Skype’s various modes of synchronous communication provide collaborative versatility. Audio, visual, and messaging capabilities allow individuals or groups to communicate and minimizes technology disruptions. While visual communication via webcam is the primary benefit to the tool, technology breakdowns occur without warning and can disrupt this method. A lack of webcams, internet speed, and mysterious tech glitches can stifle the speed of webcams. To experiment with this tool, I Skyped with a curriculum partner in another school within my district. While we are lucky enough to have the hardware to make video chat an option, unfortunately my building’s wifi was slower, creating significant lags in our conversation. Thankfully, the text messaging aspect of the site allowed us to laugh at this frustration together.
Potential uses for Skype in my 7th grade language arts classroom are project oriented. Soon my students will enter into a social justice thematic unit in which we read historical fiction and discuss issues of equality. Debates are woven in as a learning platform. I plan to arrange students to communicate with professionals from the region of the globe their books takes place. Further, I am working with that curriculum partner to have our classes debate each other.
Skype provides an accessible platform for these forms of communication. However, if Gmail accounts could be created for those participating, I see Google Drive as a significant upgrade. Skype does have file sharing amongst its capabilities, but the ability to edit and publish is greater with Drive. Further, text and video chat are available through Gmail. Skype specializes in a few services, focusing on producing high quality video chats, while platforms like Google aim to integrate many services at a comparable level of quality. However, I do see a greater opportunity for searching out unknown collaborators with Skype.
I see Edmodo as a positive tool for teachers in districts without interactive websites. Many of the components like quizzes, document posting, and discussions are qualities built into many school website providers. In the past few years, my district has moved from School Fusion to Sharp School as web provider. Both provide blogging, document posting, quizzes, and calendars among other asynchronous tools. If I taught in a district absent these perks, Edmodo would be my first choice for an online classroom.
The communities aspects is a welcome addition though. School web providers keep everything within the district, and, even then, sharing between colleagues is relegated to the individual perusing other teachers’ sites. Edmodo’s communities provide substantial amounts of curriculum supplements, questions/answers, and websites/blog posts. Further, because the communities are specialized, a narrowed search for relevant topics is made simpler. It is similar to Twitter in the way of content and global reach, but more specification of posts within the community allows for greater quality of focused sharing.
Multiple Intelligence integration into my classroom is at times
enhancing and at others partitioned. Many of the natural combinations of
intelligences come easy to a Language Arts workshop. Students working
independently to read/write followed by sharing/critiquing peers is intra and
interpersonal. Depending on the particular project, spatial and logical-mathematical
are incorporated. These are the enhancements.
At other times, I struggle to incorporate intelligences and force
them into separate activities. For example, bodily kinesthetic often seems forced
for the sake of getting students out of their desks, not necessarily improving
the curriculum. Actually, it often proves to be more of a distraction. The
closest I’ve come is gallery walks and inventing body movements for vocabulary
recall.
As learning increasingly turns toward technology as a platform,
educators are afforded greater ease in combining multiple intelligences with a
single lesson/project/activity. A single student’s varying aptitude in the
intelligences does have the ability to hamper learning in a dynamic curriculum
that combines them (Riha and Robles-Pena, 2009). More than likely, online learning
and media integration will limit the interference and allow the intelligences
to balance or even augment each other by providing greater combinations and
choices of learning tools.
For instance, an online curriculum can create a podcast lecutre
that incorporates music for a teacher without musical talent via published
soundtracks. Linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal
are all easily recreated by technology with blog forums and podcasting. These
are the elements already most readily produced in traditional classrooms.
Bodily-kinesthetic, the least used by classroom teachers, is afforded more
opportunity due to the greater allotment of time. By flipping a classroom with
online learning at home, class time can be spent exploring tangible, real-world
applications on field trips.
If any of these particular elements creates too much interference,
online lessons can be edited more simply than a one-time classroom experience.
Perhaps one student cannot focus with a soundtrack playing during a podcast
lecture. A teacher can much more easily edit and repost a the podcast than they
can recreate an in-class lecture minus the song- if there ever was one.
Multiple Intelligence learning is research supported. High-level
educators know to consider these in their lesson planning. Online learning
opens more doors for synthesizing them within a single learning target.
References
Riha, Mark & Robles-Pina, Rebecca A. (2009). The influence of
multiple intelligences theory on web-based learning. MERLOT journal of online learning and teaching. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no1/robles-pina_0309.htm
On the reluctance of some teachers to reeducate themselves in the name of technology integration...
Regarding the generational discussion, perhaps it's worth taking a look at what media innovations were taking place in the past as means for assessing the possibilities of today's innovations. Now, as a younger teacher, I cannot speak from experience. However, I bet the use of a slideshow (with actual slides) back in the 1950s and 60s revolutionized the way students could experience curriculum.
A slideshow by today's standards is basic media technology: hit the button, new slide appears. Yet, I infer that the teachers who first used this media in their classrooms had to reorganize their lesson structure and pedagogical beliefs. Teachers need to do the same today. Unfortunately for "change," the media and technology available today takes much more training than hitting a button.
On the notion that integrating technology based media creates a learning environment familiar to students...
You mention using technology based media as a tool for setting a familiar stage within which students can learn. Our current and future students are products of the digital age and therefore are more comfortable swiping the page than turning.
Within online learning and the use of technology based media on the rise, their integration into education in early years becomes pivotal. Students exposed to these tools in middle or even elementary school will be at an advantage when they reach high school and certainly college where these platforms are commonplace. Upon entering post-secondary education and/or eventually the workforce, a student who has basic tech and media skills from owning an iPad is developmentally behind in 21st century learning contrasted to the student who has been trained with online or blended learning.
Not only is technology based media integration a way to make many students feel comfortable, multimedia/online platforms in school can take them to a higher level of competency.
Background Knowledge: A misnomer I had and feel many do: multimedia = technology. Untrue. Written words next to a bar graph is technically multimedia. Sorta seems obvious once I read it, but there it is. On to this post's main idea...
Multimedia improves learning, but delivery determines the strength of the media.
People are so sure media improves learning because it provides a recorded history of knowledge learned. Without media (i.e. books, video, computers, graphs, etc.) we are relegated to original experience. While hands-on, original experience enhances learning, the recorded success found in media validate that which can be experienced. Further, culture and knowledge grow by an awareness of what has been accomplished before, using the past as a starting point for growth.
But what makes one medium better than the other? A particular pairing in multimedia superior? Why can a thirty year veteran teacher prepare students with dusty books sprinkled with charts better than some teachers armed with eBooks and wireless Internet? The answer is delivery.
The passionate veteran with books and charts is using multimedia to deliver context. If his or her approach in using these tools is authentic, real-world learning, student growth follows. I’d be surprised to hear that any of us cannot recall a teacher, even if they were only the wise old geezer down the hall you didn’t get to have in high school or a current colleague one floor down, that doesn’t resemble this description.
Contrast this wily vet with the technology laden colleague. The teacher who sticks a computer in the face of every student in order to complete online worksheets or answer multiple choice questions based on the reading. The computer/Internet multimedia marriage does not preclude student growth unless wielded with the same passion and authentic experiences the veteran provides with books and charts.
As I’m only in my fourth year of teaching, I’ve often been guilty of smothering students in technology for what truly only benefits me, the teacher. I’ve had students take electronic versions of tests and quizzes, allowing me to grade on my iPad. After typing essays, I’ve sent kids to Web. 2.0 Tool sites to review content knowledge. These are personal conveniences that do little to nothing for student learning that paper versions couldn’t. What is lacking is multimedia and authentic context.
The multimedia experiences I’ve successfully combined with authentic learning provided those smile moments when a classroom is humming with diligent work, thriving students, and poignant discussions. One of these moments came by reading historical fiction and taking gallery walks of photographs from the time period. Combining printed word with visuals sparked a real-world context for the literature. (technology played zero role in this lesson)
True multimedia academic impacts come from the buzz word circling in every education discussion: engagement.
I recently finished my second course in the Educational Technology program through Marian University. I've posted the video and written rationale that acted as the final assignment for the course. Innovations in Technology (EDT652) provided the research and talking points to many of the pedagogy perspectives I already had. So, while the video and rationale are really just a string of platitudes regarding authentic learning and technology integration, I am finding personal benefit. We all have great ideas about our various interests in life, but rarely are we afforded the opportunity to solidify them.
Video Rationale:
As the 21st Century Fluency Project puts it, quote, “today we face a new kind of student. Our schools weren’t designed for them. And our teacher weren’t trained to teach them.” The 21st Century Student is not confined to a desk, in a row, with a teacher up front. The 21st Century Student requires a skill set that will prepare them to adapt to the evolving job market.
Providing them with communication, collaboration, and innovation tools is the job of the 21st Century Teacher, who needs to facilitate meaningful learning experiences, allow students to teach each other, and invite collaboration with community field experts. Included in my video are images of community experts acting as co-teachers. Further, I work in images of students modeling communication, collaboration, and innovation, many of which are centered around technology, the professional language they have been bred to speak and will need to harness in the job market.
This can be achieved by expanding the class period and learning space into communities that have a vested interest in student achievement. Chen writes in Education Nation that “the [traditional bell] schedule reinforces divisions between subjects...” (2010, p. 198) Teachers are constantly preaching that lessons need to create student engagement, yet we continue to confine our canvas to eight separate periods. Lessons, units, and assessments are stripped of authenticity when restricted to a single content area. To truly create engaging experiences, an authentic context will utilize interdisciplinary projects that allow kids to utilize course material in a real-world setting. Thus, in the video you will see students learning in authentic settings such as a laboratory with a professional as mentor and a community river.
I conclude my video with a what I expect from the 21st Century Student upon graduation. The traditional model of teaching has done a disservice to students by providing them a curriculum void of real world skills. Those who can go onto college are not always prepared with a career pathway. Those who aren’t college bound for the most part aren’t armed with workforce skills up to par with the jobs that are available. These are not new ideas. Since 1920, the The National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) has worked to prepare students for an every changing workforce. There mission is to quote “help students discover their interests and their passions, and empowers them to choose the educational pathway that can lead to success in high school, college and career.” Therefore, my vision of a 21st Century Graduate is one that not only embodies the 21st century skill set, but has a number career pathways in which to utilize those skills. They have an idea of where they want to go and have been provided the tools necessary to get there.
While the pedagogy and learning space might by new, the end product is not. Teachers have wanted college and career ready graduates since the beginning of the profession. The 21st Century Fluency Project recognizes the pervasive “that’s the way we’ve always done it” mentality that will need to be overcome for us to prepare our students. Students will clammer for this change, but they will not instigate it. It is up to teachers, administrators, and communities to send prepared graduates into the evolving world.
