The Reflective Educator

Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Tag: technology (page 4 of 6)

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Communication tools

Our assignment this week was to choose two communication tools, either synchronous or asynchronous in nature, and use them with our LMS. The tools we choose can either be an internal part of whichever LMS framework we have chosen, or some external tool.

My online course within Moodle is intended to support a face to face course called IB Mathematical Studies I will be running next year at my new school. This course is supported by an external curriculum and a standard final exam worth 80% of the final grade of the students. Students will responsible for learning the same material as other students from all over the world and so internal accountability will be very important.

The first tool I chose is an ongoing discussion forum within the LMS. I will likely end up teaching a split class, where some students are taking IB Mathematical Studies, and other students are taking IB Mathematics SL. Unfortunately these two courses are very different and so often some students will be working on an assignment while I am teaching a lesson to another group of students. In order to provide both groups of students with ample time to ask questions, my thought is that I should provide an ongoing place for the students to bring up their questions, which either they can answer for each other, or that I can answer.

The organization of the forums is by topic. According to Anderson (2008), “[t]he first task for the e-learning teacher is to develop a sense of trust and safety within the electronic community.” For this reason I have started the course with an icebreaker week in the forum discussions. This allows students to iron out any difficulties logging into the forum and learning how to post to the forum discussions. It also provides an opportunity for all students to complete an activity with which they will be successful.

This tool will allow students both the opportunity to ask questions they might not have time to ask during class, and the chance to review the answers to these questions at their own pace. As we have organized the forum discussions by topic, it will also provide a way for students to keep track of the material we have covered in the course for any review before in-class exams. These benefits are not something many IB Mathematical Students experience, given they are often the weaker students in the school. Many of them lack the organizational skills to keep a notebook in an organized enough fashion to be useful for review.

I’ve tested the forum feature and it seems to work as advertised. It allows for discussions to be threaded, which makes it much easier to keep track of what has been discussed, and what order participants have responded to questions. The formatting of the responses is done using the FCKEditor JavaScript “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor. In my experience as a web developer, this particular WYSIWYG has excellent cross browser and operating system support, being one of the few WYSIWYG editors which support Safari.

One major limitation with the forums is the difficulty students will experience posting mathematical equations and symbols online. Although there are plugins for Moodle which allow mathematical equations to be added to the pages (I’ve written one of these myself), they are all fairly difficult to use for the end user, usually requiring an arcane formatting language called Tex to be learned by the students. I have had success teaching a limited subset of Tex to high school students, but it can be difficult for many of the students, especially the weaker students.

I have learned a variety of techniques for creating online equations, but have noted that the difficulty of adding the questions is inversely proportional to the number of steps required to add the equations into the forum discussions. The easiest way for students to add equations is to use Microsoft Equation editor, something most students learn quickly, and then convert each equation to an image (usually by taking a screen shot, cropping it in an image editor, saving the file) and then uploading it and inserting it in the correct location to their post. The most difficult method is for the students to learn Tex and type their equations directly into the WYSIWYG editor but this is a single step process.

There are a couple of problems with this forum system. One is that it is very teacher directed, in the sense the format and content of the forums is decided by me. Although students are free to post any questions they want, they must post topic specific questions in an appropriate location. This limits their freedom and hence their motivation to use the forums.

Another method of communication I will continue to use with my course is an associated class blog. I have actually used this with my teaching for 4 years now with my classes, and have found it to be very successful. I have not yet set up a blog for my new school, but my old classroom blogs, using the Movable Type and WordPress platforms respectively, are located at http://www.southbank.net/blogs/staff/davidw/ and https://davidwees.com/davidw.

Given my experience with using a blog with my students, I have found it to be an effective form of communication, both for broadcasting information to my students, and for providing a place for students to communicate with each other, and with me online. Over the years I have been refining the use of a blog with my class and can see some more improvements for the future.

First, each student has an account on the blog, and the ability to post new blog entries, comments, and create tags for their entries freely. This allows students to post about anything they want, with the proviso that it must have something to do with our course. How I have been providing some structure for the blog is by having students post daily summaries of the lessons from class, and requiring students to read each others’ summaries using a relevant comment to prove the reading of the summary.

This has been included in the participation grade of each student in the class, which I have found an effective way to motivate even the weaker students to participate in the blog. Students are graded using a rubric, which rewards both the completion of an entry and the quality of the posts, hence students feel both rewarded just for doing an entry, and for putting their best effort into the entry.

The purpose of the blog has been to provide a way to make announcements to students, upload resources for them to download, and allow for communication between students. The summaries that have been posted have been very useful for students during review, as is evident by both my course evaluation forms, and the online web statistics provided by the blog.

There are a couple of limitations of the blog. The first is that again, just like the forums for Moodle, students will have difficulty posting mathematical equations. The solutions I have used to make this possible are the same as what works for the Moodle forums.

The second limitation is that the blog does not allow for students to group entries together in their own categorization system. I am building an improvement over the WordPress CMS in the Drupal CMS, where students will be able to bookmark useful entries for later, build an online portfolio of their best work, make some of their work private, and categorize content anyway they want. All of the other features of the WordPress blog would continue to be available, but this should allow students to have their freedom to construct their own online learning space.

Both of these systems are asynchronous, but in the world of high school education, this is probably a good thing for more than one reason. First, high school students are busy, typically being involved in many different activities so finding a time for synchronous communication with all students would be too difficult. Second, the asynchronous nature of this communication means students have time to think about and format their questions and responses since mathematics is such a difficult subject matter to format for the web.

References:

Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University. Accessed online 14 June 2009 http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf

October 18, 2009 / 2 Comments

Assessment tools

So today I finished my first Moodle quiz. I found it relatively easy, although a little bit time-consuming, especially as my area of expertise is mathematics. Every equation needed to be carefully created as an image and uploaded.

There were a couple of aspects to the quiz creation which I really liked. The first was the feedback box underneath some of the answers boxes for the various answer types. Choosing answers for the multiple choice which were incorrect meant I had to think about the various ways students could make mistakes, then choose appropriate feedback based on what they did.

The second thing I liked was the fact that when students finish the quiz, they can be given immediate feedback about how well they did. Very handy. Students get to know which questions they got right, and which ones they got wrong, and some suggestions below the ones they got wrong on what they could improve. Relevant feedback, as Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005) point out is very important in the learning process.

One serious problem though is that for the types of questions which encourage higher order thought, as per Bloom’s taxonomy, you cannot give feedback to the students. Only the lower order skills appear to be directly testable.

The other difficulty is that with short answer, matching, and multiple choice questions it is difficult to see what types of mistakes the students are making. You can infer from their incorrect solutions what they must be thinking for a short answer or possibly a matching question, but the multiple choice questions leave a lot to be desired in terms of teacher feedback. Part of the point of assessment I’ve found is to inform the teacher where the students need more assistance.

Construction of questions was relatively straight forward, and the ability to re-use questions and to clone questions is pretty cool. I found this process easy to do, I didn’t need very much help. I did notice that adding images to Matching style questions was a bit difficult, and required an understanding of HTML. This is a usability problem, one that could easily be addressed by attaching a WYSIWYG editor to the textbook for the question in the matching style problems.

All in all I was pretty impressed, and I think the additional time spent creating the tests could be worth the time saved not having to grade them manually. This could be very useful for certain topics where there are very few ways students can solve the problems.

References

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 11 March 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

October 18, 2009 / 2 Comments

Using a wiki

I’ve used a wiki many times in the past, but either I was editing pages by myself, or with my students. Never have I used a wiki with a group of people who all have some expertise in the topic we are editing. The exercise we completed as a class was an interesting experience for me because of the opportunity to see a wide variety of people writing.

Besides the content being better, another thing that was different was how well the page was organized. Most of the time, when students create a page, they don’t include a sensible table of contents, etc… They need to be trained. Working with people who have used wiki’s a lot before helped a lot in this area.

Often when people have little experience with a wiki, they feel uncomfortable editing each other’s work. Without a willingness to jump in and change someone else’s words, the wiki either stagnates or bloats. Wikipedia doesn’t suffer from this problem largely because most of the edits are anonymous, and from people we don’t know. Somehow we are more willing to change some unknown person’s work than one of our peers. Students, with some training, will sometimes change each other’s work. Usually they will leave a comment suggesting a chance rather than making the change themselves.

Although I’ve used a wiki in the past, I found this a useful exercise. I think the act of reflecting on acts we have done (even many times) really helps understand the theory behind what we do.

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Digital Story

Why did you choose this particular tools? How did the tool impact the manner in which you told your story (perhaps in a way that is different had you just used text or related the story using your voice)? How might you use such tools in your own teaching to produce materials for students? How might students be given access to the same authoring tools? What kind of impact would you expect to see in your students in terms of motivation, creativity, or any other characteristics?

Our job was to play around with some of the Web 2.0 tools now available for creating online/offline presentations. There has been tremendous competition in this area, especially if this list of tools we were given by our professor is any indication. Choosing one of these tools would be time-consuming, however in this case I had Twitter to help me. Turns out that on Twitter lots of people I’m following are raving about Prezi, a relatively new tool which looks to me like a replacement for PowerPoint.

I actually did this assignment wrong at first. I used Photostory 3, a program Microsoft puts out which is surprisingly decent and easy to use. After uploading my video to Youtube, I went back and reread the assignment, and discovered I was supposed to use one of the tools listed on the Wiki page above. Oops. Guess I should be less surprised when my students mess up an assignment.

Fortunately Prezi is pretty easy to use, and I had already collected all the photos I wanted to use. Within an hour I had most of the presentation up and going. One problem I had though was embedding audio with my presentation. I really think music or a voice over included in an online presentation is key, otherwise the presentation might be a bit boring. So I did some digging around and found out Prezi allows you to embed SWF files (usually created with the Adobe Flash authoring program) into presentations. I just created a simple SWF with the audio I wanted embedded (a very famous Thai song… hope I don’t get Prezi banned in Thailand!) and set to play as soon as the SWF is downloaded. Making the SWF super small (1px by 1px) makes it seem as if the audio is part of the presentation, rather than a separate download.

I found that when using Prezi, adding each image takes a bit of time. Aligning the text with the image, especially when the image was rotated AND the frame to hold the text and image was rotated was difficult. I had to fiddle with it quite a bit to get everything to look right. This meant I didn’t really want to add more frames than was absolutely necessary to tell my story, and my Prezi presentation ended up being quite a bit shorter than my Photostory presentation.

Telling a story this way is interesting, partially because there’s no opportunity to clarify anything you’ve written. I found myself editing the text quite a bit to make sure that none of it was controversial (I’m going to be sending this to family) or could be "taken the wrong way" out of context. Without the ability to see the audience this presentation is for, I lose a lot of the very useful two-way communication that occurs when you tell a story. For example, I have no idea if anyone else will even like this presentation!

I think I’ll use Prezi next year with my students. I usually have students create a review of what we have done in class, generally as a PowerPoint presentation. Creating the presentation in digital form definitely increases the amount of time it takes to do the review portion of the assignment, but makes the giving of the presentation decidedly easier. One advantage, an important one I think, of Prezi over PowerPoint is the fact it can be used from anywhere, is easy to move between computers, and can be easily shared/embedded online. As well, none of the students needs to pay for using Prezi, which means I can reasonably expect all of my students to have the required software (they need a web browser).

I’m going to be teaching science and mathematics next year. In mathematics, a typical word problem is like a story. One way I could help students improve their ability to solve word problems is to view the problem like a story. In fact, I’ve had students create their own word problems (and video problems!) and I think that if we story-boarded the word problems, using a presentation tool like Prezi, then they might have a better understanding of the steps involved in solving the problem. Students have a variety of different learning styles, and this might help some of the students understand word problems who normally have difficulty.

In science there are lots of stories, especially in Biology. I could imagine telling the story of the life cycle of a tadpole/frog for example using one of these presentation tools. Seeing the life-cycle visually would definitely help students see the changes that occur in the frog as it matures. Telling the story themselves would help them remember it, and understand a fundamental principle of biology, the cycle of life.

Prezi is cool. It does all these neat turns and twists, etc… when transitioning between slides. This is pretty hard to do with PowerPoint and way cooler looking than the typical twists, etc… Prezi is also much easier to use than PowerPoint. After only two presentations, I think I’m pretty competent with it. Spending time during class learning how to use software isn’t my cup of tea, I’d rather the tool students are using is so straight forward you can teach it in 10 minutes. Any longer than that and you have to do loads of reteaching.

Students will like using it because it’s easy and free. It allows them to be creative while not burdening them with cumbersome multi-step "formulas" for getting simple things done.

The drawback I see for students is the audio portion. I hope the people at Prezi.com get that figured out soon. Adding an audio file to your presentation has got to be easier than what I went through. I mean I found it easy, but I’ve devoted a lot of time to learning Flash, time better spent doing something else I think from a student’s perspective.

You can view it at http://prezi.com/129140/view/. Wait a bit for the music to start, the images to download and then click on the right arrow at the bottom to navigate through the slides.

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Blogging in Education

I’ve been blogging off and on for a few years now at https://davidwees.com. Actually I have 3 blogs right now that I maintain infrequently right now, my MET program has me too busy to focus on my own blogs. I don’t really find the process difficult, the hardest part is coming up with material to talk about, and then taking the time to write it down.

I have a personal blog, which was intended to be for family members to read, and has mostly been replaced by a photo gallery website. It seems my family members want to see the pictures more than they want to read me discuss the pictures. Hrmmph!

The blog I have put the most amount of effort into is my programming blog. I’ve probably got about 100 posts on this blog, all related to various programming projects I’ve undertaken over the past 4 years. It’s also my most widely read blog, with maybe 20-30 people reading an entry each day. I actually started this blog as a way of both drumming up some business for myself (people who search for solutions to problems might see my examples, etc… I’ve probably gotten 10-12 jobs through my blog so far, all part-time). I also wanted a way to keep track of what I’ve done because to be honest, I forget! It’s a lot of different stuff.

I started an educational blog about the same time I started looking for work for this coming year. I found a job, and I’ve been pretty busy, so this blog is on hold until September. Once I start work again, I’ll probably try and update it fairly regularly, because I want a record of what I’ve tried with my students.

When I was looking at the top 100 educational blogs, the first surprise was that one of those blogs is an acquaintance of mine I met online. It was pretty neat to see his name in the “spotlights” so to speak, and so I took another look at his blog. Pretty cool tech blog, although more focused on technology rather than education.

Blogging is a pretty cool thing to do in education because it takes all of us as educators out of our classrooms and lets us show off what we do. So often educators get so little credit for being good at their jobs, having a place to showcase one’s talents can be very rewarding. As well, other educators become better as we begin to develop institutional memories about our profession. This can only lead to good things.

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Reflection on creating some modules for an LMS

For our ETEC course we are supposed to start working on a course built in our choice of LMS, between Moodle or WebCT. I haven’t discussed the reasons why I chose Moodle, but it was pretty simple: it’s what my school uses and it’s free. I figured I would be able to transfer over some of the work I did in Moodle, and bring it with me to my new school. For this reason I decided to work on a course I might actually use, IB Mathematical Studies, one of the courses I will be teaching next year.

We weren’t supposed to create a complete course as part of this exercise, presumably because of how time-consuming this is. Estimates of time spent per hour of course content ranged up as high as 40 hours of development time. Since the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) requires at least 150 hours of instructional time for a course, this would mean a full course would take me up to 150 x 40 = 6000 hours of development time. I couldn’t really justify putting that much effort in for a single course (nor could I find that many hours in the day!). I chose therefore to do the beginning introductory unit, and a sample unit on trigonometry.

I decided to evaluation my progress using Moodle with the SECTIONS framework.

Students:

As I was the student for this exercise, I found Moodle to be relatively easy to use, and it was an appropriate tool for what I was trying to do. I wouldn’t recommend a high school student (or an unmotived undergrad) try using Moodle, but the students in our class it worked.

Ease of use and reliability:

Moodle was easy to use, and I think that my course will reflect that. It was easy to set up a straight forward plan of action, separating each topic by units. Moodle makes it easy to organize your content. There were a few issues where I felt the interface could be cleaned up a little bit, especially on the JavaScript side of things. Rearranging resources within a unit is less than satisfactory, there are certainly much better widgets for doing this.

Costs:

It cost me nothing but my time, and not too much of that. I spent about 20 to 25 hours or so total working on my course. Part of the advantage I had here was that many of my diagrams and icons I had already created, so I didn’t need to “recreate the wheel” so to speak. I could imagine that this could have been quite a bit different if I was just starting out teaching, or if I wanted to have more interactivity in my course. I had a thought for a Flash widget that allows students to try and determine which method would be most efficient for solving a triangle for example, but decided this would take too much of my time.

Teaching and learning:

I think that having this exercise as a largely self-directed exercise is a really good approach. I find myself learning new technologies best by diving into them, and occasionally searching for help online. There are numerous resources for using Moodle, and with the help of my classmates (I read a lot of discussions about Moodle, and they definitely helped!) I was able to accomplish all of the necessary tasks.

Interactivity:

Moodle is reasonably interactive, in the sense that I take actions and it responds. In terms of providing interactivity for my students, my hope is that my course will allow them to respond to each other (using the forum posts), self-direct themselves through some of my content, and use the interactive applet I included. At some stage I could have a whole collection of applets, and since Moodle does not appear to filter the HTML I enter into its form, I can embed all sorts of fun Flash/Java tools within it’s environment.

Organizational issues:

Well in order to use my course, and therefore Moodle, clearly I will need a server to host it. A relatively basic server would be acceptable, given Moodle’s relatively low memory requirements.

Novelty:

Moodle is not a very new technology. I remember playing around with it in 2005 and enjoying the experience somewhat, but not being hooked. Had I realized the power it had to save my lessons, etc… I might have saved myself a lot of work now. At my new school I happen to know that the students are pretty used to Moodle, since many of the teachers appear to use it extensively. The novelty factor is probably going to be lost on the students, but perhaps I regain some of that with the additional tools I want to use.

Speed:

The UBC Moodle server was extremely fast and responsive, which was excellent. I hope the server I move this course to will be as responsive.

References:

Cavanaugh, J. (2005), Teaching Online – A Time Comparison, Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume VIII, Number I, retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring2005/cavanaugh81.htm on July 26th

Lazarus, B.D., (2003), Teaching Courses Online: How Much Time Does It Take?, JALN Volume 7, Issue 3, retrieved from http://sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v7n3/pdf/v7n3_lazarus.pdf on July 26th

Rumble, G., (2001), The Costs and Costing of Networked Learning, JALN Volume 5, Issue 2, retrieved from http://www.auburn.edu/outreach/dl/pdfs/Costs_and_Costing_of_Networked_Learning.pdf on July 26th

Bates, A.W., Poole, G., (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education, cited from course-work for ETEC 565

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Accessibility

So today I checked my LMS for accessibility and found the following observations.

First, running the mark-up through the W3C web markup filter I found a few errors. It seems Moodle is using an XHTML 1.0 strict doctype (which is an identifier for what type of HTML a browser should expect to be parsing) and a WYSIWYG editor which is not compatible with this doctype. This type of error is common, almost none of the popular web editors are compatible. Fortunately the types of errors which are produced should still be accessible to users, as the basic structure of the web page is solid, it just includes a few elements and attributes which shouldn’t be there with that doctype. Most web browsers can manage with this type of error present.

Unfortunately there appears to be a closing tag error for one of the divs at the end of the document. Moodle uses a theme, and we insert our information into boxes in the theme and one of these boxes is apparently not closed. This poses a much more serious problem for accessibility as almost all browsers struggle to try and decipher what the web designer wants when a tag is not closed. I cannot do anything about this error without a lot more control over my Moodle site, except possibly point it out to the Moodle developers.

All of the images I have uploaded to the site have the alt attributed filled in. For the equations I was careful to use the equation written in simplified TeX format as the alt tag so that a user with a visual impairment could still read the equations. Some of the diagrams alt attributes are less useful, but in general the diagram is explained in text before the image appears.

There are other ways in which my site could use improving in terms of web accessibility. For example, I use a video my students created for a project in class. The video uses captions which are formatted as part of the video itself, rather than as a separate text overlay. This means that people who have both a visual and an audio impairment will not be able to use this video. Wherever possible audio and video files should have captions which are accessible to screen-readers (Paciello, M.G., 2000).

My LMS site also includes an interactive Java applet. While this is not crucial to the understanding of the material, it is helpful. Unfortunately this applet does not use any hot-keys, and so requires a visual only interface. A user with a visual impairment could not use this applet.

Another issue which is becoming more prevalent is the mobile web market. While users who are using a mobile phone may not have a disability, more and more websites today need to be accessible for mobile browsers. Fortunately you can use a separate style-sheet for a mobile phone, but it is unlikely that this has been implemented for my LMS. A mobile browser could be used by a person who is in a remote location, so in some sense providing this separate mobile CSS stylesheet could be justified under making the LMS more accessible to users in remote locations. Similarly for these users it is important to keep file sizes as small as possible, given the costs associated with mobile browsing, as my friends with smart phones can attest.

One advantage that the Moodle LMS offers to users using a screen reader is the lack of a lot of complicated JavaScript. Although many newer screen reader technologies allow for the use of JavaScript, it can still be quite distracting and difficult for a person with a visual impairment to focus on the content. Moodle uses links for every action, which a screen-reader can tab through, the only JavaScript is on the WYSIWYG editor interface which is not necessary. The only action a person using a screen-reader might have difficulty doing would be uploading an image, as this appears to be tied into the WYSIWYG interface.

In general this LMS site is accessible, and I was pleased with the results of the survey of the site for accessibility.

References:

Paciello, M.G., (2000). Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities. Accessed from http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5_udKik9RPMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=web+accessibility&ots=IAPxj4UE49&sig=LPufnlJa4SBEMedh4nbYvUifTWs on July 29t

October 18, 2009 / 0 Comments

Resizing and cropping photos using Picasa

One of our activities was to practice resizing and cropping photos using the free and open source photo editor, Picasa. Although I have done many photo edits before, Picasa was by far the easiest to learn how to use, and the fastest to achieve results. Within 5 minutes of having installed Picasa, I had both my crop and my resize done.

Practicing resizing

Practicing cropping

Both of these photos are from the same original, which is too large to show here.

What surprised me about this activity was how easy Picasa was to use. I had downloaded it in the past as a way for my wife to easily share photos with her brother, and I liked how it automatically organized my photos into folders, arranged chronologically by when the photo was created. This was very handy. I expected to have to watch both the training videos, but the cropping was exactly as I expected it to be, and easy to find the function.

The resizing was a bit trickier, Picasa wants you to resize and export an image, not sure why this is. It seems to me that resizing an image permanently is a straight forward function, and should be included as part of their mini-toolkit. Definitely something I think that needs to be reworked.

I’ve used GIMP photo editing in the past, and it seems much more powerful but lacks two important features for the typical user. It does not in any way attempt to organize your photos, which is a powerful feature Windows really does poorly. Picasa is also very easy to use in a way GIMP just isn’t.

October 18, 2009 / 1 Comment

Creating audio with Audacity

I’ve used Audacity many times before, so this was a relatively straight forward activity. Actually, I have even given a presentation where I showed a group of teachers how to use Audacity as part of a workshop on "Using Open Source Software in Education". Very nifty program, definitely a prime example of the power of open source.

So I decided I needed to do more than the basic "create a sample" and decided to edit the audio slightly. What prompted me to do this was the fact that after I recorded my voice, although my voice sounded crystal clear, there was a tiny bit of noise in the background. Unfortunately I couldn’t move the microphone I’m using any closer to my mouth (it’s attached a headset) so I was stuck with the noise in the recording.

Here’s what it sounded like before the noise removal.

Here’s what it sounded like after noise removal.

The second recording has no noticeable background noise, but the process has added a bit of a metallic feel to my voice in a couple of places. Either the way I did the noise removal was not correct, or the filter itself needs a bit of work.

In any case, Audacity really makes professional level audio editing and recording available to unprofessional audio editors like myself, and I found this activity to be a refresher in its use.

October 18, 2009 / 1 Comment

Philosophy of Educational Technology

In my teaching, I infuse technology through-out my lessons.  Although I have a deep interest in technology going back as far as I can remember, I hope I am using technology purposefully and appropriately.  It is important to me that technology not just be a fancy add-on, but that it should be a tool with which to help students understand the world.

The purpose of using educational technology is to enhance pedagogy and enable students to learn.  We have many tools we use as educators, and different types of technology are included in this toolset.   The major benefit of using technology is that it can greatly expand the variety of types of lessons students can participate in.

In my experience students learn best by doing, rather than by watching.  As much as possible, I try to have students work as participants in a collaborative guided investigation, rather than relying on direct instruction.  William Glasser once famously said "We learn, …50% of what we see and hear, …80% of what we discuss and 95% of what we teach," modifying Edgar Dale "Cone of Learning." (Dale, 1969)  Hence, in my classroom I try and have the students do, discuss, or teach the material they are learning.  This style of instruction is aided by the powerful technological tools of today.

My strongest values in education are compassion for students, open-mindedness about what they are capable, and recognizing their differences.  Educational technology allows me to be more compassionate, in that I can differentiate a lesson better, understand my students through their work, and provide more opportunities for student voice.  One of the ways I provide this voice is using multimedia presentations and integrated technologies as summative of the students’ understanding.   These types of activities assist students in remembering what we have learned.

I have recently begun to move away from lecturing to students and have this experimented much more with student led research.  For example in my science 8 class each pair of students is researching one of the body’s systems, and presenting their work in the form of a website.  Other students will be responsible for reading this material, then summarizing it in a short audio podcast.  This way I will be attempting to improve the retention of the material, and moving ownership of the learning process to the students.

My personal theory is based a lot on Ausubel’s assimilation learning theory (Novak, 2007)which suggests that knowledge is retained and more useful when it comes from meaningful learning experiences rather than rote learning.  I try very hard not to rely on rote learning in my teaching for I know how quickly students forget the material once they no longer need it.  I also know that if you excite students about a subject, they will put tremendous effort into learning it, which greatly improves their retention.  One of the areas I have made the most change is recognizing that teaching specific content is less important than teaching the skills necessary to learn and retrieve that content.

References:

Novak, J.D. (2007). Ausubel’s assimilation learning theory. In Custom course materials ETEC 512. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia, Bookstore. (Reprinted from Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations, pp. 49-78, 1998, Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum).

Dale, E. (1969) Audiovisual Methods in Teaching – Third Edition, Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, record retrieved from Eric database on October 18th, 2009

 

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