ICT Reflections

The course has ended I would now take the opportunity to look back on all the things I have learnt in this course. Starting off with google documents, I can now laugh at myself after purchasing a new laptop in the US and the word trial package expired I was unable to use my computer to do a paper until I had the programme installed. All I had was the use of the internet, but who knew then that I could have done my paper on google docs on the internet? Thanks Aisha!
I believe in using graphic organizers in my classes, and I always had to be combing through various websites to find one that is appropriate and not all sites have them available for free. Thanks to Webspiration I can create my own. Learning how to use the various Web 2.0 tools to utilize technology in the curriculum would certainly not only enhance our teaching in term of delivery but also the students’ learning. In that through the use of the various digital multimedia devices, our lessons will appeal to the multiple intelligences of the learners, deepening their understanding and widening their perspective of concepts. Once again I would like to extend my gratitude to Aisha for a job well done and to my tutor Cherrise. The lessons you have shared would not be forgotten since they would now be a part of our daily lives.

The Draft ICT Policy

The Ministry of Education Draft ICT Policy is laudable; whether it is achievable by 2020 is left to be seen. From where we are now to where we would like to go we are a long way off. The MOE’s vision is
“To be the premier institution leading and transforming education through Information and Communications Technology.”
Mission
“To establish a technology centred infrastructure focused on enabling the education system to be responsive to the dynamic social and economic environment.”

To accomplish its vision as the society’s change agent, the MOE has embarked on bringing ICT into schools on a phased basis. Since the early 1990’s many schools have been outfitted with a single computer lab and sad to say, the status quo remains the same. We are yet to see classroom that are ICT ready where computers and projectors are provided for teaching and learning. We seem to be stuck at phase one for the past 20 years but one must not abandon hope, the Draft policy is only five years old after all. As Sabrina asked is it a myth or will it be a reality?

Technology in the classroom September 2010

Most Form One students will be happy this September, when they each will be receiving their new laptop computers. I too am excited for them. The Ministry of Education is still in the process of formulating policy guidelines for using these computers. They are yet to iron out whether the laptops would be taken home or left at school. They have to ask and answer many questions to shape this policy. Such as; would the laptops be safer in the homes or at the schools? Would they be used by the form ones for every subject or only during Information Technology (IT)? Would the SEA students in 2011 be given laptops as well? Would all teachers be trained in the use of it in the various disciplines? Would each school be provided with IT teachers? At my school in particular, only students in form three receive IT instruction and students in forms four and five who have selected IT for CSEC since we have one lab and one teacher.

Currently, there are more questions than answers and everyone is eagerly looking forward to see how these questions will be answered in September.

Registration of Form One Students

I can still see their faces as they entered the school gate and into the designated classrooms with a parent for registation at the school. Some faces were bright, others sulky with disappointment since they didnot like the school they were placed in. Many parents insisting that they wanted a transfer out of the school for their child aince they believe that their child was good (performance)and the school was not.

So we went through the motion of registration and in some cases, application for transfer. The form asked for parent's career expectation for their child, some had none, but most had high expectation for their children. This was good indeed, but the problem that many teachers face after the registration process is that there is little support coming forward for these children from there on in. Some parents we never see again. Parents must know that for their children to excel they need to be part of the education process. Home and school must work together for the students to succeed.

So in September, as we work with our new classes, it is imperative that each teacher gets his or her parents to buy into the education process by supporting their children from home. Maybe if we set up a class wiki site with parental access, we can make our parents feel as part of the process since they can always see what is happening in the class and the school without having to take time off from work.

Creating a Print Rich Environment in the Home

Creating a Print Rich Environment in the home.

Researchers have discovered that children who are introduced to literacy skills very early in life enjoy a head start over their peers by the time they start school. Parents, who read to their young ones, would have been fostering their children’s understanding of print and reading. It has been found that these children are generally more successful academically since what takes place in the home is in sync with what is taking place at school.
Any parent who wants to give the young child a head start academically, need to create a print rich environment in the home. A print rich environment is one which displays a variety of books, poems, writing tools, charts and labeled items for the benefit of the learner. This type of environment allows the child to become immersed in a world of print at a very early age. Parents can use the child’s bedroom as the nucleus for the print rich world. To do this, Shelby Moore (2010) suggested the following tips:

• Label all the furniture in the child’s room at the child’s eye level.

• Provide lots of age appropriate books of different genre for the child. E.g picture books, animal books numbers, fairytale etc.
• Provide material for drawing writing and colouring.
• Place charts on the wall with colours, alphabet, nursery rhymes, calendars etc.

• Provide music
• Provide puzzles, games and flash cards.

Every effort must be made to make the room fun and inviting. The child must be able to interact with the material provided in the environment and be able to experience that learning is fun.

http://community.leapfrog.com/t5/Kindergarten-Teacher-Shelby/Tips-for-Creating-a-Print-Rich-Environment-at-Home/ba-p/3842

Wikis in the Classroom

The use of wikis has the potential to change how teaching and learning can occur in and out of the classroom. Its major strength is its potential for collaborative teaching and learning. A wiki page can allow anyone who visits the site to change, add or delete content on the page providing they have the password. The creator of the new content is able to see what has changed. In a classroom, students can collaborate on assignments on line, they can add their own interpretation of a topic, hyperlink to other students’ wiki pages or other web pages and they can either add their own images or images from the net.

Once students respect the rights of others and do not change ‘willy-nilly’ the items on other students’ wiki pages, the wiki can deepen students’ understanding, broaden their perspectives and foster the development of a culture of sharing and collaboration in the classroom.

For teachers, a wiki is a great management tool that possesses the capability of bringing school and home together. Class assignments can be posted on the wiki, so too can class and school activities. Parents, once given access to the class wiki site, can always know what is taking place in the classroom therefore the school and home divide would be greatly reduced.

Digital Storytelling

Bernard Robin describes digital storytelling as the art of combining a variety of digital multimedia with narration to tell a story on a topic. As with any traditional story, a digital story contains themes and is told from someone’s view point. Digital stories are often used as personal narratives, to recount historical events or to instruct on a topic.
In the classroom, many teachers find use for digital stories as an introduction to a lesson, where they can be used to bridge the students’ previous knowledge with the lesson to be taught. It can be used within the lesson to aid the conceptual development of the lesson, or at the end, to summarize the details covered in the lesson. Where ever it is used in the classroom, it is a powerful tool that helps students to deepen their understanding and memory on a topic.
Students can be taught to develop their own digital stories. In this process, students will learn the following skills:

• Research
• Writing
• Organizational
• Technology
• Presentation
• Interview
• Interpersonal
• Problem solving
• Assessment
What is crucial for students being taught the art of digital storytelling is their understanding of the content area. Having a library of pictures without knowledge of the content or storytelling technique will simply lead to bad storytelling.

The Digital Natives

After reading Marc Prensky's thought provoking "Digital Native's Digital Immigrants", I exerienced an "aha moment". Prensky believes that the current generation of students from kindergarten to university are fundamentally different from any other generation, not only in speech, styles and taste in music but more importantly in the way they think and learn. This generation of students Prensky refers to as the 'digital natives'. He stated that they were born surrounded and bombarded by technology on a daily basis. Due to this, their brains are wired differently from ours. According to Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor University, different pathways for learning were developed due to enviroment in which they now live. They are able to engage in several activities at the same time, such as listening to music on an ipod, studying and texting or messaging all at the same time.

Prensky then described the rest of us as 'digital immigrants' due to the fact that we did not grow up in the digital age, we had to adapt and learn in order to survive and keep up. Yet some of us retain vestiges of our past. The digital immigrants can be seen printing documents for editing, rather than editing on screen, reading a manual first rather than assuming that the programme itself will teach how to use it.

Prensky insists that the biggest challenge facing the education system today is that our educators are immigrants in a digital world attempting to teach the digital natives. The natives engage in:

• parallel processing
• multi tasking
• prefer graphics before text
• and thrive on instant gratification and rewards.

The digital immigrants do not see much need for these skills and are still attempting to teach the natives using the same strategies that they grew up on. They also believe that since they cannot learn whilst listening to music or watching television that this will be the same for the natives.

Daily we are loosing our students to boredom. So unless the digital immigrants,( the educators) wake up and realize that their old teaching methods and strategies are rapidly becoming irrelevant, we will continue to widen the chasm between these two groups of dwellers.

Literacy, Youths and the Legal System.

Every year, over 2000 students in Trinidad and Tobago score below 30% in the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination. These students can be classified as "at risk" students who would have to engage in some sort of remediation programme or intervention at the secondary schools in which they are placed. These intervention programmes are crucial since studies have shown that there is a corelation between literacy levels and students' trajectory to success in life. Snow, Burns & Griffin (1998) stated that literacy is a key determinant of academic, social and economic success in life. It is also vital for one to be able to function adequately in today's society. What this means for us as teachers and future reading specialists, is that unless we stem the tide of students who are performing below minimum level, based on current statistics we are increasing the probability of over 700 or 35% of this cohort of students becoming deviants and falling into the hands of the law. According to O'Cummings, Bardack & Gonsoulin (2010), Marquin & Loeber (1996), research has shown that students with low academic achievement are two times more likely to become delinquents than high performing students. They also tend to have a higher absentee rate from school than their high achieving counter parts.

Studies have also shown that a large number of youths who are incarcerated are only marginally literate. The challenge that remains for all educators, is that we need to adopt appropriate strategies and educational policies to make school and learning relevant to the lives of our students. One avenue which can be used to reach our youths is through the use of technology in the classroom. If we can motivate them to stay in school, and can make learning meaningful and relevant to their lives, then we will be making some real progress in reducing the number of students who may fall by the wayside.

E-books

David Grams, a teacher at a junior school in Michigan, USA was selected for participation in a programme called 'Learning Without Limits'. Through this iniative, students were provided with handheld computer devices or PDAs with wireless capabilities to see the impact of its use on the students' motivation to read. Grams discussed with students what e-books they were interested in reading and had them downloaded to the students' handhelds. What Grams experienced during the course of this research was phenomenal. There was a never before seen fervour with which students were reading both inside and outside school.

The students appeared to be completing the books faster than before and were even reading during their 'choice time' and periods in between classes. Grams commented on how pleased he was when he saw how engaged the students were in reading their e-books through their handheld. Previously, Grams was unable to get them to be quiet during library time; now they were all totally engaged in their books. Grams felt that he was witnessing a transition or transformation regarding how students would become motivated to read. He believed that "Today's students are the first generation fully comfortable with technology as a way of life." (Rosalia, 2002) Grams, 2003)

Grams also found that students were much more willing to read their e-books once they felt the material was relevant and meaningful to their lives. Increasingly reseachers and educators are finding e-Books are a great tool to be used both by the struggling reader as well as the strong simce they come with features such as voice over and a dictionary which makes it fun as well as non-threatening to them. The only drawback or barrier to the widespread use of e-books through portable e-books readers is the cost.

The use of technology in the classroom

No one can question the importance of technology in suppporting curriculum and educational goals. In our fast changing world, it is critical for educators to get on board in integrating the use of technology with their curriculum goals. I know of one secondary school in East Trinidad which is successfully using technology for teaching, learning and assessment. The integration of technology in the curriclum has many advantages a few of which are as follow:

• Students are more receptive.
• Teachers can organize classes to cater for differences in learning styles.
• Learning can be self paced.
• The learning environment is less threatening since students can communicate with teachers online.
• There is an improvement in students' attitude towards school and learning.
• There is greater independence in learning.
• There is an improvement in self confidence and self esteem.
• There is an improvement in writing skills.

For students who are challenged in reading and writing skills, there are computer based programmes which will provide the students with drills and practice for as long as the students need since the computer cannot run out of patience. According to Wes Rodgers in Students: Technology in the Classroom "students are able to control their own pace at which they proceed through the exercises, they are neither held back nor left behind by their peers."

A critical factor in integrating technology in the curriculum is technology pedagogy and content knowledge, (TPACK). Too often mistakes are made in lesson planning when teachers begin by selecting the tools and resources rather than the educational goals. Harris and Hoffer (2009) stated if learning goals are first selected and pedagogical decisions made according to "students' instructional and contextual realities" the resources to be used for delivery of the lessons will become obvious.

The idea of using technology in the classroom is certainly not a new one, and the opportunities of how it can be used to support educational goals are endless. In Trinidad and Tobago, we still have far to go in implementing this concept, but the Ministry of Education is certainly on the right track by sending teachers for ICT training. Nevertheless, to ensure that this concept is successfully adapted in every school some serious thought must given to many things chief among which is security for these systems when placed in the nation's schools.

Why I chose to join this programme.

When the notice was published in the daily newspaper for applicants for a Masters in Reading, something clicked within me. I knew that getting through to this course was another thread in my life coming together in terms of specializing in this area in education. My journey started years ago back at Valsayn Teacher's College where my Elective was Early Childhood Education and my thesis was a comparative study on two different approaches to the teaching of reading. As a primary school teacher then, I was placed in the first year infant department and so I had the pleasure of teaching reading to beginners. My journey continued when I transferred to another school and had to teach Remedial Reading to Post Primary students.

With the onset of Universal Secondary Education, I was selected to teach Remedial Reading at a junior secondary school to the cohort of students who scored below 30% in the SEA examination. My experience in the classroom working with adolescents who are struggling in reading made me painfully aware of how little I knew about the process. I was fortunate to be selected for this programme, because even though I am not currently teaching Remedial Reading, I am still teaching remedial students. In fact, the school that I am working in gets more than its fair share of students who have reading problems. Most of the teachers are frustrated. Many have resigned themselves to delivering the curriculum to whoever is ready and willing to learn. As a teacher, my personal philosophy has been ' unless you have learnt, I did not teach'. Being on this programme has opened my eyes, so daily, I am seeing what I have being wrong and is making attempts to change so I can reach the students that I have beem given.