Author Archives: amanda ghegin

Infrastructure, Whole-picture, Questioning

For my interview, I decided to talk to two teachers at my school- the first is a Math teacher in our high school, and the second is our Educational Technology coordinator. The interviews were conducted in a classroom at the international school I work at. Teacher X is an IB DP and MYP teacher, who is teaching Grades 6,7,9,11, and 12 this year, and is in his second year at the school. Previously, he worked at a private school in Brazil. Teacher Y is a technology integration specialist, who has also been teaching internationally for a number of years. His current position is coordinator for technology integration and education, but his role has evolved during his time here. He is also in his second year at the school. The interviews were conducted separately, and the set of questions varied slightly, as indicated below:

Both Teachers X and Y:

  1. How has integrating technology affected your teaching practice?
  2. What are the biggest challenges you face in integrating technology in your classroom? Within your school?
  3. Are 1:1 device programs necessary for integrating technology effectively in mathematics/science? Are students at an advantage if they do have their own device?

Teacher X:

  1. Which topics in math and science are best supported by the use of technology?
  2. Are there any ways that you have previously used it that you deemed ineffective?
  3. Does digital technology allow you to do anything that isn’t possible using traditional teaching methods?

Teacher Y:

  1. What type of students do you think benefit most from using technology?
  2. How do you use and model technology in teacher professional development?
  3. Do you feel it is important or necessary that you as the teacher/coach are an expert with the technology? Why or why not?

 

The key themes I found were:

Infrastructure

Both spoke to the need for good infrastructure for learning, and how important it is that the systems are in place school-wide, if initiatives are going to be effective. One of the important factors are personnel and having the availability to work closely with classroom teachers. In his current role, Teacher Y states that his time is divided unevenly, in what he feels is an imbalance, as he works in both the elementary and the high school as a coordinator and implementer. He says, “On the two ends of the spectrum, I get to spend not very much time with people who have decent practice, and I spend much more time with people who have more ‘growth areas’ I’ll say, vis-à-vis technology, so there’s a certain group of staff that are under-served, if not unserved by me being here.” Teacher X’s view on good infrastructure focused instead on the idea of good habits within the classroom for the students. He stated that it was important for the students to be taught explicitly how to use their devices, particularly as they can quickly become distractions. Of importance is that our school runs a 1:1 device program in the high school. He said, “[challenges] especially with the younger ones [are] managing expectations of appropriate use and being on task. It’s something they get better at, and it’s something that has to be taught alongside the actual content of your course. How to use a device appropriately, how to use it properly, when to put it away”. The transformative experiences within the math and science classrooms come after students learn to be responsible with technology. School-wide, this can be as intensive as a digital citizenship curriculum, or as simple as time allocated to teach appropriate device usage.

 

Whole-picture

I asked Teacher Y to tell me a little about who he thought benefitted most from technology, and his ideas came with a bit of narrative from his time as a teacher and as a coordinator studying best practice. He insisted that the technology is only part of the picture, and that “the ones with good teachers” benefitted the most. He said, “I think if I had answered this question 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘kids with learning disabilities’, or something else, because I think that the way we were looking at tech integration a while back was like, ‘start with remediation’. We were looking at tech as a way to catch up kids who were behind, as opposed to looking for ways to make kids at the top move forward.” Both Teacher X and Teacher Y’s experience impressed me, but Teacher Y’s proficiency in the whole-picture approach made me appreciate and value the people I work with even more. Naturally, it’s necessary to step back and evaluate technology usage in this way; both interviewees insisted that “tech for the sake of tech is bad practice”, however Teacher Y went in-depth about what makes integration effective. He talked about previous schools, and how good practices were reinforced, in addition to places where he was actively seeking out opportunities on his own to further his understanding, because it wasn’t supported by the school. Upon asking him about devices and access to technology, he reiterated his point about good teaching and replied, “1:1 devices are an advantage, maybe. If you’re in the right classroom, absolutely”.

 

Questioning

Teacher X spoke a bit about how tech has affected his practice, how technology “has made me more efficient”, and spoke about the ways in which it manifests itself in an inquiry-based classroom. It allows students to question openly about new concepts, or in his words, “when something interesting comes up, it’s much more natural to take an interesting question and run with it, than be forced to plan everything that has to be done ahead of time. It allows for more inquiry. You get more authentic and interesting questions and results.”

Additionally, Teacher X commented that it can help facilitate learning and catalyze commentary/inquiries among the students and with him. He says, “I like academic conflict, I like when kids have different answers. They come to different conclusions based on something, and when they’re seeing what each other thinks, it’s a really nice way to stop and pause and resolve everything, because there’s a bit of an incentive. Kids want to be right, and you can kind of exploit that, to kind of get them into this idea, and I think if you have the right culture that it’s okay to be wrong, then it’s not a problem. You’re trying to resolve something. When you have that kind of culture in the classroom, tech makes it easier to share viewpoints and then ultimately get resolution, which is satisfying for everyone.” Not only resolution, but this also helps create questions to do further research on a topic, as the conversations spur more curiousity.

Though Teacher X spoke about a range of different technologies that he has used and continues to use, his reasoning for sometimes opting for the simple use of technology caught my attention. Using technology to enhance learning and dispel misconceptions in the math and science classroom works if all students have access to the understandings and vocabulary. He brought up the point of “… this idea of using videos or images to present something interesting, when it’s a video or image and no words, no text, it has a really low barrier for entry, and I think this is really important for kids who are new to English, kids with learning disabilities”, which was poignant for me.

How do we get everyone on board?

The Case Study videos were all very impressive in their exemplary teaching. Particularly, I enjoyed watching the Case 1 videos, and felt strongly that the student testimonials and interview with the other members of staff who were on the STEM team were powerful. In contrast, the video labeled ‘New Teacher’ in the Case 5 video had a teacher who was struggling to make a case for technology integration in her own classroom, despite being able to describe many of its benefits. To paraphrase, she cites ‘not enough time’, and ‘not being taught more about technology integration in her teacher education program’ as barriers that stand between her personal practice and bringing technology into the classroom on a regular basis (as her colleague has done).

For me, the underlying issues are the facts that time, willingness to collaborate, and additional reliance on others for troubleshooting and difficulties are all required in order to have successful outcomes. It’s clear from all of the case study videos that the students and teachers alike are engaged and enthusiastic about the learning going on.

This raises the question: how do we get all teachers on board? How can we facilitate this mind shift where teachers don’t see tech integration as an add-on, cumbersome, and frustrating addition to an already over-scheduled checklist of things that need to be done?

Once the mind shift switches to technology as something that can not only improve the quality of the lesson, but more importantly the quality of the learning, it appears that teachers are ready to jump on board. The majority of the videos presented showed teachers that were keen on trying out new tech initiatives and wanted to learn about them.

In following the lead of the exemplary teachers in these videos, I’d encourage some kind of buddy system in a school, so that teachers can slowly grow their network of in-house technology experts. In the Case 1 video, the teachers that collaborated and worked together had a practically seamless approach to their STEM program. They were all very clearly on the same page, each teacher played a critical role, and they fed off of each others’ energy and commitment to the program. Additionally, they mentioned going on [school board approved] professional development sessions to further develop their skills, which accentuates their being committed learners and teachers. In many of the videos, there is some sort of mention of ‘knowing that you don’t know everything’, and seeking expertise, professional development, and relying on the resources around you (skilled and enthusiastic staff) to help alleviate some of the stress around not feeling able to incorporate technology effectively.

The issues with conceptual challenges students might have, I feel was best addressed by technology usage in the Case 7 video. Where the ‘clickers’ allowed students anonymity in admitting what they may not know, it also had them actively participate so that the professor could speak to misunderstood concepts in the moment. The ability to use the clickers as whole-class formative assessment without causing any kind of embarrassment to the individual students is a great way of making sure all the students understand the lesson. Though there isn’t much room for them to ‘dig deeper’ and explain their thinking (and thus their potential misconceptions), it does give the teacher a snapshot of what they do and do not understand without putting anyone on the spot.

Unpacking Assumptions

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.

Misconceptions and the Equals Sign

Heather struggled with reconciling her explanation and the new knowledge; the ability to try and see it from another perspective was blocked out, favouring instead her own understanding of how the seasons happened. Despite the fact that she struggled to explain it, her persistence in perpetuating knowledge that she believed to be true was staggering, or as Shapiro writes, “relat[ing] it to already existing ideas or to language which [she] already possesses” (Shapiro, 1988, p.99). As a result and as information for my own practice, I take this as a cry to have kids explain their thinking as much as possible, and to rely on tools like the Thinking Routines to help clarify and to get students to talk about their understandings at every opportunity, in order to expel the myths that may come up as a result of digging deeper.

I chose to explore equivalence and how the equals sign can be taken to mean “resulting in” or “computes to”. Vermeulen and Meyer describe this as students having an operational view of the equals sign, despite its relational meaning. Essentially, seeing the equals sign as a function of computation, and as such, students being likely to “reject equations such as 8=8 as false, because there is no obvious action” (Vermeulen & Meyer 2017). Many factors perpetuate this misconception, but they “…attribute an operational view of the equal sign to the use of calculators and direct verbal-to-written translation of mathematical sentences” (Vermeulen & Meyer 2017). The article by Vermeulen and Meyer had me thinking quite a bit about my own practice, not only with respect to technology, but also in the language I choose to use.

In thinking about how this affects educators, Vermeulen and Meyer write, “we are of the opinion that the results obtained from both teachers and students do suggest that, owing to these teachers’ limited MKfT of the equal sign, they were not aware that their teaching could, and possibly did, promote students’ misconceptions of the equal sign, nor were they able to identify students’ misconceptions or suggest how to prevent, reduce or rectify these misconceptions” (Vermeulen & Meyer 2017). As a teacher of young children, this is particularly striking, because it brings to light the fact that in something as simple as the way I chose to vocalize and draw attention to equivalence can help promote or expel the myths of math as solely arithmetic and computation.

Technology creates opportunities for students to be able to visualize the problem (and it’s potential solutions) in a different way, making room for them to be critical of their own misconceptions. In the case of algebraic equations and equivalence, the idea of a balance or see-saw helps the students envisage this concept. Sakow and Ruveyda write, “Modern tools like tablet apps may help middle school teachers end the thirty-year stagnation and put these algebraic misconceptions to rest at last” (Sakow & Ruveyda, 2015). In fact, there is an app that the article outlines as particularly effective to this end. Though I’m sure there are many such apps that use the same see-saw analogy, I particularly appreciate that “MathScaled’s weights change in value from problem to problem, erasing student notions of specific values for variables. Furthermore, the app allows students to save screenshots of their work to assist the teacher in efficiently assessing understanding and providing individualized support” (Sakow & Ruveyda, 2015). It is the constantly changing factors and reframing of the problems that allows the concept to solidify, and for the students to hone their skills in this respect.

 

References

Matthew Sakow, & Ruveyda Karaman. (2015). Exploring Algebraic Misconceptions with Technology. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 21(4), 222-229. doi:10.5951/mathteacmiddscho.21.4.0222

Shapiro, B. L. (1988). What children bring to light: Towards understanding what the primary school science learner is trying to do. Developments and dilemmas in science education, 96-120.

Cornelis Vermeulen & Bronwin Meyer (2017). The Equal Sign: Teachers’ Knowledge and Students’ Misconceptions. African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education Vol. 21 , Iss. 2.

 

Programmable mBots for Geometry

When I taught 3rd grade in Korea, we used MakeBlock mBots and their respective app on the iPad for teaching geometry (angles, turns, and geometric shapes), and it was an awesome experience. The students were excited not only about the curriculum content for math, but additionally programming and coding skills. For one activity, they were divided into in small groups and worked collaboratively to program their bots to create shapes in the path that their bots took.

This experience taught me that the ability to integrate technology amplified their understanding beyond just maths content. We could have used flash cards, or done an infinite amount of worksheets to name shapes and angles, but the ability to embed (pardon the pun) and use coding in their lessons helped create invaluable ties between their math lessons and their procedural writing in literacy (which we were focusing on at the time). The connection was seamless and relevant, and helped us all think in terms of our ‘central idea’ (unifying topic), as opposed to sectioning the curriculum into subjects.

I was working at a very ‘well-to-do’ and affluential school, which allowed us the privilege of using whatever toys we wanted with respect to technology integration. This begs the question for me: what about less affluent schools? What about access to these tools that clearly transform the learning experience, that not all can afford?

Hello!

Hi all!

I’m Amanda. I’m currently writing to all of you from Southern Ontario while visiting family for the winter holidays, though I live and work in Bern, Switzerland. I teach at the elementary level, and have a very vivacious class of 2nd graders this year. Prior to moving to Bern last year, I was working in South Korea, on Jeju island for three years.

I’m in my second semester of the MET program, and have taken ETEC511 and 531. I started in the fall term and have thoroughly enjoyed the discussions… I’m looking forward to many more insightful postings/readings!

From this course, I hope to develop new understandings and improve my skill-set to get kids interested in math from an early age, where they are developing their base understandings. At the elementary level, so many kids come to school with the preconceived notion that they are ‘bad at math’ or ‘afraid of math’, and I want to leverage technology in a conscious and sustainable way to hook them, keep it engaging, and above all else, fun.

As far as hobbies go, I’m a runner and love ultimate frisbee and soccer. I also enjoy hiking and being outside in general!