Following on from my last post I guess a similar question could be asked about the effectiveness of using computer/web based tools to cover fairly basic and fundamental knowledge.

Is it worth spending considerable time learning and utilising a tool which does engage students, to complete an activity which students can learn just as easily and much faster using more traditional methods. What is the cost / benefit analysis of the tool? How much time is it worth spending for the learning that we want to take place. In a crowded curriculum I find this to be an important question to ask.

So can the tool bring learning to life? If it is core content that we feel is essential for students to understand can the tool engage the students and help them develop a deeper understanding that would have been difficult using traditional means or a teacher directed approach. For content that students may perceive as boring but teachers and society considers important, can the tool be used to switch on the students mind and engage them with the subject matter. If so then the tool may very well serve its purpose.

Another important question to ask is whether the students are simply engaged in the tool as opposed to the learning and are teachers measuring the learning that is taking place to be able to answer this question.

I have started making crude summaries of some of the reading/listening I have been doing and do this on google docs so I have access to them everywhere. The latest book (What teachers need to know about teaching methods) & listening Why students don’t like school) have questioned some of the thinking behind the constructivist approach to teaching. Particularly it has suggested that for basic skills and fundamental knowledge a instructivist or teacher centred approach can be far more effective. Once this basic knowledge has been gained student centred, constructivist approaches can be effective at developing the ’21st century skills’ (which are not new skills but are becoming more and more important in this day and age such as collaboration and critical thinking). Neither suggest that one way is better than the other as such just that each method has a purpose and needs to be used to achieve appropriate goals.

Is there ever a case for using a constructivist approach to help learners understand fundamental knowledge?

I notice a lot of teachers will use a range of methods which on the surface may not appear to be the most efficient method for the learning goals stated, but claim that the method engages students in their learning and so is therefore effective. They may be considered to be using constructivist approaches for teaching fundamental knowledge which apparently can be taught more effectively in a direct manner.

Eg: For road safety if I was looking at students developing an understanding of the major factors leading to accidents, a sample project may be to have students work in teams to research and create a presentation (movie, podcast, ppt etc) for teenagers about the major risk factors for having an accident. The time required would be significant and the quality of a number of the group presentations could quite possibly be relatively poor.

Am I better off developing my skills as a lecturer/presenter and delivering this myself to develop their fundamental knowledge around the area or can the collaborative approach be more powerful and engaging and help students develop a deeper understanding of the issue?

Should I combine the two approaches and always directly teach the essential, fundamental knowledge and then use the student centred approach to deepen their knowledge or is there justification for leaving them to their own devices in a well planned project and letting them discover this fundamental knowledge, even though this goes against the research based evidence?

Saw an interesting article in the daily telegraph today that I thought it raised a lot of good points about issues with the current computer roll out. I disagreed with one point and have included my reply.

“Personal computers, desktops and laptops are as the name indicates intended for personal use and not classroom teaching. They are not, and never will be an appropriate technology for teaching a whole class.”

Perhaps not in the traditional sense where the teacher stands at the front of the room and attempts to fill the heads of students with information that they must regurgitate for a test, but they can be extremely powerful classroom tools if you are looking to have students create and construct knowledge and look at alternative models of schooling that are more relevant to the age we live in. Constructivist learning theories are well supported by a digital classroom and they provide the opportunity to create student centred learning environments and diversify learning to make learning more relevant and engaging to students. 

An internet connected laptop is by far the most powerful learning tool we have ever had access to, but I agree that it all comes down to the ability of the teacher to harness the tool and create experiences for learning and this is the bit the government seems to have missed. Professional development and teacher ability is the key to making this worthwhile and this unfortunately appears to be an afterthought, as opposed to the foundation of the initiative.

Is this a fair indication of what the PDHPE syllabus stands for? I think it does quite a nice job.

While I think the core messages need to be about the pedagogy as opposed to the tools, I thought I would put together a few of the tools that I think would be of most benefit teachers who are just starting out on their digital journey.

1. delicious (or other social bookmarking tool) – a simple way to share and find web based resources with others. Create networks and subscribe to key words so you collect everything from the web that you want without having to go looking for it. Here are my PDHPE links as an example.

2. google reader (or other RSS tool) – have the web come to you. Instead of returning to quality sites to see if they have changed, get them to send you all of their new stuff with an RSS feed. Can collect from blogs, wikis & webpages that displat the little RSS symbol (and any other pages with ‘add to rss’ or similar).

3. pbworks (or other wiki platform) – wiki’s are a great way to collaborate with others and a simple way to create interactive webpages. Yr 12 PDHPE Wiki and 9 PASS wiki as examples.

4. google docs – I could really separate each document as they all have great features but again, the ability for more than one person to interact on the one document has some great potential benefits. The spreadsheets application is one of my favourites as it can be used to create online surveys that are automatically entered into a spreadsheet. Great for surveying students and creating quizzes. The word document is useful for faculty programming and group tasks.

5. Wordpress (or other blogging platform) – great tool for webpage creation, reflective writing, publishing and sharing student work amongst other things. Example of Yr 7 PDHPE and Sport Coaching Blog used with students. Lots of great PDHPE blogs around if you have a look about!!

6. Google calendar – keep organised and productive with google calendar. Send free sms or email reminders for events and organise your work and personal life.

7. slideshare – loads of great powerpoints and resources here and a great place to share and store student presentations. Ability to embed them into your own blogs and wikis to showcase student works.

8. youtube/teacher tube – lots of great resources here and the potential to post up the work of students to add to your wiki or webpages. You can keep them private if required and have a place to store your video’s online.

9. Twitter – while I rarely ‘tweet’ myself I do come across a lot of resources from the people I follow who seemed to have slowed down on the blog posts and amped up the twittering.

10. google search – I almost don’t consider it a tool because I use it so regularly and it is such a natural part of using the internet. Can’t go past it though.

Lots of others I could easily slot in but all of the above deserve their place (for the time being!).

I am getting more and more excited about the digital education revolution that is happening in NSW DET Schools, and not just for the great opportunity I see this providing for students. I think part of its greatest potential is all of the reflection on learning that will occur amongst teachers over the next few years.

Conversations have already well and truly started and will continue as teachers grapple with a new aspect to teaching and learning. I am sure it will encourage many with its great potential but also trouble others who have difficulty with, or resist its use for a wide variety of reasons. It is the conversations that will come about because of this that I see have such great potential. Teachers will be forced to re examine their practices and think about the ways we currently do things and whether there are better ways of doing them. I am sure that initially there will be people who strongly oppose the laptops, and those who are strong campaigners for them and to me this will be healthy for the debates that will arise over how, when and why laptops can be effective learning tools.

A lot of these conversations will take place in spaces where others will have access to them and while they may be locked down behind DET walls, DET teachers will (should) all have the opportunity to take part in these conversations. In the past these may have taken place in faculty rooms, network meetings or executive areas, but they were largely constrained to the people and spaces in which they took place. We now have the means for these to take place in online spaces which can be shared and accessed anytime, anywhere with internet access. To me this is powerful and will help us as teachers develop and reflect on current practices, which will hopefully benefit students in all of our classes.

I have been using bubbl.us as a prefered mindmapping tool with students for a while now because it is so simple to use. Students don’t have to sign in and a 30 second demonstration can have the students off and running. I find this to be a fairly common feature of web based apps – they are designed to be very intuitive and simple to use. Students also seem to like the visual design and the way the bubbles explode when you delete them. Funny how the small things can make such a difference. The students actually want to understand the work so they can create more bubbles and join them together etc which was an unplanned benefit of using computer over paper. The fact they can make mistakes and fix them and produce a nice looking product at the end encourages them to experiment as they go and not worry too much about making mistakes which I quite like also.

I have included a quick video showing a few of the features and how it works and have attached a link to some of the students work. I uploaded their mindmaps to flickr and the next step will be for the students to go in and critique the mind maps using some of the features on flickr that allow students to comment on the images.

Click the image above to see the students work.

The ICTEV conference is being held down in Melbourne today and I have just checked out Jarrod Robinson’s presentation on using mobile phones in the classroom. He is doing lots of innovative things around implementing ICT in the classroom and his afternoon session on his use of the nintendo wii in his classes is also a great program with lots of potential.

I also stumbled across this great little video made by year 6 students on mobile phones and I can see this would be a great little activity we could do in PDHPE. It is based on the video “mankind is no island” which was the winner of tropfest NY in 2008.

Find more videos like this on What’s Next?
 
There are lots of areas in PDHPE you could have students create a similar style video and it is an activity I think would engage students and get them thinking deeply about an issue to try and construct their movie.

My classes have greatly enjoyed using google docs as a way to share information and complete class activities and I have just read a post by Jarrod Robinson who completed this activity in a similar way. He has taken a screencast of the activity and this provides a great visual as to the way the google spreadsheet works.

Essentially, using google spreadsheets allows all students to input their data simultaneously and the graph will update live. It is interesting to see the data turned into something meaningful in real time and this in turn is quite motivating for the students. I have used a ‘google form’ to enter the data also but this does not allow for the instant updating of the graph so I prefer to enter straight into the spreadsheet.

If you have not already come across Jarrod’s blog I recommend having a look around as there is lots of great stuff over there and his post will provide further insight into how you can run the activity.

I recently put together some of the important data from the 2008 AIHW report that is regularly used in PDHPE into a google presentation. I did this to use in class and also so it can be uploaded to our wiki. I like google docs because if I decide to add anything to the presentation then I do not have to worry about re uploading it anywhere as it will be automatically updated everywhere it is embedded. Just another little benefit of google presentations.

I had one of those moments recently when I really felt like I had made a difference and helped my students understand something.

In one of my classes we had a very heated discussion around racism related issues and it was great that students were being open and honest, but I was deeply concerned about some of the views and comments that were being made. While I tried my best to challenge some of their views, a number of students were very set in their stance and I could not seem to get through the importance of tolerance and appreciating diversity and difference.

I remembered a really powerful video I had watched titled ‘a class divided’. “One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination.” (website description)

I watched this with my students in the next lesson we had and I could not believe the impact it had on the students. We had another equally open and honest discussion immediately following the video and each of the most vocal students the previous day had all commented along the lines that they had never really thought of the impact of racism like that and that it was great to see it from another point of view. You could see in their body language and the way that spoke that their mind had opened to the issue of discrimination and racism. I don’t think I could have used words to open their mind in the same way as this video managed to do so. Watch the movie and you will understand!!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

The digital education revolution strategy announced by the federal government aims to put laptops into the hands of all Australian students over the next 6 years.

This presents a wonderful opportunity for students and teachers and will take some pretty intensive and well delivered PD to teachers to make it work well. I think this presents a great opportunity for PDHPE teachers and some centralised planning and development could make it all work much more effectively.

My ideas would revolve around a few key areas.

Professional development of staff is the key – (I think the teacher becomes more critical for effective teaching and learning with technology invovled).
1. Face to face & online professional development courses to help teachers understand the range of technology and tools available and how it can be used in the classroom. This could be module based with online learning for specific tools such as blogging, wiki’s, podcasting/vodcasting etc and resources to assist with implementing these in the classroom. The online courses should be accredited and contribute to the institute of teachers and be allocated release time for the teachers involved.

2. A range of competitions organised and funded by the educational authorities to encourage teachers and students to participate in using these tools and help ensure they are used in powerful ways. Well thought through learning actvities could be developed by the educational authorities, with student work being shared amongst all participants. Students could also play a role in evaluating the entries and participating in peer assessment beyond their own school.

3. A common place to share and publish student work so students can see what is happening in other schools and learn from other students. An example may be a youtube style channel for students to publish health commercials or videos made in class, or flickr style space for images/posters etc to be shared. These should all be tied together at a central webspace/wiki (see next point).

4. All of these spaces should be tied together in one place where students can go to access other students work samples and where teachers can go to access teaching activities and resources to assist implementing these activities into the classroom.

The digital education revolution allows a lot of the learning for both teachers and students to take place online. I would think it essential that the early PD and initiatives allow for success and provides activities and learning that is motivating and engaging for teachers and students, has a low skill requirement and is easily accessible for all.

Underpinning the success of the whole program will be the bandwidth available in schools. With cheap computers with minimal processing power (update – looks like the DET schools will be working with quite a powerful machine that looks pretty handy allround – scratch the initial comment), cloud computing apps will be critical and without bandwidth these become almost useless also.

An internet connected laptop is by far the most powerful learning tool to students have ever had access to and I think will change the nature of teaching and learning in schools over the next 10-20 years. A move away from recalling content to students creating, collaborating and constructing their knowledge in more practical and powerful ways.

Online Quizzes (click here for access to the quizzes and results sheets)

I had an idea recently to develop an online quiz that would mark itself for my skeletal system and muscle system quizzes. We quiz the students a lot for these rote learning style areas and while I still think the idea is great, in having used it there were a number of problems in implementing.

1. To be self marking you have to enter the correct answer/s into the formula in google docs and with anatomical terms there are a million ways the students find to spell each body part. Unless they enter one of the pre entered spellings then they get the answer incorrect when they actually may know the body part. This means you really need to double check the answers anyway. This would not be such a problem in other areas I don’t think, and could be a good way to improve literacy skills.

2. Embedding the form and the images on the page is a little tricky. This took longer than I thought and if you have more than a few answers to enter and can be difficult to present this in a user friendly way. For my muscles quiz students had to open the answers form in a seperate window and resize both windows to be able to see the both at the same time. This is another step to explain and teach and a small barrier to use.

3. Students can view there results if you let them which is good for instant feedback but you need to go in and copy down the formula to add them up. This means the test is not marked until you go in and update the formula. The answers can be added into the top cell of the spreadsheet so students can compare to the correct answers which still provides instant feedback also and makes them check to see which ones they got wrong.

I randomly modified an activity in class the other day to get students to post their answers into a google spreadsheet that all students could simultaneously access and modify. (I have posted a live view of a brief section of the students adding their data). This was initially going to be completed as a table in their workbooks.

The task involved students researching a certain food and looking for both positive and negative information about the specific food. They then had to express their opinion on what place that food should take in a balanced diet.

I thought overall the activity was worthwhile and provided some interesting moments. The students overall seemed to enjoy sharing their information in this way and were very engaged throughout. They researched swiftly to be able to enter something into the spreadsheet and found it useful not to have to write it all out but to be able to read the other area that people had completed.

Then came the fun and games – one student posted a question ‘what is soy?’ to try and clarify what soy actually is, and this seemed to open the flood gates into random postings. This question in itself was great and it was good that a students was able to ask a question in this forum to be clarified. A few short minutes later though students were posting all sorts of random comments into the spreadsheet and I ended up locking them out as it stopped being productive and we had enough information to being with our next task. 

Did the random postings begin because they had finished their work and were passing time or is this the way they are used to using such technologies and forums?? I am keen to try something similar again to see the way the activity develops and see if the tool proves a benefit or distraction and look at some ways to ensure learning remains the focus of the activity.

took this screenshot with jing – great little screen capturing tool!