Case Building – Home Context
Additional framing notes included, but you can scroll down anytime to the Interview Excerpts and Commentary chart.
Preparation
Questions
After creating my set of questions and posting them to the wiki, I perused the questions in the wiki and finalized my set of interview questions. I moved away from my initial questions in viewing the video cases as I do not want to pursue gender differences or pre-service teachers’ comfort with technology since my interviewee is not a new teacher. Instead, I decided to redirect my focus to teacher comfort with incorporating technology into the teaching and what effect that has had on the learning. My interviewee has taught concepts without technology and later with technology, so she can speak to these issues from her perspective.
I settled on the following questions:
- There are varying perspectives on the usefulness of technology for teaching science and math. Some believe it’s unnecessary to teach these subjects with technology while others firmly advocate it’s absolutely a necessary component of the teaching. What is your perspective of how useful or necessary it is to teach these subjects with technology?
- *In terms of working with the 21st century learner, how critical do you think it is it to use technology to motivate or engage them?
- **How has your teaching changed after using technology? How has the learning changed?
- Can you describe an experience in using technology in a math or science lesson that was challenging?
- Students can have difficulty grasping particular math and science concepts. Can you think of an example of when you used technology to increase their understanding?
- *** In terms of access to a technology to which you do not currently have access, what would you like to be using in your math or science classroom? Explain why or what it will help you accomplish.
* question by J. Galbraith
** question by S Candelaria
*** question by J Mah
Interviewee
My interviewee is a female high school general Science teacher who has been teaching for seven years who I am giving the fictional name “Anna”. She has taught the following grades and subjects in Ontario: grades 9 and 10 Essential, Applied and Academic Science, grade 11 Environmental Science, and grade 11 University Chemistry.
Process
We met on Skype and I audio recorded the interview using a free supportive application called MP3 Skype Recorder. After completing the interview, I discovered that the recorder had quit; thus, the interview had to be repeated. My questions did not result in a 30 minute interview, so I added questions during the interview to probe deeper based on Anna’s responses.
These questions were added:
- Is there a difference in how you teach a lower level class as opposed to a more academically capable class?
- You mentioned using a Smartboard. How useful is that tool to your subject? Has it enhanced your teaching and the learning? Was it worth the cost?
- How will you use the iPad and Apple TV?
- Do you think that the use of technology improves students’ overall knowledge and skills?
- How do you learn how to use different technology applications for your classroom?
- Do you feel that you get enough support from your school and/or board in incorporating new technology?
- Can you elaborate on how Gizmo’s are useful to your teaching and student learning?
- If you could have anything you wanted in your classroom technology-wise, what would you want to use in your teaching or student learning?
Then I completed the transcription and analysis.
Interview Excerpts & Commentary
| Interviewee Comments | My Analysis |
| The Usefulness of Teaching with Technology: | |
| There are varying perspectives on the usefulness of technology for teaching science and math. Some believe it’s unnecessary to teach these subjects while others firmly advocate it’s absolutely a necessary component of the teaching. What is your perspective of how useful or necessary it is to teach these subjects?
“I think I’d probably be closer to using technology more regularly. I often at least use my Smart board every day, and other times students may be working on some kind of online simulation or some kind of a program to practice their skills. So I think it’s very important because of the generation of students we are teaching who…are heavily reliant on technology. I supplement with technology but I don’t think that…it should be used for the sake of being used. I think it serves a purpose and it should be used to supplement, but obviously there are still some things…like labs and that kind of thing, that can also be used to supplement the teaching.” |
‘Anna’ believes that she regularly incorporates technology into her science teaching by using the Smart board daily and having students complete Gizmos which is a board-funded application. She doesn’t believe in using technology just for the sake of using it, but for a meaningful learning purpose. Later in the interview, she notes that there are other activities non-computer related that are just as significant, such as lab work. Anna’s teaching style is teacher-directed with her delivering a lesson, the students completing a sort of drill and practice, and then taking up the questions. Technology is incorporated to ‘supplement’ the learning. There is an underlying assumption that the teacher delivering the lesson is a required component of classroom instruction. There is a great deal of willingness to try new applications and engage students within this teaching model. The Gizmos are very well designed experiences that help students understand difficult concepts within a traditional teaching model. |
| Smart board’s Value to Teaching and Learning: | |
| You mentioned using a Smartboard. How useful is that tool to your subject? Has it enhanced your teaching and the learning? Was it worth the cost?“
I think it definitely enhances the teaching and the learning. I find that most of the students I am teaching currently have been exposed to Smart boards, or have had Smart boards in their classes…so they are used to it. The fact that they are interactive is very nice. You can have them come up and write their answers down or even use them with the iPads. The school just purchased a bunch of iPads and Apple TV. So once that gets set up, we can have the students be more interactive with the Smartboard. I know it is a lot of money, but it is very beneficial.” |
Anna feels the value and benefit of having a Smart board and iPads outweighs the cost. She notes that they can be used interactively by having students come up to the board to write an answer. The iPads are going to be able to interact with the board as well, so she is excited about the possibilities even though she will only get to use them a few times a month. She received training as to how they could use them in their science classes and feels that there is adequate training available to support her technology wants/needs. |
| Technology Increases Understanding: | |
| Students can have difficulty grasping particular math and science concepts. Can you think of an example of when you used technology to increase their understanding?
“I recently used Gizmo which is an online simulation to help students grasp the additive and subtractive colour theory. I found some of the students already knew about the…have been exposed to colour theories if they took art; however, it is a little bit of a difficult concept to grasp, especially the subtractive colour theory, so…it’s nice to have this gizmo that can give them extra practice. We do have some…grey boxes…where students can use different colour filters and see the results in colour, but they don’t always work well, sometimes they don’t show up well, so at least with this gizmo they are able to actually see what should happen….” |
This example is a great example of using technology to dispel misconceptions or to gain understanding of a difficult concept. Anna notes that the live classroom experimentation sometimes fails for various reasons, but the Gizmo is perfectly consistent in its performance and results. The variables that affect the classroom experiment, in this case, are eliminated. |
| Challenging Technology Experience: | |
| Can you describe an experience in using technology in a math or science lesson that was challenging?
“Well, sometimes I find it challenging, well you plan this lesson or find something online and you have a great plan of how you are going to work it in and it doesn’t always work. I find it frustrating the constant updates that are necessary, particularly for the Gizmos. You always have to have the updated version of Flash for it to work…it’s kind of a wasted period…. You can virtually test it one day and it works, and then the next day it doesn’t, so it’s a bit frustrating sometimes.” |
The challenge of technology working when it’s needed seems to be a persistent issue outside of the challenges in using it to dispel misconceptions. |
| If Money was ‘No Object’: | |
| If you could have anything you wanted in your classroom technology-wise, what would you want to use in your teaching or student learning?
“I think it would be nice if every class has a set of class iPads. I feel like there’s so much you can do with them. You wouldn’t need to have textbooks [or] worry about bringing four textbooks home. They could do the Gizmos on the iPads. They could do projects on them….a 1:1 iPad situation.” |
If there was more funding available, Anna would like every student to have a tablet since they could research, use apps that reinforce what they have been taught, have digital textbooks, and have regular use instead of very limited access. I think it’s difficult to know definitively how useful a technology is going to be until we try it. I expect that there are numerous useful ways to use an iPad in any classroom. Unfortunately, the cost continues to be an issue. |
Media Credit:
Stuart Miles. (2013). Interview Key Shows Interviewing Interviews OR Interviewer Stock Image. Freedigitalphotos.net. Retrieved January 19, 2014, from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/interview-key-shows-interviewing-interviews-or-interviewer-photo-p206688.
Response from instructor:
Kim,
Anna, your high school science teacher, mentioned that, “Classroom experiments are still important, but sometimes uncontrolled variables create confusing results, for example when the grey boxes and colour filters don’t quite work properly.” (For our readers, what did she mean by the grey boxes)? More significantly, your interview reveals what educators face regarding the use of digitized or simulated experiments alongside “hands-on” experimentation. Thoughts on when they are most useful?
Samia
Hi Samia,
Your question regarding the ‘grey boxes’ I mentioned serves the purpose of dispelling a misconception based on a sound error. She had said ‘ray box’ which is a device used for light and colour experiments. I had been conceptualizing something quite different involving grey boxes on paper and colour transparencies. A ray box is a device that projects light. A teacher can project the light on a white screen and then insert two primary (red, blue, yellow) colour filters at a time to show what secondary colour (green, purple, orange) results when they intersect:
Red and Blue = Purple
Red and Yellow = Orange
Blue and Yellow = Green
I found a few pages from a textbook that describes some colour theory and this experiment. I believe that there can be problems with this experiment if you cannot darken the room enough to see the colours clearly or if the projection surface is not white, i.e. a lightly tinted wall.
I think that hands on experiments should be done in every case possible. If you have access to the equipment, a concrete, hands on experience cannot be duplicated by a computer simulation. I’m not convinced that a computer demonstration is as effective because there has to be a certain ‘buy in’ by the student to accept symbolically, representatively what they are seeing on screen. It’s a manipulated visual that’s been created to illustrate.