Okay so my title is a little dramatic, but honestly, that’s how technology in the classroom sometimes feels. It’s like trying to stay on top of 20+ spinning plates, because if you can, you can generate enough power to light the room for a week. This is what has been true in my experience, anyway, in my position within a school that had good wifi, 1:1 device:student ratio, and a subscription to EBSCOhost through the library. All of my students were comfortable with mobile devices like tablets or smart-phones, but only for entertainment purposes. They viewed their laptops as the tools that could bridge over to academic usage, and left their phones for ‘fun’ only – unless a laptop was broken and they had to get creative with how to continue on with their work.
From day one, I made it clear to students they were expected to use technology responsibly – that it was a privilege with incredible potential, but not a right. We co-constructed expectations for device use together, and this set the ground-rules – if they broke them, I just had to remind them of what we had agreed was acceptable behaviour. Thankfully I rarely had to confiscate a device after a verbal warning, and so we were able to use technology without many issues – it wasn’t perfect, but I was also willing to renege a certain level of control. With my senior students I made it clear deadlines were tight and expectations were high – if they didn’t take their work seriously, they were making their own beds to lie in. With that established, I would help them cultivate research skills that would not only following criteria of academic integrity, but lead them in the best directions to satisfy their curiousity on topics of their choosing within the framework of the course work or assignments.
What was created was essentially the blended classroom – technology was a tool that enriched my face-to-face interactions with students. I used Edmodo as a way to post homework and for quick messaging between students, and WikiClassrooms as a main ‘hub’ for course activity. There I would post learning goals for the lessons, curated resources for students to access, and any lesson content that they needed in order to proceed either in their groups or individually. Assignments were also posted to the wiki, and occasionally class discussions took place there as well. In the future I would like to maximize the constructivist potential of the Wiki by requiring students to create there for each other more actively – I had tried once before and found the results messy and disorganized, but swinging entirely in the other direction wasn’t satisfying either. Part of the challenge there was that students would inadvertently over-write each other’s work if they were editing the same page at the same time, which was frustrating and de-motivating. Any real-time collaborative work would therefore take place on platforms like Google docs or slides, or Padlet.
Although students saw their mobile devices as best suited for recreational use, they were able to find ways to incorporate it into their educational tasks through a few different methods. One was with interactive class-based quizzes on the platform Kahoot!, which functioned as review, assessment, or simple survey. It was low-stakes competition that they always got a kick out of, even if it was just a mood-lifter during the period. Another was as recording devices – more than once I asked students to record each other and then either edit the recordings (e.g. to create news broadcasts), or at the very least upload them to YouTube (as unlisted) and then share with the class on the Wiki for future reference. This helped weave into the classroom a sense of collaborative creation, which was often done preceding more individual tasks of creation. For example, I asked students in my grade 11 English class to write a piece around their relationships with identity and language, then record themselves reading it to post to the wiki. Many chose to write poems (as I had left the format open and was not grading their expertise within the chosen form, but rather their understanding of the prompt), since they had previous experience with poetry, and so we ended up with a nice collection of read poems for them to read and listen to aloud. Later, I asked them to create Blogs (on a platform of their choice, though many chose Tumblr) on this same theme, and they could both collect past work to post and create new pieces. They were required to visit each other’s blogs and leave feedback on a set number of posts, although some went above the basic number outlined. Because they were already comfortable sharing their work with each other, and we had modeled constructive feedback during class time, they were wonderfully respectful and thoughtful on each other’s blogs.
What this all meant was that I spent a huge amount of my time conferencing with students one-on-one or in small groups to check in with them on their work, either in their chosen forms of technology or in their thought processes when developing content. I could monitor group work when they added me to Google docs from my desk, but the best interactions came from checking in with them either during class or by following the links to their work after class-time, and then nudging them in the right direction either online or the following day. An extreme example of tech. use from this past year once involved me using a free temporary chat room app I found through a Google search to do side-by-side essay conferences with students, after I lost my voice entirely after the flu. It was odd, but oddly effective!
I was lucky to be able to learn how technology as a tool can better enrich my learning environment. I am not a fan of ‘technology for technology’s sake’, but thanks to creative peers and reliable recommendations, I haven’t used much that I wouldn’t use again (perhaps with some tweaking). The fun part is that when it’s clear to my students that I to am learning, but that the goals are worth it, the use of tech. becomes less about making me happy and more about making their own work easier and more effective – extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. All in all, as per Ciampa’s article this week, I’ve been able to witness and learn within the six elements that help contribute to this shift in a learner’s motivation through tech., and I look forward to further refining my own skills to better guide those of my students.
References
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved fromhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf