Short Talk Panel IPE: Redefining Learning Communities and Practices Through Technology and Media
Title: Moving Beyond the Classroom Walls: Creating Models for 21st Century Learning
Session Type: individual-paper
Organizer: Tiffany McGettigan
Participant: Brian Burnett, Tiffany McGettigan
How can schools take learning outside the classroom and into the community and wider world? What strategies enable educators to successfully utilize 21st century skills and literacies, despite the challenges faced within public schools? How can these educators create adaptable learning models?
A 1st grade class leaves school grounds to explore environmental issues surrounding their water supply and local stream, then posts their findings online to raise community awareness. High school culinary arts students investigate their city’s homelessness problem, then develop a food and nutrition education program for the homeless community. These are just some examples of 21st century learning projects supported through the Model Classroom Program.
Since 2010, the Pearson Foundation's New Learning Institute has sponsored the Model Classroom Program: a program that works directly with CCSSO State Teacher of the Year alumni to implement projects with youth. Participating teachers are challenged to design projects and practices that are challenge-based, collaborative, and utilize real world learning. Most importantly, these teachers are advocates of 21st century approaches to leaning, and by developing successful strategies they help other educators adapt their work to their own schools and communities.
This short talk will feature an interactive presentation of exemplary projects, followed by a discussion about the impact this program has on teachers, students and communities. Strategies used in developing these programs and for confronting the technological and philosophical challenges existing within schools will be highlighted and addressed.
Title: KQED Do Now: Engaging Students with Current Events and Twitter
Session Type: individual-paper
Organizer: Matthew Williams
Participant: Matthew Williams
This lecture will discuss the affordances and challenges of using social media and mobile devices for adding value to content area learning objectives and advancing civic engagement and digital citizenship. In the past year, the power and relevance of mobile devices and social media has erupted globally. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become dominant forms of communication and idea sharing, contributing to the organization, messaging, and mobility of social movements in the United States and abroad. Yet, there is a disconnect between the role social media plays with our youth and the role it could have in our learning institutions. Students use Twitter and Facebook to chat with friends, provide personal updates, and maybe link to a funny video on YouTube.
This lack of connection to learning has contributed to a growing number of school districts that have banned the use of mobile devices and social media platforms in schools. Facebook is blocked in the San Francisco Unified School District. Many schools have implemented a no cell phone use policy in the classroom. But strong tools and resources do exist to make the strong connection between these new technologies and learning. Specifically, KQED public media in the Bay Area has developed Do Now, a project in which middle and high school students participate, through the use of social media tools, in weekly topical discussions pertaining to the arts, science, civics, and government policy. KQED Education aims to introduce 21st Century skills and add value to learning through the integration of relevant local content and new media tools and technologies. Social media, in particular, provides a prime for students to actively engage in discussions and share ideas. Careful implementation of academic ways to embrace these technologies is vital. KQED recognizes the power of these devices to support learning in a networked culture as well as to promote knowledge in a core content area and encourage civic engagement and digital citizenship.
Do Now ties technology and new media tools to timely stories related to core content areas. Students are introduced to local and global issues, from the plastic pollutants in the San Francisco Bay to the implications of the California Dream Act. The platform then allows them to join a conversation that expands beyond classroom walls. Do Now is flexible and can be easily integrated into a classroom context and catered to the needs of individual educators. The intention is for educators to jump off from this introductory question into a more expansive lesson, perhaps incorporating the voices from other students from other schools or launch an inquiry-based investigation into topical areas.
This session will focus on the success and challenges of Do Now in the Bay Area, particularly regarding its ability to advance learning and shift school policy on mobile devices and social media. We will also look at several case studies from middle and high schools from San Francisco Unified School District.
Title: The Digital Divide in Classroom Technology Use: A Comparison of Three Schools
Session Type: individual-paper
Organizer: Matthew Rafalow
Participants: Meg Cramer, Matthew Rafalow
Do all schools use the same educational technologies similarly? While concerns about the “digital divide,” or access to technology, are still relevant for many schools, analysts are increasingly concerned about how often-expensive technologies for instructive use are employed across school contexts. Researchers have termed the “participation gap” to describe differences in opportunities young people have that shape how they learn to multitask, network, and create appropriate content with technology and online media. This shift in attention from simple matters of access to more nuanced differences in digital participation reflects a growing unease about how inequalities may persist even when technology is more widely available. Three schools that vary by student socioeconomic status and race-ethnicity and employ SMARTboard technology in classrooms were selected for study in Southern California. Ethnographic- and interview-based data show that school culture significantly shapes the use of the same technology across schools. Teachers draw on cultural codes transmitted to them by principals, other teachers, parents, and mass media in ways that affect the authority structure in the classroom, which in turn constrains or enables the capacity for the teacher to take advantage of the innovative educational capacity of new technology. In predominately white, middle- and upper-class schools, the use of SMARTboards encouraged participatory learning, while in the low-income, predominantly Latino school, SMARTboards were used like traditional blackboards and students were rarely permitted to engage with the technology. Innovations for public education must consider how culture can shape the use of technologies, particularly when serving marginalized student populations.
Title: What makes a college social network site sustainable? A successful case study
Session Type: individual-paper
Organizer: Donghee Yvette Wohn
Participant: Donghee Yvette Wohn
Due to high college drop-out rates, institutions are trying to build internal social network sites (SNSs) or online communities as a way of helping student adjustment and persistence. Such efforts are taking place not only among brick-and-mortar schools, but also virtual schools. There has been very little evidence, however, of the success of these systems. One of the biggest problems with these sites is the difficulty in attracting enough users, and then sustaining those users. This is somewhat ironic, since the goal of having the online community is to keep students in college.
In this talk, I will present a case study of Ewhaian.com, a student-driven 10-year old SNS for one of the top universities in South Korea. Ewhaian was launched at the same as a very similar SNS created by the university, but the latter failed within a few years. By highlighting the major differences between the two sites, I will describe the factors that were unique to the successful SNS. These factors were extremely consistent with the three main facets of self-determination theory—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
This case study will be useful to both designers and administrators, as there are few, if any, instances of college-specific SNSs in the U.S. that have maintained a high proportion of student engagement for such a long time. Implications for sustainability in terms of site governance and user engagement will be offered.
Title: A Critical Analysis of the Role of Digital Media and Multimodality in Deaf Education
Session Type: individual-paper
Organizer: Mark Gobble
Participant: Mark Gobble
The potential role of digital media in the deaf education setting is examined and supported, drawing on research from deaf education, technology, cognition, and multimodal practices. As deaf education continues to confront challenges in instruction and learning, the role of digital media becomes a critical area of analysis and study.
Deaf students lag behind their hearing peers as much as or more than six grade levels behind the norm in reading with 50% of 18-year-olds in the United States reading at the fourth-grade level or lower (Traxler, 2000). Deaf education shows a well-documented lack of progress especially in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics.
Deaf students, by nature, are bimodal-bilingual learners and users. Deaf students use two distinct modalities, and this is a very unique phenomena. If deaf students already often utilize a visual-spatial language in sign language, it wouldn’t be a big leap to consider the potential benefits of incorporating more visual-spatial modes of literacy in the classroom that may benefit the deaf student through digital media which can readily play visual-spatial modes of literacy such as animations and videos.
Access to digital media also allows for greater interaction between deaf and hearing students who may not otherwise be able to communicate effortlessly, smoothly, or even at all. Lang and Steely (2003) showed that deaf students experienced difficulties in interacting with hearing peers and instruction and in equitable classroom activities. A mobile device can be preloaded with an augmentative and alternative communication app that helps deaf students construct sentences with a natural-sounding voice. While deaf students may struggle with interacting with hearing peers and instruction, McKee and Scherer (1992) reported that deaf students experienced high satisfaction with sharing of ideas with hearing peers when there is a use of media.
There are some promising results, thereby the strong push for using digital media in deaf education. Barman and Stockton (2002) reported that deaf students marked an improvement in using independent academic skills as well as their technology literacy and motivation when they accessed instructional units on the Internet. Low-reading-ability deaf students were also shown to perform equally as well as high-reading-ability deaf students through computerized instruction (Dowaliby & Lang, 1999). Additionally, an interactive multimedia and web based curriculum “yielded significantly greater knowledge gains for deaf students as compared to traditional classroom experience” (Lang & Steely, 2003)
Introducing digital media into deaf education will be a multi-faceted opportunity involving not only the reinvention of learning but also the transformation of deaf students’ identities as literate beings. Digital media will allow for the development of a multimodal representation system so much more effectively than the traditional means of classroom instruction design, utilizing a variety of modalities and literacies so readily available through digital media that are not available on the traditional print material or spoken language typically used in today’s schools. This may assist in creating a research paradigm shift moving away from the paradigm of disability and deficiency to one where deaf learners posit themselves as literate beings.