Blogalisation

No gamer left behind is a vodcast regarding the use of gaming technology in leraning, it may be accessed here. The video presents a number of examples where gaming is being used for educational purposes to great effect. The U.S. military is a high profile example of simulation gaming being used for training purposes. More relevant to the secondary school is the example of using civilisation to interest students in social sciences/history. The students in the video use the COTS (commercial off the shelf) game of civilisation to learn about how civilisations have been constructed and the different influences which shape the ways in which the different societies develop. The video states that the students in the program have become A grade students after the introduction of using civilisation as a means through which to learn the subject. I have always enjoyed computer games, I feel they have been a great help to my own development of problem solving abilities among other skills. Of particular interest to me as a language teacher I’m very interested in the use of MMORPGs as a tool through which learning can occur. I have recently taken to playing a free MMORPG by the name of Rappelz which can be accessed here (French version). The reason I chose to start playing the French version is because I see this game as being a means through which I can foster a virtual French community with my students, however fantastic the community may be, it’s a medium through which I can provide my students with the opportunity to create meaninful language in a context that interests them. All of the games quests, characters and beasts have French names, and communicate with the player in French, meaning if the students are to succeed in the game, they will have to understand the language. Further to this, the game has a guild function, through which I can organise a team with my students and we can play through the world together, communicating solely in the target language to achieve our goals of slaying whatever beast or conquering whatever quest is thrown at us. I find the idea of this game very exciting, I have mentioned the game to students in my class before who have already mentioned that they play it and other games such as silk road, which is another free MMORPG. Finding the right game to use to stimulate the interest of the class is something a teacher will need to consider, and also whether the RPG type game is more suited to boys or girls or whether both can play, however I feel at the very least this type of game can provide a very meaninful learning experience to students in the language subject area.

Van Eck has written an article on the use of digital game-based learning, it may be accessed here. The article discusses the history of technology in education and details the struggle to have game based learning accepted by the educational community as a valid means through which students can be educated. The main arguments put forward for the validation of this teaching method is that learning conducted through games is meaningful by the way that the knowledge learnt is learnt in a specific context and must be applied within that context in order to succeed at the game. Secondly, play is a ‘primary socialisation and learning mechanism’ the article uses lions as an example of a way in animals (just like people) learn how to conduct themselves through the use of play, and that the lion learns to hunt through playing as a cub.  The article then continues to discuss why games better teaching/learning. Primarily the article mentions Piaget and that games are masters of creating cognitive disequilibrium and resolution through assimilation and accommodation, and according to Piaget, this is how we learn. The article proceeds next to discuss the different types of games and their differing strengths when it comes to education… for example a card game is best for “promoting the ability to match concepts, manipulate numbers, and recognise patterns.” Finally the article discusses the difference between using media and integrating media. It mentions that a major flaw of the use of technology in education is that it has been ‘used’ not integrated into the learning process. Integration requires analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the media and then making any necessary accommodations for weaknesses and employing the strengths of the media. It also makes note that if the media has no significant strength… it shouldn’t be used. Seems common sense, however a lot of technology has been used simply because it’s novel and seems attractive. This point is at the heart of designing learning for a digital generation… to make learning meaningful to our students we must integrate technologies into our classrooms, not only deliver the same old instructional methods through the new media. The real strength of ICT at the current point in time, in my view is its ability to allow students to learn independently, through creation and discovery, this type of learning is the deepest level of learning and will be life long for our students… the next question then is how to we guide this discovery learning to areas applicable to the curriculum? A somewhat difficult question… ideally we could throw away the curriculum and have students learn things they’re truly interested in in any given subject, unfortunately this too has its problems. Things to think about.

Please find the the ABC’s Australia Talks: Education Revolution podcast to which my podcast relates here.

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I’ve just finished reading Rieber’s Article on designing learning environments that excite serious play. His article discusses the definition of play and what play can offer to the educational context, especially by way of learning through designing. I found the article interesting on two levels, though a little unfocused because of these two aspects. Firstly the concept of play as means by which things are learnt excites me incredibly, I’m a defiant individual and who hates being told what to do, another facet of this same characteristic is that I will not be defeated by anyone or anything, this has made me a resilient learner who has been able to survive his education through sheer refusal to give in. On the other hand, I have learnt myself a great number of things through interest, things that I have learnt more deeply and have sustained in my knowledge far longer than those things I have learnt so as to survive a course. For this reason the type of teacher I want to become is one who doesn’t have an air of forcing students into learning something, I want to inspire play from my students. To me, students will learn best, both in terms of understanding the knowledge taught to them and in terms of how well and how long they are able to use the knowledge/skills if they learn it through play. It’s great, to me, to have read that there is a movement in educational philosophy which values the fact that people play and learn through playing. Secondly the article discusses the benefits of using a designing for learning method, which also seems to be an encouraging and progressive form of education; one where students control their own learning and become specialists in fields relative to them through skill, interest and desire. The implementation of these two educational techniques will take an enormous shift in attitude for most teacher and an equally sized shift in the organisation of schools to accommodate the ’studio’ atmosphere Rieber describes. Overall I found this article uplifting and it gives me hope that teachers and students of the near future will both play in the classroom.

I’ve come across a website run by a government office known as the Australian Agency for International Development. On their site, here, there are quite a few links to articles concerned with the implementation of ICT in education. The articles vary in their focus from how lesser developed countries can deliver ICT based lessons using larger class sizes and fewer computers to the article which I’m writing this post about, which is a list of things that should be kept in mind when implementing ICT based educational programmes. The article may be accessed here. In this article the department details 14 lessons which they have learnt through their own research into ICT programmes and implementation in Australian schools. Some of the more poignant points to me were, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13. The other points are still valid, I just found them either a little too obvious in nature or a little too lofty in their ideal. Points 3 & 8 inform us that for collaborative online communities to be truly successful it helps if the collaborators have physical contact and/or a history of collaboration in a physical environment. I found this interesting as I know there are interest groups on the internet that have enormous amounts of collaboration from people who’ve never met before or had any prior dealings with each other. It does make sense, however, that if people have met and have an intrest in each other, the motivation to collaborate online will be stronger. Points 4 & 5 warn against the use of ICT by teachers who have only moderate computer skills and mentions that ICT programmes work best when implemented by teachers who use ICT for simulation or applications that are associated with higher learning. This is an interesting contrast to an article I commented on in a previous post in which the author mentioned her concern for ICT making students skim the surface of the world and not digging deeper into topics. I agree with this site that higher order thinking is an area of education which ICT can really enhance and believe this should be a focus for teachers wishing ot use ICT in their lessons. The other points relate to time constraints on using computers across schools and windows of opportunity due to schedule differences between the schools, the fact that teachers who are pressured for time by examinations will not be able to implement ICT effectively and that a collaborative, group-working focus should be adopted for ICT, something like a wiki where the students can co-author the online work.

Overall I think the article gives some practical points to keep in mind when thinking of using ICT or implementing an ICT programme in schools. I think the mother site has some great links relating to ICT that I’d like to explore and find more about.

I’ve just had a look at the Berwick Secondary College website in which it has a page discussing the use of ICT in Language classrooms. The page can be accessed here. The page has a section entitles why use ICT in the teaching of LOTE, however this section is a little superficial in its reasoning for why to use ICT in LOTE. I agree with the value of ICT for live interactions with people from the target language, this has obvious benefits for the listening to authentic productions from the target language and for interaction with native speakers of the language, however it mentions that the use of ICT can provide innovative teaching programs to compliment face to face teaching and explicitly mentions that it isn’t to replace face to face teaching. A little more explanation on the ways in which ICT can be used innovatively to teach LOTE would have been helpful. The page also had a section for ICT resources related to LOTE, however this, too, is a little superficial in that the resources provided are few and very obvious in nature, such as the department of education’s page of teaching resources for the subject. The learning federation link provided however does have some useful resources for LOTE teachers. The site may be accessed here. The resources are arranged in two main categories with is useful, multimedia and interactive programs. The multimedia resources include videos and audio recordings and the interactive programs include games that students can play and learn useful language related skills in the process. One which I previewed involved teaching students how to relate kanji by their radicals in Japanese and also find commonalities in meaning from looking at the radicals. It also taught students how to look kanji up in a kanji dictionary by way of radicals, all these skills are taught through playing a treasure hunt game for the different kanji on an island, the places in which the students find the kanji relate to the meanings and I believe the game was quite well set out overall. More investigation is needed to find programs and multimedia that are relevant to the classrooms in which I’ll be teaching adn that are beneficial and not just superficial however the site looks promising in terms of starting a resource pool of activities/media/resources that can be used in the classroom. I would like to develop a website myself in which resources can be pooled together under various menu types, by topic/grammar structure/resource type or at least provide links to relevant resources under these different headings.

Please find the video to which this post refers, here.

Lamb & Johnson have written a quaint little guide to social technologies mainly pitched at the teacher-librarian. The article may be accessed here.

The article is useful for new comers to technology as it gives a run down of the most common networking sites including media sharing sites like flickr and youtube and explains very briefly and in plain language what they do.

The article also describes a couple of the benefits of web 2.0 and the dangers that may come along with it, and it stresses the positive side of using the internet which is great in my opinion.

One of the interesting comments in the article was, “many students are unable to effectively evaluate the information that they gather from these various social contacts” which I find a little surprising. I would have thought that digital natives would be very discerning of the information which they can use and that they can’t in the digital setting. If this is the case, however, as teachers, it is important that this becomes one of the skills we teach our students, as it is vital for functioning in today’s society.

The other interesting point in this article was that regarding the use of the internet as a means to gain freedom. The authors mention that some students experiement with the internet like others do with drugs, and that this can sometimes be harmless and sometimes be dangerous. The concept of freedom through the internet was something which I hadn’t really considered, however it makes much sense to think that something with no bounds like the internet could provide a means by which teenagers can gain freedom from their parents/teachers/caregivers etc. . To me, this poses an interesting dilemma, how do we give our students the freedom they want/need through the internet whilst still protecting them from the dangers? I believe a great deal of rhetoric will be needed by any teacher to pursuade a student from accessing/creating something inappropriate via the internet whilst still allowing the student to, at the very least, feel as though their freedom isn’t being impinged.

The article also gives some ideas for modeling positive internet use by way of encouraging the use of social networks based on book clubs or writing clubs. I believe modeling ‘good’ use of the internet is one of the most powerful tools we have in relation to guiding our students usage of the internet, however it must be done with some credibility, something like a book club sounds, to me, very dull, and is likely not to be appealing to the majority of the students either, I think it is important to find material that will engage and interest the students and that is also appropriate for your classroom, modeling this will have a beneficial impact on the students’ usage of social technology, however modeling something that is irrelevant to their desires is somewhat null, in my opinion.

Sherry Turkle’s from powerful ideas to powerpoint presents an opinion of information technology making the world a ’shallow’ place in which people are taught to skim the surface of their world and see things in black and white. Turkle demonstrates her point by discussing the use of powerpoint in classrooms for presentations regarding poetry. Tukle mentions the complex nature of a poem with its multitude of interpretations and contrasts this to the powerpoint presentation with its bullet points and single authoritative voice presenting ‘facts’ to the class who do not disagree or pose argument. The interesting thing about this article to me is not the use of the technology itself, I believe students need to be taught to delve into complexity and do not disagree with Turkle that computers can help people become life skimmers who do not really understand the world in which they live, however as a student teacher myself who has had students deliver powerpoint presentations, I believe the technology does not forbid debate or problematic knowledge, at the end of every presentation in my class I ask my students questions pertaining to the bullet points they had presented, challenging their findings or assumptions, my students are encouraged to do the same, they often do. The powerpoint and computing technology in general, provides us with the facility to arrange and present our information in concise matter of fact ways, this does not mean that those facts are not or should not be contended. The internet is a good example of a counter point to her argument, in which she states we need to be able to be comfortable with ambivalence and contradiction, one google search will show a range of results regarding a single topic, all of which will have differing perspectives or at the very least nuances which we must sift through to find the most appropriate information for our purpose. Sometimes this is a purely personal professional purpose,other times it is an academic fact finding purpose, and I believe technology has given us greater access to this dilemma and through this, better equipped us emotionally and intellectually to deal with this ambiguity.

I’ve just read an article by Todd Oppenheimer regarding the use of computers in education which may be accessed here: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm . The article was written in 1997 which allows it some scope for having a dated and inadequate view of what ICT can do for the field of education, however even still the article seems a little naive and closed minded. The article does have some very good points, such as its opposal to the closing down of other school programs such as art and music to make way for computers. I agree that in the secondary school a wide variety of subjects should be made available to allow students to find their area of interest and develop the skills they will need to find a career that suits their personality. The main gripe I have regarding this article is the fact that it makes computing technology seem like another fad in education, it quotes the creators of previous technology such as radio and television and likens the computer to the same type of machinery which will ultimately have little impact on the way we teach an learn. The difference between computers and the former technologies is its application in the real world, how many occupations require the use of a television or radio? These two technologies are merely for broadcasting information from one place to another in one instance. The computer is much more than this, it has infiltrated every aspect of our professional lives and all workers need computer skills in order to be successful and competitive in the workplace. The computer not only broadcasts information but creates, manages and stores information, and is a new medium through which creativity can be expressed such as music or art. Due to this difference, there is every reason for governments to invest in educational technology by way of funds for computers.