time following much thought. I am not an epiphany sort of person. Last week’s presentation on computational thinking across the curriculum (and assessment!) was an exception to this pattern, leaving me with a sudden and newfound understanding of what it means and looks like to incorporate coding across the curriculum.

Coding is a useful skill in the current day and age, but the value of integrating it into every subject and the technicalities of doing so seemed like serious obstacles, especially given my lack of knowledge on the subject. Conceptualizing the essential nature of coding as consisting of a way of thinking rather than as a set of arcane languages enables much more natural and effective cross-curricular integration.

While learning to think in analytical, logical, and abstract terms seems like it would be useful for understanding coding as a technical skill insofar as doing so trains one to “think like a computer,” the real universal applicability of computational thinking has to do with metacognition. Seen this way, computational thinking is essentially problem-solving skills which are applicable to any curricular area. This style of thinking and understanding is well-suited to the use and assessment of core competencies within projects that meet curricular content and competency goals.

I had the opportunity to take part in this workshop twice, once with teacher candidates and once with practicing teachers. The latter session covered the same basic ideas, but was accompanied by activities that prompted the making of deeper connections with competencies and more explicit connection of computational thinking to different curricular areas. Working in rotating groups to connect computational thinking skills to different areas of the curriculum was a helpful way of understanding how broadly applicable this way of thinking is, but the major insight I took away from this activity, and which did not crop up so much during the teacher candidate session, was the usefulness of computational thinking to behavioural processes. Classroom routines, goal-setting, and other activities are no less algorithmic or pattern-based than any of the intellectual skills explicitly included in the curriculum. It’s striking just how much computational thinking teachers do in the course of their daily practice without being aware of it, and it’s interesting to consider these habits in the light of an explicit framework analysing it. Being able to approach one’s own work habits analytically seems an important part of effective self-reflection, and computational thinking certainly fits the bill for pedagogical reflection as well as for the teaching of meta-cognitive skills to students.

A note on triangulation in assessment. Most educational diagrams are as ugly as they are useless, but look at this here model of assessment:

Crisp, clear, concrete, and doesn’t try to do too much. Covers the possible sources of assessment information, and allows the teacher to weight them as necessary/appropriate to the individual learner. Love it.

A final throwback to the earlier presentation on multi-access modality: computational thinking skills lend themselves well to collaborative activities, as evidenced by the activities employed in the presentations. Would the acquisition and practice of these skills be potentially impaired outside of the face-to-face modality?

Somewhere towards the end of my last blog entry I found myself wishing that an introduction to a technology product had been more tutorial in format; today I got my wish. I went into Cliffe Waldie’s introduction to Freshgrade expecting an infomercial, but was pleasantly surprised by the actuality of the experience.

I’m glad we were given a chance to actually experiment with using the program, from both the student and teacher perspectives. On the whole, Freshgrade reminds me chalk.com, another free online planning and grading resource which I have used while teaching in the past. Having now used both, I can say that Freshgrade appears to be more user friendly as regards ease of use, and the in-built collaboration between learner and instructor was absent from my previous grading tool entirely.

The ability for student, teacher, and guardian to all keep up to date using the same portal is Freshgrade’s real selling point for me, though the ease of use is certainly welcome. Having the curricular competencies built into the planning framework is downright exciting. The online nature of Freshgrade makes it a good fit for multi-access modality courses, should I ever attempt such a thing. The idea to use online reflective journaling as a tool not just for student metacognition but as a means of  making them more accountable to their parents is also intriguing, though I suspect that the students whose parents mot regularly check their progress will be least in need of this particular stick.

I question the presenter on a couple of points, especially on his repeated claim that Freshgrade “enhances” assessment. This is a meaningless buzzword, and I don’t see how Freshgrade would change my grading experience. In fact, I’ve always preferred marking physical work to digital, finding it to be both easier and more pleasant, which means that I tend to mark digital work last. For me personally, then, the use of Freshgrade for assignments promises to make marking a less pleasant experience, though this is a rather minor gripe given the success I’ve had with digital assignments in the past and the ease Freshgrade seems to bring to these.

I have a bigger issue with the question of assessment as a whole, I think. I’ve we’re moving towards gradeless assessment, how does the Freshgrade platform fit with this goal? A point for further investigation.

As a self-identifying Old and selective Luddite I not merely agree with but take for granted Sally Song’s warning against tech overreach by teachers. One can indeed get carried away with social media to everyone’s detriment and the novelty of apps and technology in the classroom can mask their lack of necessity, if not even merit. I confess that this spoke to a misgiving about some of the apps introduced in an earlier presentation to our Educational Technology class, my notes for which include the observation that much of what we were seeing was “collages with glue.” Technology can sometimes be useful for teaching useful tech skills, but fail the necessity test for replacing more tactile work. My children attend a Montessori school, of course I value the tactile experience, but I think there is enough research that I can honestly claim not to be opining out of total ignorance on this score.

Office 365 sounds like a useful product. Many of the ways Song described it being used were very much reminiscent of Google Slides, Google Docs, and Google Classroom, all of which I have used in the past to my own general satisfaction. Sway sounds like an interesting cross between a website and PowerPoint with the potential to combine design skills with presentation of content, thus offering a welcome alternative to the rather limited structure of PowerPoint that is not Prezi, an execrable, ugly, and needlessly flashy mind-map variant of PowerPoint (I’m voicing an opinion here, but this is a hill on which I am prepared to die, as the saying goes). I’d like to look more into Sway and any potential FIPPA issues therewith once I have the time to do so. Sometime next year, perhaps.

Many of the services offered through 365 were familiar enough to me, that on the whole I think I would have been more interested not in hearing what in can do, but rather learning more about how it is used. That is to say, I find myelf in the unusual position of wishing a presentation had been more like a tutorial. It would be interested to compare the ease of use and capabilities of the Google and Microsoft suites.

As a parent who relies on small children to bring home messages about school events, and as a former teenager who typically found school announcements in jacket pockets a month or two after their best before date, the Remind app sounds like a wonderful tool. A great way to spam (in the most positive sense of the word) (willing) parents with important updates.