Technology in education exists to enhance our understandings, and good use of technology would do just that. Working at the substitution levels of the SAMR model implies that technology is being used to elaborately and expensively reinvent the wheel. Good use of technology should make a learning experience transformative, in that the opportunity would not have been possible if not for this tool. In a classroom, this is tricky because the tools themselves are in a constant state of evolution. They are expensive, can take time to implement, and take expertise to troubleshoot when there are issues. None of these factors make it easy, but certainly the skills and understandings gleaned from the tools make it worth it- if they are being used effectively.
Good technology helps not only visualize but also engage. I don’t know what the design of such a classroom space would look like, but certainly the students would feel comfortable enough exploring and challenging the curriculum and their own understandings with technology. With a previous 2nd grade class and as part of a teaching team, we taught a unit on landforms and talked a lot about how they are created. In looking at their prior knowledge, many of the students believed that mountains simply existed, or that they were built up over time, rather than eroding. We talked at length about tectonic plates, did lots of experiments to demonstrate how they are formed. It wasn’t until we had the opportunity to go to a university nearby, and ‘play’ with their augmented reality sandbox, that some of them started to change their ideas about how mountains are ‘built’. The technology in this case helped some of the students who could not visualize how erosion worked, and helped us see how factors like extended amounts of time can affect a geographic location. Even the passing of that much time is a difficult concept for the students to grasp, so this tool helped many of them make a pretty big leap.
Recognizing that this isn’t typical of most classrooms, I feel very lucky that my students had the opportunity to ‘play’ and figure out how erosion works. I’m certainly not naïve enough to believe that everyone left that year with a perfect understanding of tectonic plate movement, but the technology definitely enhanced their ability to explain the concepts, and additionally piqued their interest for more research. I think that access to these kinds of resources is likely the biggest challenge.
Hi Amanda,
I think most of us would agree that good use of technology should make learning transformative. Although, I do not automatically think that technology implemented in these ways are expensive and difficult to troubleshoot. For instance, something as economical and ubiquitous as Google Sheets could be used to simply add numbers (substitution), or to collaborate with like minded students in multiple schools and multiple regions to solve a significant ecological problem (transformation). That being said, implementation time is certainly a variable that really depends on the learning task and the experience of the teacher(s). Anyhow, let me know what you think.
Thanks for your insights Gordon, I completely agree that technology does not have to be over-the-top to be effective; you can use many different forms of emerging technologies to achieve the same goal- thanks for responding!