Friday, 22 February 2008

Portfolio Task 3


The ambiguous embrace: twenty years of IT (ICT) in UK primary schools. (Robertson, 2002)

In the 1980’s education was seen to be introducing ICT into primary schools with links to children’s pending economic success. Two decades later reports showed that the use of ICT in primary schools was extremely limited. It would have been difficult at this time to have really grasped the importance that ICT would have today and will have in another two decades. Perhaps if there were the realisation of the success and economic importance that ICT has proved to have, maybe it would have had a more significant role in education at this early stage.

During the 1980’s an estimated £490 million was spent on IT hardware in schools. By the mid 90’s the equipment had aged considerably and so limiting advances, otherwise possible. A major downfall of our ever-increasing ICT repertoire is how quickly it becomes outdated.

Over the two decades the potential of where ICT could take education, the enhanced experience through interactivity and so the enrichment to education was slowly being recognised. In saying this though, there was evidence that proved that schools were failing to exploit this potential. Possibly practitioners were unaware of the extent of this potential and focused more time on core subjects, that over centuries have continuously proved to support children’s pending economic success. As a new skill to children and practitioners alike the subject knowledge and experience required for successful teaching was lacking with no clear expert (between the teacher and children) to lead the way.

The paper sings the praises of ICT and openly questions the continued lack of practitioner support for it. It focuses on the initial introduction of ICT into schools and compares it to where we are now and how it features in the potential future economic success of those children passing through the education system today. It reinforces the continued argument that ICT needs to be firmly embedded in the practitioners repertoire and so it can be taught as it’s own entity as well as an aid to further education in other areas of the curriculum.

Does ICT contribute to powerful learning environments in primary education? (Smeets 2005)

Education should be creative and allow children to learn using a variety of learning styles and skills that are transferable between their lessons, school and home life. A strong case is made for the support of ICT in order to achieve this. ICT can help to make education real and relevant providing authentic learning situations, and ICT will promote a range of positive behaviours such as higher order thinking and co-operative learning, linking to significant research in education by Vygotsky. I agree, however it suggests that the above can only be achieved with ICT, which isn’t the case. I feel that the skills gained in ICT lessons can be effectively linked with other subjects, allowing children to see the link between transferring skills by being shown how ICT fits into every aspect of their lives. Can some of the benefits of ICT not be obtained in another way, and so to increase variety in teaching and learning?

The continued argument of the teacher’s skill is raised, as a practitioner’s experience and confidence is directly linked to their teaching. If children are seen to be more expert than their teachers then there is no one to extend their learning and help them progress and develop.

The physical locality of computers greatly impacts on teaching, ideally every classroom would have a computer available for each child, which could be used at any time, computer suites are often shared between many classes, limiting the time available to each class.

The research suggests that slowly ICT is raising its profile and that more practitioners are incorporating ICT into their lessons. A drawback is the limited experience of practitioners as new resources are continually available. Schools should carefully choose which equipment to invest in and then have all practitioners fully trained, allowing them to quickly solve problems with the equipment.

Perhaps at this point in time ICT does not contribute to powerful learning environments in primary education; at least not to it’s potential. But the introduction of ICT has been a steep learning curve and it could be that too much was expected too soon. Majority of schools now have IWB’s, computers in the classroom and access to a computer suite and access to picture, video camera’s and microphones, to aid learning styles and abilities. If we re-address this in a decade’s time perhaps we will be where we thought we would be today.



The two articles addressed above complement each other in their struggle to raise the awareness; that ICT is not being used to it’s potential in our primary schools today. I think they are better suited if they combined their efforts. Robertson provides a background to ICT and the journey and struggles over the past two decades to get practitioners to realise the potential and get computers in schools. Although I believe no one could have truly predicted the way in which ICT has expanded and grown in that time. It comments on the lack of true inclusion for ICT, but recognises the initial struggles of cost and outdated equipment and lack of practitioner experience and confidence. So as Robertson has addressed how we have gotten here, Smeets focuses on the here and now. How is ICT actually being used, what does it support (e.g. co-operative learning, differentiation and higher order thinking) and exactly how this is being implemented in our classrooms with our children today, with reference to availability, locality and teacher interpretation. In reading both together it highlights inconsistencies within the education system, reminding us that it needs to be continually addressed and revised to keep up with technological advances and particularly looking at the requirements for children’s future economic success and the skills they will require.

There seems to be much focus on schools being behind the times and that ICT is still not being integrated enough, but as Robertson and Smeets both highlight difficulties that ICT has had in schools are we in a place to criticise? As Smeets research indicates, the schools in this study are all at similar levels. This could be partly due to the generation of the majority of current teachers being ICT immigrants. Possibly over the next decade as more ICT natives move into schools we could see a rise in standards of ICT in our primary schools, as what practitioners don’t know they can’t teach.

(Image from google images: http://www.calmet.com/ict/images/ICT-Logo2.gif)

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

It's all about Prensky!


Having read and commented on the three Prensky articles for ICT DA7, I thought some of the thoughts we both (myself and Prensky) brought to the discussion were interesting. Below I have included the points that I felt compelled to comment on (by Prensky), my comments are in red. Each article can be found in full, by clicking on the title of the article.

(The photo of Marc Prensky is from google images: http://www.k12schoolnetworking.org/2007/images/speakers/Marc_Prensky.jpg)

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

I think this is a really important point to raise. The children of today are not the children of the past, and saying “In my day,” will not change the behaviour and thought process of today’s child. Children through generations have been changing, and finally it is being recognised that they have changed so significantly that we can no longer go back. It is no surprise that the children of today have changed, considering that the world in which they are raised has also changed.

One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back.

In some ways this is true, the launch of the internet and the new millennium signifies a new beginning, we have progressed through apes, cavemen and now the 20th century man is a thing of the past. So far the future has been good to us, the progression has been successful, why fear that it may change now?

“Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine.

It is not only the world that has changed; it is not only the technology that has changed. The actual physical being itself has changed. The brain structure has changed; different information is being presented at earlier ages and in completely new ways. I think it is fascinating that the brain structure has changed, but it is no real surprise.

Digital Immigrants don’t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can’t. Of course not – they didn’t practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years.

Why do people so often find it hard to believe something, just because it is not something they would do? I have to have noise in my life all the time, TV, music, something, anything, and sometimes, to others annoyance I will have both on. My brain is often on over drive and I find that if I don’t have something on to “distract” me then I get bored of what I am doing and my mind wanders. I am much more likely to concentrate when I have something else to help occupy my mind, this could be due to the amount of TV etc I have watched since getting older and now a simple task (like reading and commenting on a 6 page article) is not enough, there must be something else and as I type I am moving to the music.

“Every time I go to school I have to power down,”

I have recently seen on the news a section on children under 3 should not be exposed to any TV or video games etc. They believe that the TV etc is constantly moving, panning in and out, changing shots etc, things on TV move so fast, especially when compared to the “real world”. There have been reports that children under 3 exposed to TV and video games will develop attention deficit disorders as real life will be too “slow” for them. I can see to some extent what they are saying, but I believe as with anything in life these days, everything in moderation.

So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new?

It should be both. We shouldn’t loose some of the traditions of the past, for example the hand written word has long since disappeared, yet we still spend hours making children write joined up. This is important, I think we should look on computers as complementing our current life style, and not that it becomes our life, and so we should hang onto as many of the immigrants ideas as we can, but at the same time embrace the natives.

My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. After all, it’s an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.

But do we want them to think of life as a game? I think we should be careful about crossing a line we aren’t sure there is a way back from. We have already begun paying children and young teens to go to school, real life, the real world isn’t a game, part of school life is to prepare them for the real world. Would we be doing that if we taught them life is a video game where you have many lives and many chances?

In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history and evolution can’t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 181 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented.

This is an essential fact, but how do you present information in a way that children instantly remember it? I have a whole brain full of what my parents and others may consider useless information, but how did it get there? I didn’t set out to take it on board, but I did. If only some of my teachers could have done that…and now here I am to see if I can get it right.


Digital natives, digital immigrants: Do They Really Think Differently?

Although the popular term rewired is somewhat misleading, the overall idea is right—the brain changes and organizes itself differently based on the inputs it receives.

The input the brain receives is definitely changing, even at school, computers are being used more often, teachers have interactive whiteboards etc, let alone those that have the access to computers and video games at home and have more extreme fast paced input.

Scans of brains of people who tapped their fingers in a complicated sequence that they had practiced for weeks showed a larger area of motor cortex becoming activated then when they performed sequences they hadn’t practiced.

So perhaps playing a video game they have been playing all week is actually more “taxing” on the brain than new skills, which we may believe challenge them more.

Several hours a day, five days a week, sharply focused attention—does that remind you of anything? Oh, yes—video games! That is exactly what kids have been doing ever since Pong arrived in 1974.

This is something the children want to do. We must be careful not to put them off, it’s like educational TV programs, you know they are educational and so they immediately become less interesting and appealing. The sooner we start putting meaning behind something normally nonsensical the less appealing it will become.

Children raised with the computer “think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around.”

I know that I have a fully active imagination, I have intense and detailed dreams which I often am unsure as to whether they are true or not. I can be on one train of thought and immediately jump onto something else and then back and then to something else and off I go again. Could this be due to story lines on a show jumping around? You hear the beginning of one storyline and then they move to another, then to an old one and tie it up and then back to the first one. Has my brain now been “re-wired” to work this way as this is what I “feed” my brain on???

“Sure they have short attention spans—for the old ways of learning,” says a professor. Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for anything else that actually interests them.

But is it the fact that it is something that interests them alone or is it this rapidly becoming age old argument that the fast action of TV and video games, the intense colours, the control and the flashing lights that attract our attention?

So it generally isn’t that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, it’s that they choose not to.

I think that saying this is showing a lack of understanding, it may be partially due to this, but I think it is also due to a different way of life. Many children have a totally different home life to school life. This isn’t how it used to be. Back in the day children would finish school and then go and do chores, possibly go to work etc, now a days the constantly berated “fat” nation come home and plonk themselves on the sofa watching TV and playing video games. The world has changed but the education hasn’t.

In one key experiment, half the children were shown the program in a room filled with toys. As expected, the group with toys was distracted and watched the show only about 47 percent of the time as opposed to 87 percent in the group without toys. But when the children were tested for how much of the show they remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. “We were led to the conclusion that the 5-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what was for them the most informative part of the program. The strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

In support of this I remember in my A-Level psychology lessons my teacher said she would allow me to doodle whilst she spoke as she too found that she concentrated better when doing something. Some may find it rude to doodle/colour etc when someone is talking requiring your attention, but I am actually listening better when I am pre-occupied. However, I would be hesitant to try this out with children, although I believe with some it may work, but there would need to be a half waypoint. They would have to meet you half way, make sure they didn’t distract other children and they had to input into the lesson to prove they were still following it and they shouldn’t ask what are we doing when the input is over. Although this would be horrendous to manage, depending on the children.

The trick, though, is to make the learning games compelling enough to actually be used in their place. They must be real games, not just drill with eye-candy, combined creatively with real content.

This is important, the games must still be GAMES in order to continue to occupy the children’s interests. But how to get the curriculum…including the “boring” bits into games….and what about teaching, the children could stay at home and work through a pack of video games, they could loose interest in everything else, and what about those jobs which are less purely based on computers, what would those children do having spent their education on one. Also what about telling children that staring at TV will turn your eyes square? Surely the computer would have a similar affect?

On the one hand, they can choose to ignore their eyes, ears and intuition, pretend the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant issue does not exist, and continue to use their suddenly-much-less-effective traditional methods until they retire and the Digital Natives take over.

What about those immigrants that aren’t choosing to ignore the natives and their new language, but they simply can’t catch up with the amount they are behind? They are so used to teaching the old way and haven’t been introduced to the technology in a friendly easy to pick up way, their brains aren’t wired that way. And when the children you are teaching rapidly are becoming more competent than you it almost seems that they know everything, maybe it is ok to concentrate on what the children don’t know. They will still be learning. The most recent class I was with, their behaviour became increasingly disruptive when on the computers, lessons would become chaotic and the children hyper active, any immigrant may be wise to stay away!!!!


Changing Paradigms

But to today’s kids, none of that is education. To them, education is getting prepared for the future – their future.

How can children be sure of what education is and what is best for them? I am in total support of personalised learning and making things interesting, and enjoying learning but at the same time, adults cannot be sure of what the future holds, and what will be needed, it would be foolish to bend to the whim of the children who have a much more idealistic view of learning, education and the future.

More than anything else, kids today want their education to be, and feel, meaningful, worthwhile, and relevant to the future.

Who knows what the future holds? Technology could come crashing down around our ears and we could rapidly revert back to the stone age, where would our technologically advanced children be then?

What do they want from their schools? The answer, they tell us, is community. Working in groups. Doing projects. Having the opportunity to share their ideas with their peers and hear what their peers have to say. Being challenged. Being asked interesting questions. Being listened to. Being respected.

There has been a huge shift towards group work etc however; this allows some to free load whilst others do the work. In order to responsibly set the children up for the precious future they are so determined to arrive at we need to make sure they are all as well prepared as possible.

Digital technology fits only awkwardly into the old “tell-test” paradigm of education. In that paradigm, you keep your best ideas to yourself, rather than sharing. You don’t go looking up information during a test, because it’s “cheating.” You don’t take other people’s work and use it in new ways because it’s “plagiarism.” You can’t use your cell phone as a lifeline, (like you can do on TV to win a million bucks) because it’s taking “unfair advantage.”

But modern technology fits perfectly with the kids’ twenty-first century educational paradigm, i.e. Find information you think is worthwhile anywhere you can. Share it as early and often as possible. Verify it from multiple sources. Use the tools in your pocket – that’s what they’re there for. Search for meaning through discussion.

I have always wondered why there is such emphasis on tests and levelling, etc in the real world you would never be in a situation where you couldn’t ask someone else and or check in a book, or on the internet etc. So why prepare us for a future we will never encounter, although it could be a case of this is how it was in my day, so this is how it is in your day.

If we’re smart, we’ll give our kids their heads (as we say about horses) to use all their technology and passion to learn, as we steer them in positive directions and truly enjoy the ride.

This is a key statement to take from Prensky’s work, but we must remember that we are part of the learning process and that maybe computer games are not the way of the future, in replacement of good old fashioned teaching, the verdict is still out.

Monday, 4 February 2008

A Bloggers Bloggin Blog!!!

I feel that my first placement school is really on top of the ICT in terms of learning and aiding learning. There are two main computer suites around the school, which are 99% of the time occupied. Year 4 have their own computer suite and the head expects them to be in it all times of the day, which is not always possible. However, the educational software on the computers allows for all aspects of the curriculum to be supported by work on the computers. All classrooms have a handful of computers in them so that extension work etc can be on the computers if required. There are also a number of laptops that can be used by children if their projects etc require the use of ICT.

Due to the area of the school many children do not have access to computers outside of school time. The school is aware of this and is also aware that the children will require good ICT skills for the future and allow for this. The computers that the school have are rented, this is particularly good as they can upgrade much more easily and at reduced cost compared to if they had bought the computers and had to get new computers in.

I do feel that especially with the Year 4 computer room that the layout is not beneficial to functional teaching. The computers have been fitted into a pre-existing room, rather than the room being built for computers. The computers would be better facing the wall around the outside of the room. The children are currently in lines, back to back with other children. They can too easily interfere with each other’s computers, wires and chairs etc and it is very difficult to move around them.

The school is very keen on personalised learning, having lap tops, cameras, microphones etc available allow the children to decide how to communicate a project, e.g. if they want to make a radio program or film a TV commercial etc the tools are available and very child friendly.

The main issues that will constrain the children’s ability to learn is the teachers lack of confidence with the tools the school has. The classrooms have the ability to make their whiteboards interactive but none of them do, they use the projectors but that is as far as they get. The teachers limited use and excitement to try out new tools is then passed to the children. They often feel that they need to know how to use them in order for the children to use them, but this is not always the case as children can often click buttons and learn through trial and error. The teachers are shown all the new equipment when it comes in and the ICT coordinator runs staff meetings to show them how the new “toys” work. However, if they don’t use them within the next few weeks they forget how they work or even that they are available.

Although ICT has many benefits, there are also many times where the network goes down, or the power goes off etc, which, if you have planned a lesson around using these resources would be impossible to continue. Considering I have only been at the school for 5 weeks, these problems have occurred far to often.

In addition to this considering how much time my current children spend on the computers I am very aware that they are slow to type and many of them their handwriting illegible. I worry that too much focus on computers and using them will in time outweigh the need to work on handwriting. Many children come to me with work and I try to work out what it says in vain, when I ask the child to tell me what it says they look at me blankly. I feel that computers should be the next step, after handwriting (although I don’t fully believe in forcing children to write joined up…but that it another story in itself!) rather than along side or instead of. My children can spend a whole lesson working and will either produce a few lines on the computer, and if they cannot spell they choose a word from the list that appears…and so in some cases still doesn’t make sense, or they can produce more written work but in many cases illegible.

In closing I would like to comment on the use of Blogs. I was a little apprehensive about using the blogging software at the beginning of this project. However, with the right guidance at the start, the blogging journey has been an enjoyable one! I know how to add images and links to video clips, allowing me to make my blog, hopefully, more interesting to the readers!

I have found it interesting to look at the blogs schools are currently doing, two of which I have added links to on my blog. I am really keen to try this with a school. I think the benefit to the children and the school community could be invaluable.

The school I am currently at will be later in the year making contact with other schools with the same name. My class have begun by investigating where these schools are and using google earth to locate them. I think this is a fantastic way to get children thinking about the world outside of their own lives. To think about things that are happening to other children in other areas of the world. I can’t wait to try this somewhere!

Having read articles in magazines about schools that have been using blogs, (see blog written on November 16th 2007, Blogs 4 Schools.) I think that the children and families can really boost their skills for writing, reading, communication, looking at different types of language use etc. Blogs allow children to discuss sensitive issues, behind the safety of anonymity. See the above-mentioned blog for details of blogging and schools and whether it works.

I enjoyed looking into the wiki and I understand, thanks to the video clip we watched, the purpose of wikis, but found the blog much more beneficial to my learning, although I am glad to have had the experience of using one and knowing which websites you can use for free, always important in a school!!!

I have always been fairly confident with ICT and definitely take a hands on approach, clicking buttons and trying things out rather than reading manuals etc. I feel that my degree, which had a large focus on ICT and having to produce our own web sites etc, really helped me to embrace it. We all know how much easier using a computer is to handwriting, especially things like essays, where you can add paragraphs in and change the order without having to rewrite anything. You can make numerous copies, quickly and easily, or could change the colour of each one you print. Having information that doesn’t need to be printed on a memory stick etc allows easy transport and has meant that I don’t have to take my laptop with me everywhere. I could spend all day talking about the little things that ICT has done to improve not necessarily the quality, but more the ease of life.

I have really enjoyed blogging. I think that communication in itself is such an important issue that now it has been made easier and much more user friendly, we should be embracing it. For example people (mainly relatives) that wanted regular blog updates linked to my blog so that they could be emailed whenever I posted something new.

However I do not think that the future will or even should be filled with computers “taking over the world”. Take the image above from the film IRobot, is this how we should be thinking of technology? Should we be thinking of robots as human? As something that can or will become too powerful for us to control? Will we live in coexistence?


Will it become a way of teaching? I remember reading a while back about virtual teaching, a computer room filled with children and a teacher on the screen, is this really the way of the future, is this where we should be taking education? We should work with ICT letting it be part of our world, but we should always remember that we are the creators and although they lived differently cavemen survived without it and at the end of the day so will we.

We cannot replace the value of humans and we shouldn’t begin to try.


THE END

(Image is from google images: http://www.aaronwt.net/IROBOT2.JPG)