Rosen (2011) writes about technology and children and digital natives. Salmon Khan (2012) also focuses on digital technology and how it can increase the quality of student – teacher interaction in class if used appropriately. This workshop explored a range of technologies focused on literacy and outlined what they all could be used for.
Wordle is a free online service which generates clouds from text. This can be used to get students to describe themselves doing a biography.
Glogster this free online service can be used to develop interactive posters or a web page. You can use text, audio, video or images.
Markup free online service used to identify key features of informational text and can be used on a range of web pages. It promotes comprehension of text.
Diigo free online service that can be used as a social book marking tool, and, permits highlighters and sticky notes.
Apture free online service which enables you to explore any topic on any online page and, then link other information to the page.
Bitstrips free online service which enables you to create and publish comic strip stories. There are a range of writing genres, narratives, settings and characters.
Storybird free online service using artwork as an inspiration for story- telling, narrative writing and provides pictures to illustrate.
This research project aimed to provide empirically grounded data from the international baccalaureate teaching profession. The study examined the beliefs and practices of this specific population and helped to promote reflection. A mixed methods approach was used with a literature review, online survey, focus groups and documentary analysis. They used Collinas & Pratt (2003) Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) which was a 45 item inventory including areas such as transmission, developmental and nurturing.
The online survey 14,407 were invited to participate between July 2010 and April 2011. There were 3,194 (22%) responses. There was an over representation of diploma programme staff and under representation of the Americas. There was no significant difference in gender responses. The average International Baccalaureate teacher profile dominance was Nuturing.
There is some further review of data to do using multivariate analysis.
Student experience is critical to student retention, reducing attrition and enhancing success. University students are changing with more widening participation and students from non-traditional backgrounds. Students do use social media but the project set out to see what they use it for. Mudrack and Farrell (1995) said there were 3 types of informal roles that students undertook which were advice, task and maintenance.
The project team looked for first year foundation students to participate and 133 students did mostly women of 700. The approach used was netnographic study which is an adaptation of ethnography.
The roles that students played were explored but the key results were that students used it to give logistical support around the university, informal peer support, results comparison, arrange social events and stress relief.
Implications of this research are in terms of how this advice can be provided to students who don’t use Facebook.
Potter and Kustra (2011) discussed scholarship of teaching and learning and the importance of critical reflection on one’s practice.
A project was undertaken with final year undergraduate education students. The methodology used was self-study (Samaree 2006). Through the study students were encouraged to reflect on activities and then the data was analysed and five themes have started to arise. These are:
- Personal situated inquiry
- Critical collaboration inquiry
- Improved learning
- Transparent and systematic research process
- Knowledge generation and presentation
The data is leading to a model being developed.
This session focused on preparing the indigenous population for tertiary success to help with access to HE. Completion rates for indigenous people in HE is less than 50%. Many undertake block release study and so experience a disconnect and disengagement. The response to these issues has been to develop online classes. Moodle and Blackboard have their uses but are less able to develop communities so they explored social media. Facebook was used and did help to build communities. Although the delivery of content was not resolved using Facebook students did help each and support each other giving tips. They shared information, built relationships and celebrated each other’s successes.
This linked back to the first two plenary sessions and had three main elements as a focus which were diversity, multi-literacy’s and pedagogy. Each of these involve choices and differentiation. Pedagogy was about situated practice, transformed practice, critical framing and innovation. Learning should be a transformative meaningful journey.
The project being discussed here was focused on teaching maths. They used Atkin and Karplus (1962) learning Cycle model because it was very science focused and had 5 ‘Es’ which were engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate.
ICT when first introduced was just technologised traditional teaching but now there are ways to transform teaching maths. There was a need to re-engage teachers in Greece in learning because there tends to be a very traditional approach to teaching.
The project was about bringing together academics from different disciplines and this was undertaken with the University of the Ioannina and took place 2012-2013. The project was focused on early childhood. There were two pilots with 45 teachers from Greece and some second year teaching students. The aims of the project were to emphasis engagement, collaboration and work-based learning. The method used was a 10 month participatory new programme design. Students were involved in jointly writing documents and learning elements. A social space was used to collaborate and share the work.
The findings from the students which involved 172 students were that family engagement was good with 82% of the students feeling this was important. They felt technology was relatively easy to use and perceptions of diversity changes.
A second strand to the project started back in 1996 when a cluster started to work on learning design in Australia. This cluster has a vision which had three themes vision, capacity building and evidence. The vision in one group was on teaching 5 -16 year olds and the core business of teaching and learning. There was a need to impact on student learning outcomes, value the students, challenge the students, connect to the real world and prepare life as global citizens.
Principals met to consider how to do this and employed one person as a deputy principal to work across all schools in one district. Principals needed development to be leaders and pedagogy experts. Coaches were used and mentors and there were four meetings a year to develop themselves. They then worked with their teachers with a meeting at the beginning of the school year for a whole day and for a further 3 days in the year. This was to ensure practice was embedded.
Coaching was used in classes to give feedback, peer review and help with CPD. The senior team needed up skilling and wanted to look at assessment for learning. The format enabled a growing network of relationships.
This is the workshop I provided to share the work we had been doing through the change academy project for recognising teaching excellence and to see if those who participated in the workshop agreed with the findings to date or had other views. There were 22 participants in the workshop from 7 countries and it was very lively for the last session of the day.
Following some presentation by me we undertook two activities. The first was to get everyone to notes down on separate post-its three things that indicated excellent teaching to them. These were then placed on a flip chart grouped and we discussed some of the things people had listed. There was quite a lot of overlap for some. Here is a photo of the flip chart.
Next the participants then considered how they would assess the things they identified as being excellence teaching. Again there was a lot of discussion and agreement for many areas. Here is a picture of all the post it notes from that activity grouped as well
The motivation for this research was students being unable to find things on a website and then lecturers also having problems. The University students have a complex curriculum and students needs more advise. Websites do not lend themselves to being self advising and face to face advice is now moving on line.
Stages of web development explored were:
- Institutional view this tended to be an electronic brochure with one way communication
- Content in context top page customer organised
- Personal web portal students centred and can lead to databases being accessed
- High tech with a 3 plus build that enabled a lifetime relationship
- Proactive in anticipating student needs
The solution was to build a simple website interface that linked to key advice and was designed so someone else did the maintenance. The tool was easy to use and built on basic questions and did not require specialist knowledge. Looked at Visio and mindjet which build concept maps. Using a mind map design was felt to be best.
Advantages had been the development was proactive, tool could access any material and allowed for multiple attachments. The disadvantages had been identifying the content so the original problem was not recreated and specialized content often needed updating.
Students had found this useful but sustainability of changing things and have expertise to do this as an ongoing activity may be an issue.
This project focused on a group of students who were being supervised by Connie. Most of these students had been identified as problem students by the institution with these students finding study difficult, many were part time and many had dropped out or were going to. Connie was new and was given the students and wanted to examine their experiences and her own. The research took place between 2009 and 2011 in a school of education.
Six students were involved and initially this was quantitative data only related to results. All students had been delayed in completing and all had started their dissertation in different months of the year. There were 3 males students and 3 female and all were part time.
The researcher asked the students to write a narrative of their experience of the doing the dissertation and data was collected from the journals and text messages etc. The researcher also kept a diary. This enabled sharing of experiences.
There were three key themes in the data which were:
- Academic issues around writing and language, lack of prior experience of undertaking research, undertaking a literature review was also something they were less familiar with
- Personal issues included illness, job demands and finance
- Administration and organisational issues included delays in being allocated supervisors and students confused about requirements
Students found that having one group with one supervisor was good the support was there and they gained intellectually. This is now being looked at for future groups.
This session was focused on the context of a Postgraduate Certificate in HR management. There was one module focused on skills development and developing reflective practitioners. However students did not see the relevance of this despite it being an essential component of professional practice.
Vivienne proposed a solution to this which was the potential of using an e-portfolio and this being assessed. The software the University used was pebble plus. An action research project was started in September 2012 and the portfolio had links to the professional body competencies. This meant that the students could collect evidence for these and add this to the portfolio.
Technologists came and provided input for the students about how to use this and provided support throughout the project.
Data was collected from the technologists about issues they dealt with, from lecturers about support students needed to develop the portfolio and from students about the experience.
Part time students who worked as well as studying felt this was really good and that they would continue to use this after the course however full time students were very negative. Positive themes from the data were it was good to have everything in one place, easily accessible, could compare data and share their work. Negative themes were learning a new technology, relevance, internet access, relevance beyond the course and difficult to use.
The conclusion was that the technology did not create engagement with this beyond the assessment and it was still difficult to find appropriate activities to engage students. There were also some age issues with part time students being the more mature. The pilot will continue for one more year but with changes to take account of some of the issues.
