ICT-Mediated Learning Environments

This can be categorised into 3 different levels:

1) Macro – teachers use ICT to teach the entire course.

2) Meso – teachers use ICT to teach selected topics (e.g. geosketchpad to teach geometry)

Source: http://www.homeschoolmath.net/reviews/geometry_guided_inquiry.php

3) Micro – teachers use ICT to support learning to achieve specific objectives (e.g. Randall’s listening website to teach . test for listening)

Dependent on the level of usage, the teacher will either a) be the main computer user; or b) students will have access to computers for hands-on lesson. Additionally, for an activity that requires mobility, students may be given portable laptops with wireless access.

Source: http://mr-payne.com/handouts.htm

There is no hard and fast rule on what is the best way to use ICT to teach a subject (i.e. Is it better to use ICT on a macro level or a micro level?), or the perfect ratio of computer to users (i.e. Should the teacher be in full control of a single main computer, or students have individual computer to work with). It really is dependent on the purpose of the lesson – a teacher needs to balance out issues like the extent to which he needs to engage the students and / or gain his attention (i.e. teacher is main computer user) versus giving them free rein (i.e. student can use computer at will), and availability of equipment, before deriving at a suitable plan.

Technology for Assessments

At minimum, teachers use ICT as a tool to assess tests to students (e.g. MS words), present information to students (e.g. Powerpoint), administer tests (e.g. hot potatoe), and as an administrative and management tool (e.g. excel to tabulate student’s performance, and e-mail).

Using technology, can definitely help to lighten a teacher’s load in terms of marking MCQs (e.g. use OAS); help keep the teacher organised administratively.

Students can also benefit if the teacher uses technology to adminster tests. For example, using hot potatoe, students can complete the tests at their own pace and receive immediate feedback after completion. This helps a student to reinforce knowledge learnt.

Students use the internet frequently, as a tool to a) conduct online research to complete their assignments, b) post ideas on blogs or forums, and c) socialise with friends via online social networks.With this drastic increase in internet usage, cybersafety / cyberwellness is fast becoming a serious issue that schools need to address.

It is impossible to protect students from the evils of the internet, but schools can help to educate students to make the right decision when they encounter anything undesirable on the cyberspace (e.g. cyberbullying, sex solicitation, violence). Schools can also educate students on internet ethics (e.g. plagiarism).

To help educate the students on such cybersafety / cyberwellness issues, schools can invite external vendors to teach the students (e.g. Touch Youth Services cyberwellness programme), or they can ask students to carry out school cyberwellness campaigns. Most importantly, teachers need to re-emphasise such cyberwellness issues to the students from time to time.

Below is a summary of the different types of cybersafety / cyberwellness issues that students might encounter:

1. Content

• Retrieve online (pull) – unsupervised students may chance upon sites promoting pornography and / or violence.
• Put online (push) – students may commit plagiarism, or are tempted to copy from available websites.

2. Communication

• Cyberbullying- students may use blogs or forums to defame a fellow student.

3. Compulsion

• Cyber addiction – students may develop gaming addiction, cybersexual addiction, and net addiction.

Gone are the days where teachers took on a frontal approach in teaching the class; instead, teachers these days need to switch hats according to the students’ needs and the requirements of the teaching task.

It is important for a teacher to spend time creating and editing his lesson plans. 1) It helps a teacher to be focused on the instructional objectives and goals that he wants his students to achieve. 2) It helps to facilitate an objective lesson that the students can follow easily.

According to the ICT for self-directed and collaborative learning (Chai & Wang, 2010), components of instructional objectives include: Audience, Behaviour, Conditions, and Degree.

Audience specifies the learners; Behaviour describes the observable / measurable learning outcomes that the students need to achieve at the end of the lesson; Conditions lists the equipments needed to aid the students in achieving the behaviour;  Degree states the standard of performance the students must achieve.

The portion which teachers may have queries about is the behaviour portion. As the book states, we need to distinct between i) learning outcome to be achieved and ii) the instructional activity that the student engages in to achieve it.

To elaborate, “completing an English worksheet” is not a learning outcome. Indeed, the student completing an English worksheet can be observed and measured, however, it is merely an instructional activity. A learning outcome should specify an observable skill that the students can pick up from completing the English worksheet. (e.g. use present and past tense appropriately). Teachers can use action verbs like identify, construct, evaluate and so forth, when listing their learning outcome.

When writing lesson objectives, it is good practice to list the objectives according to difficulty level. It is also a good practice to teach students skills with increasing difficulty to challenge their minds.

According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, there is a hierarchy in which students learn. By building a good foundation of knowledge, and drilling on comprehension skills, it would be easier for a student to synthesise information that he reads.

Source: http://www.c21te.usf.edu/materials/institute/ct/index4.html

Designing ICT-based presentations for your lessons

Having said that, a teacher needs to plan for an interesting lesson. As much as he creates a lesson (on paper) that meets all the objectives , yet does not gain the students’ attention, the lesson pretty much does not meet the stated objectives.

In the beginning, I mentioned that the teachers need to switch multiple hats. When teaching the Z generation students, a teacher needs to be more than a teacher. In the discovery approach to learning, it is important for the teacher be a facilitator, to facilitate the student’s learning process, and not dictate the student’s accumulation of knowledge.

As presented in class by Mr. Koh, using ICT games can help the students in discovering information for themselves. For example, the use of a Wii-game like Trauma Center, can aid a class of Biology students to put in perspective the knowledge that they have learnt in class into a visual context. This 1) motivates students in their learning, and 2) is fantastic for visual learners.

Source: http://wii.ign.com.

So, the next time you plan your lesson, do incorporate such ICT elements. Keep it interactive, keep it enjoyable, and your students will be kept happy and more motivated to learn.

Learning Theories

According to Skinner’s theory on Behaviourism, students can be taught through a reinforcement-respond process. Drill and practice activities are examples of Behaviourism-based activities. Students practise on exercises repeatedly, and are conditioned to perform. However, this makes learning uninteresting; also, the student may not be motivated to learn.

According to the Cognitivism theory, students will learn after a series of rehearsing, elaborating and organising lesson content. Examples include resource-based learning, where students systematically source for information and learn in a structure manner. This systematic way of learning is said to have a better chance of converting information from the working memory to the long-term memory. However, to trigger off learning, the senses must be stimulated.

According to Piaget’s Constructivism theory, all students are entitled to construct knowledge through knowledge discovery. In this process, teacher (expert) talk is minimised and student’s are encouraged to discover knowledge by forming their own ideas according to their own perspective. This process is good for classes where students need to formulate alternate hypothesis. However, it may not be applicable in other lessons where students rely heavily on expert knowledge (human anatomy in biology) and can be time consuming.

According to Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism theory, students are influenced by their social cultural bearings when constructing knowledge and forming meanings. Students learn from their external environment and pick up social cues to solve a problem. Applicable lessons include those that require students to inteprete social context such as selected text for English Literature.

Dependent on the lesson content, lesson based on the different theory is applicable for learning. Whilst drill and practice activities (behaviourism) may allow a student to enrich their content knowledge, a systematic learning may allow a student to form stronger concepts (cognitivism) and help them to retain content learnt. However, in situations where there is no absolute right answer, it is good for students to brainstorm on alternative ideas (cognitivism and social constructivism) and discover for themselves whether the proposed idea is feasible. In this case, drill and practice activities will not work.

Thus, using a multi-modal approach in teaching would be useful, as this will allow the teacher to strike a good balance to aid the student’s overall learning.

In the second portion, I will not dwell too much in depth into the 5 different based lessons as brought up in class; but reflect on the ideas brought up during my expert group discussion – computer-based learning.

Tapping on ICT to make lesson interesting – A focus on Computer Game Based Lessons

Computer games stimulate the sense of sight, hearing, and touch. It instantly gains the student’s attention, thus achieving one of the step for learning to take place according to the Cognitivism theory.

Source: http://games.shadow.sg/

In Geo-Challenge, students can learn the flags and the geological shape of the different countries, and learn where are the different cities and landmarks located. This game engages the learner, and is beneficial for their general knowledge of the world. In my opinion, this is a fun way to learn maps and places, which otherwise would be a bore to memorise from picture books.

During my English lecture last week, Ms. Chan showed us how to tap onto a CSI computer game to teach our students writing skills. Normally, computer game based learning often acts as a supplementary tool and not as a main tool in teaching a subject.

The CSI game will be used as a main tool to teach students narrative writing. They will learn detective jargons by playing the game (e.g. blood, UV light); by solving the crime they will understanding what does it mean by resolving a conflict in a story, and thereafter use these knowledge to write a story.

Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/935/935858p1.html

This interactive approach helps to energise and interest the students in learning narrative writing. It makes the lesson come to life, and is more appealing to students.

A picture speaks a thousand words, but a moving picture speaks even more. What more can we say about computer game-based learning?

We need to be aware that computer game based learning has its limitations as well. 1) Students may get too engrossed playing the game and ignore the lesson objectives and 2) Other methods may be more appropriate for the lesson in mind. (For spelling lessons, game based learning may be too much).

Hence, it is important to weigh the method of presentation / what type of learning with the desired lesson objectives and carefully selecting the method with the best fit. Overall, we as teachers should aim to deliver multi-modal form of teaching, to achieve the ultimate aim that is to engage the students to motivate them to learn.

Self-directed learning

With the change in aims, teachers are now slowly moving away from spoon-feeding and hand-holding students, and steering towards creating an atmosphere where students are hands-on and directive about their own learning.

In the school that I was attached to during my contract teaching, students in my class were tasked with completing an explanatory essay, through the use of ICT, and in a self-directive fashion. The students had a) the freedom to choose any topic that interested them (e.g. cars, astronomy, animals, and so forth), b) were required to conduct online research by themselves at their own pace, and c) generate an explanatory text, explaining a process (e.g. how are chocolates made) based on what they had found. One of my students took this task further, in which she went through the whole process of making chocolates, in her own home, to ensure that what she wrote was accurate.

The usual ICT based tasks that teachers use as assessments include students doing up powerpoint presentations, or like what I have illustrated in the above paragraph, whereby students are required to write projects based on online research.

The question is, how do we expand on this list of ICT tasks that is deemed appropriate for secondary school students to take on – in a way that it intrigues and challenges them, yet is still fundamental enough for students to understand the task at hand, and stay relevant to course materials?

The possible work tasks and relevant models highlighted in the ICT textbook on causal reasoning, analogical, and expressive and experiential seemed a little far-fetched. Indeed, by creating complex mind maps, or using difficult systems can challenge the minds of students, but how does this read on the affordance scale (as per chapter 5)? In contrary, can such tasks bore students instead, simply because it is too difficult or unrealistic?

On the other hand, ICT tasks like web blog, web paint, or podcasts may be better activities to interest and teach students. Pertaining to EL, skills such as video editing or podcasting are good skills that students will find value in picking up, thus, teachers will be able to get their attention, teach them new skills, and get them to think creatively to complete assignments. Hence, meeting the ICT mp3 goals, and delivering course content.

Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning is not cooperative learning.

It is not surprising to see that cooperative learning often occurs in student group projects, more so than collaborative learning. The latter is hard to achieve, and can be difficult to assess.

In cooperative learning, the team is split into small groups to target a specific work task. Thereafter, students just need to extradite and compound information obtained from individuals. The outcome? Project work accomplished; individuals do learn contextual knowledge, but they do not internalise all the information that the group has sieved out. Additionally, there is a likelihood that individuals take for granted the work that their other team member has done and will not question it, unless there is a jarring error; thus, limited learning has occurred.

In contrast, the process of collaborative learning makes every team member troubleshoot the same problem, and prompts them to question suggestions – sharpening their thinking skills and social awareness (i.e. conflict management) – so as to generate a convincing solution.

Unfortunately, ICT based collaborative learning is hard to assess. How do you grade the students participation? How do you ensure that all students participate whilst still having a facilitator? How do you weigh their suggestions? It is not easy to put a grade on such qualitative qualities.

But as a professor once told me, as long as 50% of the students do learn something from any activity, whatever the grade the student receives, it is a successful programme. Hence, the most important part is that students understand the rationale behind collaborative learning, and attempts to collaborate with one another on the project work, pick up a few pointers along the way, and the programme is a successful one.

In my primary school, teachers relied greatly on the chalk board. Thereafter, in both my secondary school and junior college, it was clear that there was an on-going replacement exercise in which visualisers were replacing overhead projecters; teachers also used videos and powerpoint presentations to teach us lesson content, that would otherwise seemed dry and difficult for us to absorb or comprehend – this was especially beneficial for visual learners.

As teachers, carrying out lessons driven by ICT is inevitable, simply because the learning style of the students has evolved. Unlike in my days where students will head to the library to find information needed to complete projects, students these days will tell you that they googled or wikipediaed information.

Furthermore, the demands of a globalised world requires the Z generation students to be on a different level of technology-savviness from that of the X and Y generation students. These kids may be required by their employers to have the skills to host online conference calls, prepare presentations that have attractive graphic features, or tabulate complicated mathematical formulas on a spread sheet.

Having said that, I am a product of mp1 and mp2, and I am anticipating to see what students mp3 would produce. Unlike the former, mp3 assumes that students are already well versed in basic technological skills. Instead, mp3 emphasises on self directive and collaborative learning – the focus is now on generating a robust cohort of students who are self motivated thinkers and who are capable of finding creative solutions. It is no longer teacher-talk, but rather students self-exploration.

A problem that all teachers would face is finding the suitable task that would 1) spark students’ excitement and entice them to self-participate, 2) nurture their ICT abilities through that subject, and yet 3) balance pedagogical, social and technological affordance. I hope that at the end of my ICT course, I would be able to answer these questions.