My past as a technology journalist equips with me a sound understanding of the importance of technology and why it is very useful in today’s society. Our lives have changed irrevocably because of it. But technology for the sake of technology concerns me.
For Science, my Stage 3 class had to research an animal and provide a PowerPoint presentation on its unique features, appearance, habitat and other qualities to class. The problem, I found, was two-fold: 1) Poor researching skills on the Internet. Many just copied info verbatim from any site offering info on their chosen animal rather than using discretion. 2) Many spent more time jazzing up their PowerPoint – or problem solving PowerPoint errors, than on the actual content.
The idea of the teacher was great. Students research a topic. Dump it into a PowerPoint file replete with relevant facts and images, and then provide the class with an engaging presentation using the IWB. The execution, however, needs refining.
Our Effective Teaching lecture in Week 3 provided some interesting notes. Two that stood out for me was ‘Teaching with technology NOT teaching about technology’, thus focussing more on the content; and if you teach a subject based around an Internet search, you need good pedagogical knowledge and good content knowledge.
Our week’s reading also provided an interesting point from the authors Finger, G. Russel, G. Jamieson-Proctor, R & Russell, N in their book Transforming learning with ICT: Making IT happen. One page 12 of their book they write: “lCT provides very powerful productivity tools. As Jonassen points out, word processing allows us to become efficient, effective and productive writers through 'the ease of editing'”
And it was the ease of over editing that concerned me. Too many kids fussing over the appearance of their text and not the content. Secondly, there probably could have been more open ended questions from the teacher so they were forced to focus on multiple sources in their research. There is no reason why students don’t learn good web searching techniques at this age.
In any event, it was not all that bad. The positive was the students really enjoyed the technical aspect of their presentations. I noticed a lot helping others in solving PowerPoint problems or adding features to their presentations. The downside was many hours were spent (wasted?) on the slides and the actual quality of the content was lacking. Perhaps higher cognitive questions and better instructions on how to search for content on the Internet would have yielded more informative presentations.
Howie, this is so true! My class are exactly the same, they have now used the laptops twice to do research but what they are being asked to do is very straight forward "what is the name of" type of stuff, doesn't involve any higher level thinking. They also spend so much time deciding whether to use Word or write it out that they seem to take forever to get going. Really interesting post. Richelle
ReplyDeleteHi Howie,
ReplyDeleteUltimately I think it is up to the teacher to show the kids how to make sense of the information they find and to interpret and record it in their own words, rather than just "cut and paste". The problem you mention above is prolific. This begs the question, whose responsibility is it to teach the kids how to use the technology. The parents are looking to the teachers and the teachers are hoping that the parents have already introduced the kids to it. My prac colleague teacher handed out an assignment last week that needs to be completed in a certain application. When a few kids mentioned to her that they don't have this application at home and have never used it she only went as far as to make the suggestion that they google the application and search for a free trial (i.e basically teach themselves!). Lastly I agree with you about the fuss over the aesthetic appeal of children's work. I think there is too much focus on how it looks, whether it is coloured in and pasted in rather than the content.
Great blog Howie.
Jolanta