‘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.