Their project is called mytoons.com. They had students add their projects to mytoons and then used the social networking opportunities therein to have them review one anothers work. Its very similar to the project we did at USC in YouTube. Their big finding was that usability is important, and unusable sites are not that useful, which is fairly expected, I imagine.
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She claims there are two types of concept maps, inner to outer and upper to lower. She wants to know if concept mapping is a useful strategy for high and low achieving students. She used concept mapping to help scaffold a procedure on using English language learner articles. She finds that good readers created far more complex concept maps. All readers using concept maps improved over readers who did not, but poor readers benefited the most from creating a concept map of a reading exercise.
]]>They used videoconferencing to do teacher education in remote, distance courses. The HDTV was important because it allowed them to capture the students interactions and expressions. Remote participants observed senior teachers teaching a course remotely.
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The second author discussed her research exporing the relationship between social and spatial investment as co-variants in VLEs in terms of motivation and learning outcomes. This was a very interesting paper.
]]>Regardless, I think that the instructor should be lauded for trying to teach in a way that kids will find engaging -- to "speak their language", I suppose. And the comments are generally positive. The pedagogical challenge I find to this approach is that a) it seems to lack any sense of context, b) it makes some pretty strong claims (really -- you're teaching me *everything* I need to know about fractions?), and c) has absolutely no notion of transfer. Of course, I doubt this instructor is *only* using this method to teach, and skills training is important -- basic factual knowledge is a building block for deeper things. But the pedagogical approach, coupled with the title, makes me very concerned that the real goal of education is to give kids a "rap" that goes off in their heads when they see a fraction on a standardized test. So, sure, start with a rap (or better yet, let's actually see if we have evidence that the kids who get the rap learn more about the mechanics of turning fractions into percentages), but please let's not stop there. Why is a fraction the same as a percentage, and what do those things signify in our world? Let's test on that, what do you think?
]]>Three models:
1. Proficiency
2. evidence, and
3. task model
ECDL design procedure
1. Identify learning objects
2. For each LO, dterimine its purpose, establish quality criteria, define rules for evulating design, produce a design, evaluate against criteria, and apply fixes when possible
ECDL says thesee are the high-level things they care about:
1. Engagement
2. Accessibility
3. Validity
4. ??
5. ??
10 KSAs -- knowledge, skills, attributes; he suggests a matrix that allows you to
TALK 2: Do schools and educators play an important role in 'bridging' the digital divide?
Their model is a pyramid/tiered model that starts at the base with access to hardware, software, and the Internet, then to the middle with how teachers and students are actually using the hardware and software, and culminating at the top of empowering individual students.
They found significant trends across all forms of SES schools over time. But of course higher SES schools have more software and hardware overall, and their growth trends tend to be greater over time.
Conclusions include that there is a digital divide between the ways that high SES schools use design and development software, and more low SES schools use "content" (read: 'drill and kill') software.
TALK 3: Waterford reading program (WERP-1)
TALK 4: Webcasting in the classroom
Question 1: Does webcasting affect attendance? Attending lecture is preferred to webcast, but students are tempted to skip more often if they know there will be a webcast.
Question 2: Does it affect performance? No real results in the literature. If they skipped class because there was a webcast, their performance seems to suffer.
Question 3: Do students think it helps them? In general, they think it is very helpful to them.
Question 4: How do they use it? To review missed classes, to study prior to exams, instead of reviewing notes, and after attending live lecture.
Question 5: How often do they use them? Very often.
Quasi experimental design, with two sections of a large-enrollment course.
Results: attendance was lower in the webcast section than the no-webcast section. Students seem to skip classes. 36% reported that they often or always watched webcast instead of coming to class.
Performance on tests and quizzes was the same across both sections.
]]>three times that learners use tools well:
• there must be an opportunity for support (some type of help is there when the user needs its)
• learners recognize that there is an opportunity; he or she knows why the tool could be of help to them
• learners need to be motivated to look for help when they need it
in general, students tend not to use help enough or overuse it (use it too much, grow dependent on it or try to use it to answer questiosn instead of thinking it through themselves)
tools that provide direct information are more used, but meta-cognitive and generalized tools that support building skills to help oneself are less used.
they are asking: when students use help does it help their learning, when they provide advice do students use tools more, and does using tools help with student variables such as goal orientation, motivation, etc..?
Groups that received advice on how to use the help tools inline spent more time with the help tools. Mastery-oriented students used help tools significantly less frequently than did others.
Talk 3: Using or not using help tools during collaborative tasks
]]>He is looking at computer algebra and dynamic geometry.
• He talks about technology and how it is used in the classroom as an adaptive process -- the affordances of the technology become "ingredients in" rather than "determinants of" the classroom practice
• Instructors tend to use structured investigation when using technology in the classroom, but they *talk* about using technology to enhance guided discovery
TALK 2: Exploiting interactive digital technology to enhance dialogic classroom interaction
• Based on a sociocultural, dialogic model of education
• technology should serve pedagogy
• they are discussing ways in which they can use the interactive white board to build cumulative knowledge over time and to bring the class together in a dialogue about ideas
• They are having a conference next year at Cambridge on the use of "whole-class interactive technologies"; it might be worth submitting a paper for this on using blogs and wikis
TALK 3: IWTs in Singapore
• Singaporean teachers often take a declarative approach, and students end up with a wide range of basic knowledge and skills, but the approach has somewhat dampened creativity, which is a concern
• She identifies 3 stages of development: supported didactic, interactive, and enhanced interactive
TPCK, or TPACK -- Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Mishrat and Koehler, have a handbook of TPACK
]]>Date: 2005
ISBN: 1-85433-422-0