This week's readings talked about how to use programming and robotics effectively in the classroom. My main overall thought about some of these articles was: it is cool what technology brings to the table, but why do people think that technology is the "thing" to make learning more meaningful and engaging? I keep seeing these words pop up in several articles, not just with ones related to technology. We (as in my classmates and I) all grew up with much less emphasis on technology than todays generations and we turned out to be well-rounded and intelligent, so what makes using these approaches different or unique?
The Physical Programming: Designing Tools for Children to Create Physical Interactive Environments (Montemeyer et al, 2002) was definitely a unique approach, since most designing of education, whether it be a curriculum or classroom set-up, is designed by an adult rather than children. This kind of reminded me of the movie "Accepted" where students create their own university and create their own classes because it is what they are interested in (sorry for the tangent). I was a little confused about whether the child is supposed to see themselves as part of the story, a storyteller, or a "programmer" of the story (almost an 'architect' of the story). I thought it was interesting how the children were the most intrigued with the outcomes of the parts being programmed (ie, hitting the hand several times to see the light come on) because it makes me wonder what is going on in their head.. are they thinking about how pressing the hand makes the light turn on, or are they just concerned with the seeing the light turn on. I was disappointed that the authors left out some key insights into how this technology would be useful in the classroom, I was left wondering what the actual purpose of this tool was. Was it to teach programming skills, or storytelling/interpreting skills or both?
The article Teachers as Designers: Integrating Robitics in Early Childhood Education (Bers et al, 2002) was interesting to read because I like the constructionist approach to teaching and learning and even though this article caters towards early childhood teachers, I think this approach can work at any age. I agree with the authors when they explain that pre-service teachers lack the technological skills needed to integrate and use technology in their future classrooms. I think the constructionist approach taken when teaching how to use technology in the classrooms by having the preservice teachers go through the process that their students might go through was a unique approach, but where this article lost my interest was in the examples of how the pre-service teachers used programming and robotics to aid learning. In the first three examples, all three lessons could have been taught with or without the use of the robots. Other than possibly provoking some interest because the robots were new and different than what the students were used to, the students did not gain anything from robots being used. The last example impressed me though and I thought one of the key elements to this design was not only were the students using robotics and programming design skills to build an actual robot, they were becoming 'technologically fluent' which was also a goal for the pre-service teachers as well. It seemed to me the first three examples were using the technology to aid in teaching the subject matter, whereas the forth example was teaching design and organization skills, PLUS technological vocabulary.
another sort of food for thought question I have been thinking about is: Does technology make the subject matter relevant and meaningful to the students or is it the technology itself that is relevant and meaningful?
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Hi Allison, after writing my reflection of this week's articles, reading your reflection has been quite a nice breath of fresh air. I really like that you have such a critical point of view. Reading your reflection helped me put into perspective my own take on the readings.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I agree with your impression on the Physical Programming article. I was truly excited when I started reading it cause, since it promised to take many of the abstract concepts of programming to a real world context. As a Programming teacher I always played in my mind with the idea of introducing programming to my students using more physical aids, but I never quite had the opportunity to do so. Nevertheless, it is true that the article is confusing and doesn't address several issues such as how to take advantage of Physical Programming in the classroom to support class content, or how to use it in a collaborative way, where children give feedback to other children.
On the other hand, I did not have the same impressions you had with the Robotics article. To me, the article was valuable because it is the first one that we've read that addresses the training of teachers as the first step to introduce technology in the classroom. Nonetheless, I must admit that you raised a very important issue that I had not even noticed: all three activities could have perfectly been done without the aid of any computational technology. Your insight helped me realize that the article is not about technology supporting teaching, it is more about teachers learning to embrace technology as a support for the classroom.
About your last question, I do think that technology by itself can't be relevant or meaningful. It's us, humans, who give a meaning to it. And in the case of education, it's the teachers and the students.
"Does technology make the subject matter relevant and meaningful to the students or is it the technology itself that is relevant and meaningful? "
ReplyDeleteAha! These are the sorts of questions we need to be asking. And I think the answer to this one is "neither". Authentic activities seem to be much more important in making things relevant and meaningful to students. I have been in lots of conferences/seminars/webinars of late where faculty members talk about their fabulously successful forays into teaching with technology, and what I see consistently is not that the technology "made" the subject or the learning more relevant and meaningful. What I usually see is that the teacher found something that really mattered to the students (and perhaps students that weren't all that excited about it were caught up in the enthusiasm of the rest of the class), and then the students used whatever technology was put in front of them to engage with it. If you hit on something authentic, something that will really capture the students' interests, you can have them write about it on rolls of toilet paper and be successful. I've seen instances of successful uses of technology where I could have suggested several tools that would have been better at enabling the activity, but the activity itself was so compelling that getting the "right" technology was not the most important thing.
Sorry, I haven't figured out a way to crank out surefire authentic activities.