Final Post

Final Blog Entry

My key learning area (KLA) is Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and my focus audience is secondary school students. Learning about and teaching students  ICT is my passion so it is fairly obvious that I will take the position of that it is important to take advantages of all of the affordances that modern technology offers teachers in order to improve teaching outcomes.

The two particular areas that technology is valuable for in the classroom is motivating students and supporting the needs of learners (Roblyer & Doering, 2012).  Of course within NSW classrooms in both high school and primary schools ICT skills are mandated through syllabuses (Board of Studies NSW, 2012.).

The main thing I have taken away from this subject is to remind myself that lessons that happen to use technology shouldn’t start with technology (Roblyer & Doering, 2012). They need to start with learning outcomes and sound pedagogy, the technology is there to support those two things. This may sound obvious but actually is more difficult than it sounds to ICT teachers. ICT teachers are interested in technology and often have a technological component as a learning outcome so it is easy to forget about learning outcomes and simply look at the technology for technologies sake.

My studies of in teaching over the last couple of years have led me to realise that from a pedagogical viewpoint I find Vygostski and his social constructivist approach very influential. Vygotski maintains that learning is a social process and that communications between peers is a critical factor in the learning process (Marsh, 2010). Fortunately for me, the social aspect of learning has been highlighted by both my teachers here at CSU and embedded within the relevant syllabuses for ICT. An example of this is within the Software Design and Development (SDD) curriculum, where under key competencies it explicitly states that “Planning and organising activities and working with others and in teams are integral to the development of software and are addressed  in Preliminary and HSC courses” (Board of Studies NSW, 2010, p. 13). Technology can really help supply tools that can help enable teamwork and collaboration, some of these tools include; project management tools, Wikis, various social media tools and Google Docs which allows multiple people to simultaneously edit the same document even if they are in different physical locations (Carpenter & Springgay, 2010).
I feel that one of the big appeals of using ICT in learning is that students are keen to use the technology because on the whole they have previously had a pleasurable experience interacting with it. There is plenty of literature to suggest that computers and games (Howard, 2006; Oldfield & Slessor, 2010). Zang (2008) discusses the importance of looking at what motivates people to use ICT in the learning process.

Finally, I think the key features that make ICT in the classroom compelling are;

·         Dynamic, ICT is a fast changing field and this makes it attractive to many (although scary to a few students).

·         Fun, students generally associate ICT with fun. The key is to relate the fun to the planned learning outcomes.

·         ICT facilitates communications and allows for the creating and sharing of information in a variety of formats.

References

Board of Studies. (2012). information-and-digital-technology-syllabus.pdf. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_hsc/pdf_doc/information-and-digital-technology-syllabus.pdf

Brand, J. (2006, November). Games are good for learning : not just because they are fun. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/documentSummary;res=AEIPT;dn=155943

Carpenter, B. S., & Springgay, S. (2010). Technology and Collaboration. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 7(2), 1–5.

Howard, C. (2006). Learning, study and review methods 101: A fun way to learn and study complex theoretical content. In 23rd Annual Ascilite Conference (Lina Markauskaite, Peter Goodyear and Peter Reimann 3 December 2006 to 6 December 2006) (pp. 351–361). Sydney University Press. Retrieved from https://ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney06/proceeding/pdf_papers/p103.pdf

Marsh, C. (2010). Becoming a teacher. Pearson Higher Education AU. Retrieved from http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WwbiBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=marsh+becoming+a+teacher&ots=Ayr1Z0zggY&sig=jjsBz8h0Sb_l1Qn9dxKzqyXUg_w

Oldfield, J. D., & Slessor, A. (2010). Shades of Grey: Playing games in the classroom to enhance student learning. Retrieved from http://unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/handle/10652/1668

Roblyer, R., & Doering, A. (2014). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching: International Edition (6th ed.). Pearson.

 

Zhang, P. (2008). Motivational Affordances: Reasons for ICT design and use. Communications of the ACM: technical opinion, 145-147.

Technology in the Curriculum

"Post to your blog your ideas about your software choices in relation to your discipline area and which part of the curriculum you will focus on. This might be a little tricky for those of you who have not spent a lot of time in the classroom yet, but if you spend some time looking at the curriculum document, you should be able to find an area of the curriculum that will be appropriate for you to use in this assignment."

I believe that one of the reasons that I failed this subject last semester was that I didn't give sufficient thought to how I would argue the benefits of the chosen technology. In particular I believe my problem was that in TPACK terms my T was my C. This is not easy to support through research papers. It is easy to search for things such as using technology to help us teach ART/Geography/Math however noone seems to write papers dicussing using technology to teach technology.

This time around I will choose a non technology type thing.

Lesson Plans

Lesson Plans

As someone who has never taught, I definitely qualify as a "beginner".

What concerns me most about lesson planning is that almost everything is unknown. I don't know how long things take in practice. I don't really know how long the various parts of the lesson are going to take from intro to organising to producing work. This isn't surprising of course because I have no real practical experience and I feel that this is the sort of thing that only real world experience can make you confident in predicting.

Lesson plans are described by Simmons and Hawking (2009) as a planning tool and I am sure they are betting that nothing (they are really the only planning tool we have) however it is hard to have confidence in the plan when it is based on so many unknowns.

I also feel that Simmons and Hawkings make a good point in that the Lesson plan is only a plan and not a script. When I have my first class I hope I dont become too relieant on the plan while the lesson is progressing. Perhaps for my first few classes I will produce a detailed plan and then a summary and only take the summary into the lesson.

Simmons, C., & Hawkins, C. (2009). Planning to teach an ICT lesson. In

Teaching ICT(pp.54-105). London ; Sage Publications Ltd.

Affordance

Affordance

After reading both Bower(2008) and  Morgan, Butler and Power, M. (2007) both of which are text devoted more to evaluating or showing examples of evaluating affordances of various technologies I have come to the conclusion that in an ICT context affordance simply means capabilities or services offered by a piece of technology.
Hadfield and Jopling (2014) describe the history of the term affordance, how it passed first from a term describing the natural world through to HCI and finally to ICT (along with many other fields).

Hadfield, M., & Jopling, M. (2014). The development of an implementation model for ICT in education: an example of the interaction of affordances and multimodality. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 51(6), 607–617. http://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2014.924747

Bower, M. (2008). Affordance analysis—matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, 45, 1, 3–15.

Morgan, M., Butler, M. & Power, M. (2007). Evaluating ICT in education: A comparison of the affordances of the iPod, DS and Wii. In ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/morgan.pdf

TPACK and ICT

Reccently on the ESC407 general discussion forum Chris Condy a fellow prospective ICT teacher posted the following;
"I am currently looking over the TPACK stuff and finding it really difficult to break a line between technology an content, as the subject I will be teaching is IT. "

On the same thread Zana Cefai responded with a pretty good article TPCK: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE 'T' IS ALSO THE 'C'? (Gill, 2012).

Both Gill (2012) and Chris observe that for an ICT teacher there is a lot of intersection between the T and C parts of the conventional understanding of TPACK initially defined by Mishra and Koehler (2006). In fact when teaching ICT it can be impossible to separate C and T.

Chris claims that the conclusion from Gill (2012) was that there needs to be a new ICT-TPACK. I am not so sure I agree with this. Gill (2012) does observes that Angeli and Valanides (2009) conclude that there needs to be a separation from other technologies, however, Gill (2012) goes on to include the point from Shuleman (1986) that the beauty of the TPACK model is its inclusiveness.

One thing is certain, Gill (2012) agrees that for ICT teachers there is a strong link between the T and the C.

All of this is very interesting to me because last semester I failed ESC407 and on reflection I believe one of the problems I have had coming to terms with for this subject ( and in particular assignment 2) is the tight coupling of T and C for ICT teachers. 

Also interesting to note is that Roblyer and Doering (p68, 2014) try to redesign the TPCK diagram with a TECH-PACK version that tries to include the added emphasis that is being placed on technology in the classroom. I have enough trouble getting my head around the standard TPCK diagram so the TECH-PACK version from Roblyer and Doering feels  very unweildy.

References

Gill, L. (2012). TPCK: What happens when the “T” is also the “C”? (p. 88). Presented at the Biennial International Technology Education Research Conference, Surfers Paradice: Griffith University. Retrieved from http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/514768/2012-TERC-Volume-1-of-2.pdf#page=96

Angeli, C.& Valanides, N.(2009).Epistemological and methodological issues for the conceptualization, development, and assessment of ICT–TPCK: Advances intechnological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK).Computers and Education ,52, 154-168.

Roblyer, M., & Doering, A. (2014). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching: International Edition, 6th Edition, Pearson.