Great article - beyond Prensky...

http://chronicle.com/article/Collaborative-Learning-for-the/128789/

Digital hidden transcripts (Liew, 2010) - Blog resource from last year's students

http://thegr8divide.blogspot.com/

10 internet technologies that educators should be informed about

Am cutting and pasting from a useful web article for our quick-reference convenience.

Original source:

Walsh, K. (April 19, 2009). 10 internet technologies that educators should be informed about. Retrieved September 2, 2011, from http://www.emergingedtech.com/2009/04/10-internet-technologies-that-educators-should-be-informed-about/

1. Video and Podcasting - One of the most widely adopted internet technologies for use in instructional settings is video streaming. Between YouTube, TeacherTube, EduTube, and many other video hosting sites, there are an abundance of lectures, how-to videos, and supporting materials available in the form of web based video. Podcasting has also been used to provide similar offerings of audio materials through popular sites like iTunes. [Click here to learn more about video hosting for education, or hereto learn more about podcasting for education.]

2. Presentation Tools - This category is vast and rich. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of tools on the Internet that can be used to create and share presentations, from simple Powerpoint slide players like Slideshare to multimedia timeline tools like Vuvox and OneTrueMedia. These tools can be used to support classroom teaching or distance learning, or for student reports and presentations.

3. Collaboration & Brainstorming Tools - This is another wide ranging category, including thought-organizing tools like mindmap and bubbl.us, and collaborative tools like web based interactive whiteboards and Google Documents. Additionally, some of the other tools in this list, such as wikis and virtual worlds, also serve as collaboration tools.

4. Blogs & Blogging – Bloggers and many other regular Internet users are well aware of blogs and blogging, but there are many other professionals who really are not frequenters of the “blogosphere”. In addition to a basic familiarity with this technology, educators should be aware of sites likeBlogger and WordPress, where users can quickly and easily create their own blogs for free.

5. Wikis – The use of Wikis in educational settings is growing every day. Sites like Wetpaint and others allow users to create free wiki web sites and are a great way to get started with using wikis for educational applications.[Click here to learn more about the use of Wikis in education].

6. Social Networking – All educators should have a basic understanding of sites like Facebook and MySpace and how they are used. This doesn’t mean they need accounts on these sites (and many educators would recommend against using these sites to communicate with their students), but they should understand what they are and how they are being used. Educators should also be aware of the professional social networking site LinkedIn.

7. IM – A large percentage of students use IM regularly, via Aim, IM aggregator site Meebo (Meebo allows users to combine messaging from Aim, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, and other sites), or other tools. It behooves educators to be aware of this, and I have even come across various articles about using IM within the classroom setting (such as this one from Educause).

8. Twitter – This listing is really focused on technologies, not specificapplications, but this application is currently just too popular to ignore. You should at least understand what it is and the fundamentals of how it is used.[Click here for some insight into how Twitter can be used in education.]

9. Virtual Worlds – This technology has received a lot of press, with SecondLife being the clear leader thus far in this application area. In my experience, the use of SecondLife has been somewhat constrained by high bandwidth and processing power requirements, but this also means that there is still considerable room for increased adoption of the application as systems continue to become more powerful and higher speed bandwidth more prevalant. Active Worlds is one of a number of competitive technologies, and provides a “universe” dedicated to education that has been popular with educators.

10. RSS Feeds - RSS allows users to create their own “push” data streams (that is, define data flows you want coming to you automatically, rather than having to go and “pull” the information with a Google search or other browsing effort). RSS feeds enable you to take advantage of streams of published content that will be sitting in your In Box, or in an RSS reader, when you want them. There are RSS feeds available for many topics and many web sites. 

e learning faizal

I would like to say that the paradigms involved in the lesson are that mainly of the Interactionist and Behaviourist theory.

Interactionist

Students were involved in student centred activities such as pair work and peer assessment in many stages of the lesson. A form of peer assessment is evident when a checklist is given to the students for reading aloud. They rated their peers' reading using the checklist. They constructed their own knowledge of what is a good or poor reading from their experience when assessing the various forms of resources (peers'reading, recordings). The activities are in line with Vygotsky's writings. Social interaction is vital in the development of language competence. Students will get to model after or learn directly from the interaction with the other students. The students in this lesson construct their own knowledge through interactions with the other students with the teacher acting as a facilitator to their learning.

The teacher as the facilitator provides explicit instructions of readings such as appropriate pauses and intonations. The students are then left to process the information through their interaction, making judgement of what is good or bad, and practice what have been perceived to be good and demonstrate learning by reading according to the outcome desired.

Behaviourist

For behaviourists, learning is said to be the result of stimulus-response habit-formation (Skinner). Students in this lesson were asked to listen and imitate ideal pronounciation. This is one of the various forms of drills and practices which are habit-forming.

Strengths

In Chapelle and Jamieson (2008), it is stated that the classroom is the place most likely for students to be exposed to a wide variety of learning methods for the English language. The use of the video to relate students to the real world albeit an exaggerated one triggers curiousity and recognition with past experiences. The varied form of technology used such as the video, audio recording and an e-portal gave the opportunity for the varied form of learning dynamics which retain interest and promote interactions.

Explicit explanations and instructions and a facil;itating teacher allowed the students to work by themselves most of the time as they are well-guided and have referral points ( a more knowledgeable other to turn to).

The provision of the checklist with rubrics allowed for checkpoints at the various stages. The various opportunities for immediate feedback allows the students to evaluate and process their learnings.

Weaknesses

The video chosen could have been more suitable. It could have been of a newscaster instead where it would be more of a reading than a conversation.

Resources could also have been more varied to suit the different abilities of a mixed-ability class.

E-Learning Individual Work - Beng Yu

The paradigms of cognitivism and constructivism can be seen enacted clearly in this lesson plan.

Cognitivism

Cognitivist theories view learners as “information processers” and “rational beings that require active participation in order to learn, and whose actions are a consequence of thinking” (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2011).

Right from the very beginning of the lesson, when students are shown the video clip from Friends and asked the pre-activity questions, the teacher is already highlighting the amount of importance she accords to the mental processes of thinking and recalling. Students are viewed as ‘information processers ‘, where the video clip acts as the ‘information’ and students are required to ‘process’ it.

As the teacher moves on to Main Activity 1, her explicit teaching of rules pertaining to the variation of pitch and tone and her (inferred) expectation that they would somehow be able to ‘process’ the rules, understand them and apply them to their reading further goes to show the paradigm of cognitivism she is undertaking.

Later, when students are asked to ‘listen to their partner reading the script and to give feedback using the checklist provided’, the teacher is in fact expecting the students to process information from two sources – firstly audio information from their partner, and secondly visual information from the checklist. The feedback eventually given by the student (i.e. the action) is viewed as “a consequence of thinking” by the student after processing information from the two sources (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2011).

As the lesson progresses to Main Activity 2 where students are required to ‘explain why they chose that answer’, and after that to the Post-Activity where students are asked to ‘give a reason for justification of the grade’, it becomes even more evident that the teacher views the mental processes of thinking, knowing and problem-solving as a main part of her learners’ learning, since getting students to explain and give reasons for their answers requires the use of students’ higher-order thinking skills.

Constructivism

Constructivist theories view learners as information constructors who “actively construct their own subjective representations of objective reality” as knowledge by “linking new information to prior knowledge” and “testing hypotheses through social negotiation” (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2011).

Constructivism can most clearly be seen in the Post-Activity of this lesson plan. As students “listen carefully to 3 audio recordings of 3 different pupils reading the same oral passage”, and “work in pairs” to “discuss and give an overall grade for the reader based on the checklist”, they engage in social negotiation with their partners. Whatever prior hypotheses they held with regard to the notion of ‘good’ reading is now subject to testing and negotiation, and when both students in the pair have settled on a common notion of what is ‘good’ reading, new knowledge is constructed.

General Strengths & Weaknesses:

Generally speaking, the wide variety of ICT tools used in the lesson seems to promise that students will be engaged. But Towndrow (2007) warns us to “avoid a product-oriented, technologized traditional classroom, where only the physical appearance of the learning environment is changed by the presence of technologies”. Therefore, I’ll attempt to use the 5 scales of the “language learning task designer’s ‘mixing desk’ suggested by him as a basis to draw out the general strengths and weaknesses of the ICT employed in this lesson plan.

The first scale is the choice of task. Broadly speaking, for this lesson plan, there seems to be no choice for the students. The materials are chosen by the teacher and instructions are issued by the teacher. There seems to be little freedom for the students “to negotiate topics and act on their novel ideas and curiosity” (Towndrow, 2007). The lack of choice of task is thus one of the weaknesses of this lesson.

The second scale is the media and tool use. At first glance, the wide variety of ICT tools used in the lesson – recordings, e-portal forum, Instant Feedback System (IFS ) and videos etc – seems to be a strength because they add variety, interaction and flexibility to the lesson. However, if we look deeper, it seems clear as well that the ICT tools are very much teacher-selected rather than student-selected. As Towndrow (2007) pointed out, student-centred learning could perhaps occur in much more beneficial ways when learners no longer need to wait to be empowered by their teachers in the use of technology and are enabled to bring their own media and ICT skills into learning contexts. Perhaps, the lesson could be made better if the slider for media and tool use could move a little more towards the right (i.e. student-selected).

The third and fourth scale points to the outcomes of learning tasks and strategies. For this lesson plan, there is a mix of learning tasks; some result in a single outcome that is known in advance, while others accept more than one outcome. For instance, Main Activity 2 requires students to answer questions using an IFS. This task had only a single outcome, since the questions had pre-determined answers that were either right or wrong. On the other hand, the Post-Activity was one with multiple possible outcomes because it was less-structured and predictable-- students were given the liberty to justify themselves by giving reasons for the grades they had given to other pairs. In return, other pairs could reply to indicate if they agreed with the justification. Because of this mix of outcomes and strategies, I would regard these areas as strengths of the lesson plan.

The final scale takes into account learning support. In this lesson plan, the nature of support provided by the teacher is more “fixed, predetermined and procedural in nature” than “flexible and contextual” (Towndrow, 2007). This can be seen in the way instructions and feedback are planned to be given to students throughout the lesson. For instance, feedback by the teacher seems to be missing in Main Activity 1, while the main form of feedback planned to be given by the teacher for Main Activity 2 is that the teacher would reinforce at the end of the activity ‘that the tones of speech must match the given description of how the speech is meant to be expressed’. Such feedback seems to be lacking in specificity and individualization and provide little support to learners – a weakness of this lesson plan. Although there is an attempt later in the Follow-up Activity (homework) for learning support to be flexible and contextual (by having the teacher give specific and individualized holistic feedback on each pupil’s recording after the deadline), such learning support seems to come a little late though; perhaps students could benefit more if more is given throughout the learning process in the classroom. Some might argue that the ‘support’ should already come from the mutual feedback provided by students themselves since the activities revolve largely around peer learning, but taking into consideration that this is supposed to be the first lesson aimed to “…correct their weaknesses before we proceed on to other speaking outcomes…”, I would think that it is important for students to receive more accurate feedback during the lesson itself.

Individual Response - Peggy

This lesson plan is mainly based on the Interactionist model. I feel that the teachers who did this lesson plan had planned to have collaborative learning which follows the interactionism model. According to Vygotsky, the interactionist model says that learning is acquired when students interact with their surroundings, which includes people around them such as their peers and students. This is evident in activities such as pair work which aims to foster collaborative learning and the e-portal platform where teachers can give feedback to the students.

However, there are some traces of the behavourism pedagogical approach found in this lesson plan as well. One of the tenets of the behaviourism model is that learning can be acquired through habit formation and this can be achieved through the drill and practice method which is evident in the activity where the students have to imitate how the people in the conversation speak.

Strengths
Generally I feel that this is a very detailed lesson plan. I like how the objectives are clearly stated and they used verbs like “read” which is an outcome that can be measured and observed at the end of the lesson.

Secondly, another strength is that they made use of a variety of ICT tools such as using video clips, the IRF feedback system which is controlled by a remote control, as well as using an e-portal platform where students can interact with not only amongst themselves but the teacher can also participate. This creates a less threatening platform for all students to express their views especially for the shyer students who are afraid to voice out in class. Usage of this portal would also lessen the teacher’s workload at the end of the day as she is able to assess everyone at one go during curriculum time and she can give immediate feedback to the students.

They have stuck quite closely to the interactionism model in the sense that they tried to incorporate pairwork during the activities. When students give feedback to each other, they themselves will also learn from their peers.


Weaknesses
One of the weaknesses of this lesson plan is that it is too teacher-centric and it allows very little space for the students to be able to explore on their own. Since ICT is a tool to facilitate language learning, teachers should make good use of the facilities instead of just altering the physical classroom but there is no change to the pedagogical approach of the lesson. According to Towndrow (2007), in order to fully utilize ICT as a tool, it is not enough for teachers to just change the classroom and make it more technologised but adopting a student-centric pedagogical approach when teaching is key. In this case I feel that there could be more activities where students can explore and learn about language pronunciation. So instead of giving them the checklist which is akin to spoonfeeding them, the teacher can divide the class into groups and give each group a different area to research online about good pronunciation. The class then comes together at the end to craft the checklist together. The teacher can play the role of the facilitator who guides the class discussion and to provide scaffolding as a form of learning support which is essential as one of the five characteristics when teacher delegate tasks (Towndrow, 2007).

Another weakness is the materials or resources used, as some are either not age-appropriate or does not serve to meet the objectives of the lesson plan. Since they are still primary students, I feel that the long conversation script is not suitable for them and the script can be altered to a shorter one. The video clip which was used for the pre-activity can be changed to one which actually shows the speakers engaging in expressive/non-expressive speech which is what the objective of the lesson is. The Joey clip would come in useful if the lesson plan was about teaching plosives.

Elearning - Renee

In this lesson plan, the main learning theory reflected, in my opinion, would be interactionism, alongside a tinge of behaviorism as well.

According to the interactionist model, language competence is said to be developed through social interaction (Vygotsky, 1978). As reflected in the lesson plan, the students were asked to work in pairs in the main activities 1 and 2, and also to partake in a class forum discussion in the post activity. In these ways, the students learn about reading and its various aspects such as tone variations, pace and pause, through the interactions (conversation exchange and practice) with their fellow peers and classmates.

According to the behaviorism theory, learning is said to be the result of stimulus-response habit-formation (Skinner, 1957). There are instances of influence from the behaviorist model of language learning in the lesson plan as the students were asked to perform imitations of the ideal pronunciations - drill and practice.

Generally, the lesson plan is one that is very detailed with specific instructions and objectives reflected in each learning task.

One of the dominant strengths would be its incorporation of ICT (video clips, e-portal system) into the learning process. Towndrow (2007) states that by employing ICT, it would add variety, interaction, flexibility and individuality to the lessons. Furthermore, the e-portal platform creates a less confrontational and less threatening medium for students to express their views, thoughts and opinions more readily at the comforts of their own homes. This also helps the teacher with convenience as they can assess all the class data in one click and not have to rummage through and manually mark a stack of papers.

The weakness of the lesson plan, however, lies in the fact that it is mainly teacher-oriented and that students don’t get to partake much in the decision making process in their learning. In the main activity 1, teacher provides the students with a checklist rubric without letting them know how and why it was derived this way. Towndrow (2007) says that there is no reason why students cannot make decisions about what they learn and how learning occurs. In fact, students ought to be given the freedom to negotiate and act on their novel ideas and curiosity. For example, they should be given inquiry-based learning activities to help them research, filter and gather information on the various aspects pertaining to reading and pronunciation instead of just taking the checklist from the teacher.

In addition, the conversation scripts provided to the students for the activities were too lengthy. This would not aid in the given short attention span that primary school students are expected to have. Last but not least, the video clip of Joey has been observed to be focused on only plosives, and not the adhering to the main objectives stated in the lesson plan.