Overcoming barriers

18. Barriers to the effective use of technology in education.

I love the way that a web search sends you off on tangents - it forces you to do lateral thinking whether you want to, or not. I started wanting to know about barriers to the effective use of technology, but found myself wasting time looking at mostly irrelevant pages and blog posts.
That said, you do end up learning things even if they're not the right things. So, I found myself looking at an online trade magazine called Installation, which is aimed at the people who sell hardware to colleges and schools. 
Holographic screens? Amazing, but not relevant to what I'm about here. What is interesting is an article title 'Education Technology Trends 2015', which looks at what is likely to sell well this year. By the way, knowledge sharing and video are the magazine's top tips.
But it also talks to educators about what is most important to them and says that reliability is the No.1 issue.  One interviewee stresses that teachers don't have time to waste on tech that doesn't work and adds that they must see benefits in something new, or they won't use it.
It got me working on this octopus of a mind map using Coggle. It's a big subject, but only part of it has a direct bearing on someone in my situation.

I think I can do something about at least three of the items at the end of those arrows. By 'teacher attitude' I mean that resistance to change can be a barrier, so my openness to change and readiness to try new things can make a difference.
That can also play into what I've termed the 'institution's attitude to change'. Much of that will come from a college's leaders, but staff views and opinions will also make a contribution.
Lastly, there's 'teacher confidence'. How confident - or not - I feel about using technology is partly about how well I've been trained to use it.
But it's also about putting in the time to find my way around whatever that new tech is (like I had to do with this blog a few months ago). Being ready to make a few mistakes, but to learn from them.

Sources:
Installation, www.installation-international.com (Accessed 21.1.15)

Pros/cons

17. Assessing the merits of technology for classroom use.

How can you make a judgement about the suitability of ICT? At the moment my decision-making process doesn't go much beyond 'will it work?' Or, that should be, can I make it work.
For example, I was rather proud this week of the brief PowerPoint presentation on the Welsh colony in Patagonia that I put together for my last Leisure & Tourism session. It was meant as just a quick five minute aside, but did look good - even if I say so myself.
The problem was that I put it on a cheap and nasty memory stick, which the classroom desktop refused to read. As it turned out I didn't really need that PowerPoint - the lesson seemed to work fine without it.
So, how to make a judgement about when to use technology, and when to stick with something more traditional? For insight I thought I'd turn to one or two of the text books I've come to rely on.
And my first impression is that in even the more recent editions the advice feels dated. For example, the library's copy of Francis and Gould (3rd edition, published 2014) is so new that it hadn't previously been stamped, but the language it uses when new technology is discussed sounds quaint; it devotes a section to the use of the overhead projector.
They only give half a page to the topic of how resources should be evaluated. They say "as in all aspects of teaching, use and reflection on that use, provides the route to improvement" and then offer this checklist.

My copy of Geoff Petty's 'Teaching Today' is fairly up-to-date - it's a 4th edition, written in 2009. He's enthusiastic about what ICT has to offer, but devotes more pages to traditional delivery than to things digital.
He warns his readers not to be 'dazzled' by the new, adding: "Ask yourself, 'What am I trying to teach?' and 'Will this help me?'"
It seems a commonsense approach. And research seems to suggest that the danger of being dazzled by the tech is very real. I've found plenty of opinion, but what seems to me to be the most useful study is one that looks at the hard evidence for a connection between ICT use and improved learning.
A Durham University team led by Professor Steven Higgins looked at 48 studies of learning from a range of age groups and from around the world.
What they were trying to find was primary studies that made comparisons between groups of pupils so that they could quantify the learning gain (or loss) that could be attributed to technology. Their study, published in 2012, concluded that technology alone does not make a difference to learning.
Technology engages and motivates, the report says, but it is the way that it is used that is the really important factor. "The crucial lesson emerging from the the research is that it is the pedagogy underpinning technology which is important: the how rather than the what," it says (those are their italics, not mine).
The report makes lots of interesting points - far too many for me to regurgitate here. The stand-out points for me are that technology should replace less effective classroom strategies, not effective ones, and that teachers (and learners) need lots of support when they are getting to grips with new classroom tech.
Just one last thought. I can't help thinking that there's a serious conflict between what this report says and Sugata Mitra's vision of schools without teachers. His street children did wonders with a computer in a wall, but would they have done even better if they had been given a computer - and access to a first-class teacher too?

Sources:

Francis, M. and Gould, J. (3rd edition, 2014) Achieving your award in education and training. London: Sage.

Higgins, S., ZhiMin, X. and Katsipataki, M. (2012) The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning: A Summary for the Education Endowment Foundation. London: Education Endowment Foundation. Link

Petty, G. (4th edition, 2009). Teaching today. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.

Quality control

16.  Towards information literacy.

Working on this blog has really focused my thoughts on the concept of digital literacy. When I started out last autumn it was one of the first topics I posted on, and at the time I assumed that it would all get clearer as time went on.
Not so, what seemed black and white then has become greyer and greyer as time has gone on. Clearly, as teachers we have a duty to  help learners towards a judgement of what is, and what is not, 'good' information. But that's quite a tall order because it's a call that I find hard to make for myself.
You can trust a text book or journal on the library shelves. Online news and comment is of variable quality (for example, I feel safe with the BBC's output, but am less certain about some other news sites) but how do you judge the credibility of blogs, video-sharing sites or social media?
Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) is the public body that supports post-16 education in the ICT area. It says that developing students who can learn and thrive in a digital society is a key role for universities and colleges.
It talks about digital literacy, saying that they are a package of capabilities that fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society. That package has seven elements, one of which Jisc calls Information Literacy.
It says information literacy is about finding, interpreting, evaluating, managing and sharing literacy (Jisc's digital toolkit can be found here) How that happens in practice is something I plan to look into further. 

Source:
JISC www.jisc.ac.uk (Accessed 3.1.15)

School's out?

15. How technology has changed the way we learn.

A few months ago I was doing a long journey alone by car, which gave me time to think about the prospect of starting out on my PGCE course. D-Day was just a day or two away.
Flipping channels on the radio I landed on BBC Radio 4 just as a programme with the title 'The Educators' was about to start. At any other time I might have opted for music instead, but under the circumstances I decided to keep listening.
For the best part of half an hour Sugata Mitra, the Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, expanding upon his vision for the future of teaching and learning. It was fascinating, but for me the timing wasn't ideal.
His vision for a world where learning is self-led is inspiring, but possibly not good news for student teachers. In Mitra's future, teachers are effectively obsolete.
You can't embed BBC files here, but here's the link. It is well worth a listen. He talks about his experiences providing computer access to Delhi street children (via something that looked like a cash machine) and about how children will learn for themselves if only they are giving the tools to make it happen.
First his street kids learnt how to use the computer, then they mastered English to understand what they saw on the screen and that opened up the internet for them. So, the future of teaching lies in what appears to be a combination of the humanistic approach to self-led learning - and technology.

It amounts to a world that has little or no need for teachers. In his radio interview, Prof Mitra says: "There will be machines that can replace a good teaching, just like there will be machines that will replace a heart surgeon."  
Of course, Sugata Mitra was only new to me. When I told friends and relatives about what he had to say they had already heard of him - he was 'the hole in the wall guy'.
I also discovered that he's also a TED star. There are a few Mitra talks to watch, but the most up-to-date is 'The School in the Cloud', from February 2013.
It's a great watch. Mitra is a inspiring speaker who manages to tell a big story in a light-hearted, self-deprecating way. It's worth spending 22 minutes on, but if you're in a hurry just listen to the anecdote at 10:55 - it will make you laugh.
If you want to hear much more of what he has to say you can watch an hour-long presentation to a conference in Harrogate last year. Here's the link.
What it all means for educators is open to question. He may be right when he says that in the future we will not need schools (and presumably colleges) any more, but how we get from here to that future remains to be seen.
He has his detractors. For example, the blog The Digital Counter-Revolution calls him the most prominent representative of an anti-teacher movement.
That movement, it claims, is made up of people who think that learning and education are good, but that teachers are bad. They have a vision, the authors argue, of teaching as being all about a Pink Floyd-style factory producing bricks.
Personally, I'm inspired by Mitra's vision, but do have reservations about how inhuman it all sounds. He talks about learners having access to knowledge but being minded by facilitators who can teach nothing, because they know nothing. 

Sources:
BBC Radio 4 'The Educators' Sugata Mitra (Broadcast 17.9.14) Link
Digital Counter-Revolution www.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk (Accessed: 18.1.15)
Hole-in-the-Wall www.hole-in-the-wall.com (Accessed: 18.12.14)
International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, Harrogate 2014 Link
TED Talks 'The School in the Cloud' www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU (Accessed: 18.1.15) 

Into the blogosphere

14. Looking for blogs that are useful to my teaching.

Time to go in search of more blogs to follow. How do you find blogs that are worth reading? I'm starting with a blank page here, so the best first step seems to a web search for 'education' and 'blog'.
Up pop pages and pages of them - everyone has something to say about education, or so it seems. Luckily, the first page of Google results has a few best blog lists, so I'm hoping that I can get past the chaff and go straight to the wheat.
The site Onalytica offers a listing of what it says are the 100 most influential education blogs in the world. It's analysis isn't just measuring popularity, they say, but influence too.
The obvious first choice is to pick the world's most influential blog, which is called dy/dan, and is the work of an American maths teacher called Dan Meyer. I'm a bit puzzled as to what has got it to the top of the tree; it's not really for me, for a start it's mostly about maths and it is very American.
Given the way the online world works the 100 are going to be mostly North American, aren't they? So Plan B involves filtering out everything that isn't coming from the UK. Lists are there to find, but they're not ones that are based on analytics - they're subjective, just bloggers listing blogs that they value.
Learning Spy is a fascinating read in itself, a lucky dip of a blog that had me clicking from subject to subject. But it is mostly about secondary school teaching, so isn't that relevant to my situation.

Of Learning Spy's top 10, the most interesting blog for me is, I think, Webs of Substance. It focuses on what's happening in education research and it's interesting to find out about what's new.
It's a fairly serious, business-like place to be. It's author, Harry Webb, doesn't bother  prettying things up with pictures or videos, but the writing is good and posts are well argued.
And for a student, it's feels a little dangerous because he's challenging some of what we're being taught. For example, take Bloom's Taxonomy. Webs of Substance says: "I think we can all agree that Bloom’s taxonomy is a terrible way of viewing learning."
Can we? He then goes on to say: "This is not because it really isn’t based on anything. Although it really isn’t; it’s just something that a committee of worthy people made-up."
He goes on to make a case against the taxonomy and how it's used. As a complete newbie I don't know enough to judge that case, but it's interesting to see orthodoxy being challenged.
It's also fascinating to read the comments that come in to Web of Substance. On the Bloom's post alone there are 16 and they're well worth looking through too.

Sources:
Dy/dan www.blog.mrmeyer.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)
Learning Spy www.learningspy.co.uk (Accessed: 18.1.15) 
Onalytica www.onalytica.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)
Webs of Substance www. websofsubstance.wordpress.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)

Mapping ICT

13. The value of mobile technology in teaching and learning

I've been putting off returning to online mind-mapping for a while. My first attempt at working with bubbl.us wasn't a great success, but I knew I really had to give it another chance.
Compared with the paper and pen approach to concept mapping the little bubbl.us boxes seem awkward and fiddly. And I think the untidiness of a scribbled, on-paper mind map helps the process along - for me anyway.

But it seemed to make sense to return to bubbl.us to use it as a tool to look at the benefits of ICT for learners and teachers. It's such a big topic that I think I really need a second attempt, making separate maps for both learner and teacher - but it has been a useful exercise in that it has given me a feel for just how transformative ICT has been over the last 30 years or so.

Source:
Bubbl.us www.bubbl.us

The little things...

12. My journey to tech confidence.

I was speaking to a colleague at college tonight about classroom technology (by the way, that's not him above) and came away with so many good ideas. It's great to hear insights into the practicalities of classroom 'craft' from someone with plenty of experience.
Lots to think about, but one of his suggestions stood out - if only because it was so easy to make happen. In fact, I've already been online spending my money.
His must-have bit of hardware is a wireless mouse. Going wireless frees the teacher from being tethered to a classroom's desktop computer, which is, he says, a definite plus.
It means that you can be navigating yourself around what's on your interactive whiteboard from anywhere in the room. I can see definite advantages to that.
Here's an example. It could help when someone is drifting away into inattention at the far side of the room. With a wireless mouse, the teacher could leave the desk at the front and bring that student back on track by using his or her desk instead.
Or, the teacher could hand the mouse to a student and involve him or her in the lesson more asking the learner do the clicking for themselves for a while. I've spent a very reasonable £10 and am looking forward to playing with my new 'pet' when it arrives.