‘Embedded’ ICTs???

I often think of two categories of ICTs when I’m considering teaching and learning. Those that we use ourselves as teachers when resourcing and for our own learning and those that we provide to students in the hope that they will receive some learning benefit from their use. While the second category of ICTs is probably the one that gets the most press, I’d suggest that both are equally important in terms of learning gains for our students and that we can glean some interesting insights by comparing these two categories of ICTs.

Doing a quick tally of the ICTs I’ve used in the past, I came up with the following list. These are off the top of my head and the more I think back, the larger the second list in particular tends to get.

My ICTs - used for my own learning and resourcing for teaching:

• Electronic presentation tools: prezi, libre office present, tablet and VNC client for annotating texts
• Other resourcing tools: open office writer, google docs,
• Organisational, publishing and collaborative ICTs: dropbox, various LMSs, email and email lists, a plethora of task management tools
• Graphics tools for developing visuals for resources: GIMP, inkscape, tablet, scanner (for making hand-drawn stuff electronic)
• ICTs to find, take from and occasionally contribute to professional learning communities: Google search, VLN, Twitter, Various blogs, Google+

Student ICTs - delivered to students to help with their learning:

• ICTs for publishing, editing and collaborating on writing: google docs, blogs, microblogging clients, various word processors, e-portfolios
• ICTs for creating visual texts: GIMP, inkscape, various browser-based editers.
• ICTs for collating and disseminating online resources: Edmodo, livebinder, google docs, Edcanvas/Blendspace,
• ICTs for feedback/assessment: Socrative, mentimeter, a few random apps written in C#, various moodle plugins,
• ICTs for student to collaborate on resource development: Wikieducator, google docs, voicethread
• Learning resources for students: youtube, linked tutorials for various skills,
• ICTs for developing learning communities: LMSs forums/groups, facebook, e-portfolio, phpbb forum for students, microblogging,
• Game design for learning: (learning about ICTs and specific curriculum areas) scratch, gamemaker, Gary’s mod, C#, gamefroot, rpg maker,

Now this may be quite different for you but on comparing these two lists I found that I still use nearly all the ICTs from the ‘my ICTs’ list, while of the ones in the second list, ‘student ICTs,’ very few are used consistently across a whole year in my classes and many were used once or twice then failed to make their way into my programmes in subsequent years. I would say less than three of the ICTs in the ‘student ICTs’ list I’d consider as ‘embedded’ in my classroom and course delivery. In case this was because I’m totally out of whack with the rest of the world, I had a chat to a few other teachers and found varying degrees of the same phenomenon. It appears, at least from my flimsy attempts at researching it, that there are quite a few ICTs that we use ourselves consistently for creating things and our own learning but fewer ICTs that we deliver consistently to students to help them with their own learning.

Some possible explanations for this:

1. With the sheer number of students we have in a class, it’s difficult to consistently embed a single ICT in our students’ learning. Helping them to learn an ICT takes more overhead than we can often spare.
2. We don’t find enough advantages in many specific ICTs to use them regularly across a whole year with all students.
3. It may also be that ICTs are designed for specific uses and that these don’t often have relevance to an entire course.
4. Students don’t use a single ICT for long and pick up and drop them regularly as their needs and interests change.

While all of those above statements are probably due to a degree, I don’t particularly think they present a problem that we need to solve. Although it does give some manageability gains, it’s not always in students’ best interests to have them all using the same ICTs across a year. Perhaps if I’d taught in a school where BYOD requirements mandated one type of device to make rolling out a single app easier I might think differently but even when I’ve seen teachers (and myself) roll out a specific ICT for a learning need, a few months down the track a number of students aren’t using it any more. A few are totally into it and developing the skills needed to use it even better, a few more use it for a while and stop and many only use it during the time it was delivered in class. I suspect, whatever the ICT was, it fitted the small number of continued adopters pretty well and so they’ve kept getting something out of it.

The fact is that new ICTs come and go all the time. Apps and new pieces of hardware are constantly being created and updated to suit new needs as they arise and better cater for existing needs as designers understand better what works for individual people. There’s so many possible ICTs out there we could use, it’s not a surprise that what an individual does end up using may vary significantly from another person. And there’s a common theme in the way our old mental models fail us when thinking about ICTs here too, we need to spend less time thinking about specific ICTs and tools (even though they’re tangible and marketing people would like us to be convinced one ICT will be perfect for all our/our students needs) and more time thinking about ways to help our students to learn the skills to:

• figure out what their needs are
• assess the potential of an ICT in the light of this
• develop the resilience required to learn complex ICTs so they can fully appreciate the possibilities out there
• compare ICTs and what they offer (despite all the marketing jargon and hype that makes this difficult)
• and decide on the ICTs that work best for them, given their needs at the time, own learning profile, strengths and weaknesses.

While I won’t go as far to say that mandating the use of a particular ICT for a class or school is a definite no no, I would suggest that we need to be both flexible about what this looks like in relation to individual students. And most importantly, that we carefully consider the benefits of an ICT and monitor what kinds of outcomes it is providing for our students and use this to inform our approach as we go.

To part with a couple of stories, a student in my tutorial was asked to use Springpad on his Ipad in science for keeping track of his learning. The great thing was that the teacher had taken the time to sit down with that student, have a look at what he was already using and engage him in a discussion around the usefulness of his present ICT arsenal and what benefits he might gain from taking up Sprindpad. So this approach to ‘mandating’ the use of an ICT works fine, just as long as it comes with some kind of best use analysis and discussion for students.

I also had the privilege of sitting in on some design and photography classes over the last few weeks. While my role was pretty inglorious, I was the printer-support guy who had to fix paper jams, check students were using the right printer settings and fix disabled printers from terminal (nerd points!!!) it did enable me to observe some of the ICT-use diversity in the classes. Some students were using GIMP, others were using photoshop, some were into a picasa app, others were using apps I’d never even seen. Across all this, a large number were using a combination of apps. While having students using whatever suits them (and in these classes it was a combination of computer skills and photography and design skills that dictated this) does provide some extra complexity for teachers, to me, it looked totally worth the effort. In this instance it enabled all kinds of students engage in a course in a way that might not have been possible if they all only had one option to choose from.

So then, flexibility and options with ICTs provide complexity for us as teachers but there are ways to manage this. And if we’re not providing it for students as much as we can in classes, one thing’s for sure, they’ll make decisions around best-use themselves in their own time regardless of what they have or haven’t learnt with us.

ICTs, learning and why cooking crystal meth makes you a bad person

Recently, as I was perusing the work output of my tutorial students, I came across one individual with two windows up on his laptop. In one he had a very nice piece of formal writing and in the other he was desperately trying to re-watch the first four seasons of Breaking Bad before the final aired the following week. Responding to this would have been a pretty simple decision for me a few years ago. The logic in my thinking was pretty simple: he should work solely on his formal writing rather than switching between it and ruminations on how the complex decisions facing Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and friends might make us further confused about what makes people good and/or bad. If he works solely on the formal writing he’ll get a better grade in English. There is clear evidence that switching between two cognitively complex tasks (conveniently ignoring the fact that some might argue that watching TV isn’t a complex cognitive task) leads to a lower level of engagement and quality with both. Not to mention the fact that tutorial time is for working! On school work I mean, not other work! And when I say school work, I mean minimal time on satellite stuff loosely connected with regular subjects and more time on really hardcore stuff like assessment work!

But it’s not really that simple, is it? If you’re writing me off as a bleeding heart liberal at this point, please bear with me as I do my best to outline how this once simple decision has now become a deeply complex and angst-ridden internal conflict. Well not quite angst-ridden but definitely a little more complex. Student S (as we’ll henceforth refer to him as) will potentially do really well with that piece of formal writing, regardless of whether he’s switching between writing it and watching Breaking Bad during tutorial time. The fact is, that he’s got more than enough time to get a pretty convincing excellence before the piece is due. Of course this adds some complication around consistency if another student without the same skillset isn’t able to finish theirs because they’re also watching Breaking Bad. I could, I suppose, argue that Student S’s piece of writing won’t be as good if he multi tasks for the next half an hour but to be honest I’m not even sure that’s true. On the other hand while it’s not all that likely he’ll decide to become a drug dealer (he isn’t taking chemistry, physics is more his thing) I can see how engaging with the complex and layered characters in Breaking Bad might, in fact, give him some ideas for his own final piece of creative writing later in the year.

My response to this complex moral conundrum could be to tell Student S that he can’t watch Breaking Bad on the premise that it would make a difference to his final formal writing grade or that it isn’t equitable if other students aren’t able to do the same thing. The latter argument might hold some weight with him but probably not the former (Student S does have a reasonable social conscience.) Another option might be to push for a school-wide ban on the watching of films or TV series during tutorial, thus taking the responsibility of the decision away from me altogether. Although I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of being an enforcer more than that of a being a philosopher. The option I took in the end was to try and convince him that watching Breaking Bad would make it difficult to engage in his formal writing and that if he really wanted to enjoy the entirety of the first four seasons, he’d be far better off doing it at home on a decent-sized screen without sub-standard earbuds for sound.

It seems strange to me that I’ve only recently considered how many variables there are in a conversation with a student on what learning is the most important for them at any one time and why. There is the student’s complex list of priorities, my list of priorities (not all of which will be based solely on Student S’s best learning interests), the learning interests of the other students around Student S and finally there is the overarching consideration of what’s going to be the most useful to all of those groups in the future. And once we get into thinking about the future, anything I say about how useful a piece of learning might be will always involve some degree of speculation. And crikey, if there’s one thing that makes it obvious I’m not the fount of all knowledge, it’s an admission that some of what I’m saying might be speculation.

Perhaps in the rare times questions around the utility and value of the learning we’re delivering did used to come up, we might have been giving the curriculum a read over and seen those learning area justification sections. For the most part, students arrive in our class at the beginning of the year and they’re stuck with us for however long and regularly the timetable says they should be, and also with any decisions we make on what learning is the best for them. It’s not that we’ve never had to justify these things before it’s just that we haven’t had to all that often.

Given how technology is changing the face of learning however, it seems a risky proposition to go on ignoring what makes a particular type of learning valuable to an individual student or engaging with these questions in a surface manner with responses such as: students must alway work on what I’ve timetabled in exactly the order I’ve specified because that’s what’s best for them. In a world which continues to be changed by technology at a fairly rapid pace, engaging in conversations with students about what learning is valuable along with why and how it might help in the future seem pretty jolly important. We don’t need to pander to every whim of every student all the time, but we do need to help model the process of thinking about the importance and relevance of learning and engage in this actively with students. These conversations can be pretty intimidating especially when we’re already pressed for time or by the knowledge that students do need to pass assessments on a clearly specified set of skills. Not to mention the fact that we’re not even totally sure our individual beliefs on what’s important are even going to be that much more helpful for them than arbitrary rules with flimsy or non-learning based reasons for their existence. Still, we don’t have to worry about knowing it all now either. If they want more ideas on what particular piece of learning is important and why, they’ve always got the internet to go searching for other opinions!

So while after nearly having finished watching Breaking Bad myself I’m still pretty clear on the largely negative moral implications of cooking crystal meth. I’m still sadly a bit unclear, however, on my ethical responsibilities when it comes to directing what students should be working on. But maybe like Jesse, Walt and Vince Gilligan, I’ll just keep doing my best to respond and develop stuff as I go along and hope everything turns out OK. Just as long as I can get it sorted in time before the future arrives…