All Posts Tagged With: "technology in the classroom"
Analysts: 90,000 have downloaded iBooks Author since Thursday
Apple plans higher education revolution
Screenshot of iBooks Author from Apple
Steve Jobs’ plans to take on the textbook market appear to be working. In the three days after the Thursday launch of Apple iBooks Author software for iPads, more than 90,000 users downloaded it.
On top of that, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from its new textbook category in iBooks, which started selling textbooks from major publishers priced at $14.99 or less.
Apple hasn’t revealed any official numbers yet, so Mashable warns that the figures, from Global Equities Research, are unconfirmed.
Still, the iBooks Author software represents the biggest opportunity for a shakeup in the textbook market long dominated by expensive publishers.
Continue reading Analysts: 90,000 have downloaded iBooks Author since Thursday
Don’t give students more tools of mass distraction
Hand-held device will soon become part of classrooms across the country
The role of technology in the classroom has no doubt been a contentious issue since the first Roman student brought an abacus to his grammaticus. Using the most up-to-date equipment in school has always seemed to be a necessity. And yet the process of learning hasn’t really changed that much since ancient times: teachers still need to teach and students still need to pay attention.
Last week Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty sparked a national debate on the role of technology in Canadian classrooms. Asked about a proposal to relax a ban on cellphones in the classrooms of Toronto-area high schools, the premier seemed rather agreeable to the idea. “Telephones, BlackBerries and the like are conduits for information and one of the things we want our students to be is well informed,” he said. “It’s something we should be looking at in our schools.”
McGuinty has a point. It seems inevitable that some sort of hand-held wireless device will eventually become part of education systems across the country. The cost and complication of traditional textbooks makes electronic delivery of course material straight into the hands of students a rather attractive proposition. For this reason alone, electronic tablets or smartphones such as the BlackBerry likely have a place in the classroom of the future. The prospect of linking students together via communication technology also holds great educational promise.
At the same time, we can’t ignore the enormous and obvious downsides of such technological intrusions. Cellphones may be conduits for information, but they’re also tools of mass distraction. Texting, tweeting, surfing and updating your online profile have nothing to do with learning and no place in the classroom. Yet it’s even become commonplace for parents to text their children during school hours. What are they thinking?
Any effort to make cellphones part of the official school day must solve the problem of their non-educational use, either by setting strict rules of acceptable conduct or blocking access when it’s not appropriate. And we should recognize that there’s a big difference between integrating wireless devices into the curriculum and simply inviting students to bring whatever diverting gadgets they might possess to class. The fact not every student owns a smartphone must also be addressed. Regardless of what the future holds, it’s far too soon to be advocating widespread use of cellphones in the classroom.
It’s also the case that the value of technology to learning is frequently oversold by eager advocates. A long series of educational revolutions via technology has been promised throughout the years: from television to video to desktop computers to laptops to SMART Boards to cellphones. Despite claims that these innovations will change the educational experience for the better, there’s no evidence technology actually leads to higher marks for students.
The ubiquitous presence of wireless laptops on university campuses in many ways anticipates the presence of cellphones in public schools. A study from 2008 in the academic journal Computers & Education looked at how these laptops have affected classroom behaviour. “Results showed that students who used laptops in class spent considerable time multitasking and that laptop use posed a significant distraction to both users and fellow students,” the research observes. “Most importantly, the level of laptop use was negatively related to several measures of student learning.” Students with laptops had lower test results than those without. The reason? They were often not paying attention to their teacher. We should expect the same thing from cellphones.
Similarly, a 2009 study looked at students who sent instant messages during class. Texting students took longer to perform simple tasks such as reading a written passage than those who did not. Consider it another blow to the alleged benefits of multitasking. An investigation into PowerPoint lectures found students enjoyed them more than traditional presentations, although this did nothing to raise test scores. Clickers, small hand-held wireless devices used for in-class quizzes that are popular with students and teachers, similarly have no discernable impact on marks.
Technology may lower school costs, make marking more efficient and even raise student satisfaction. But it can’t produce students with better grades. And this means technology will never replace the timeless need for skilled teachers capable of catching the attention of easily distracted students and engaging their minds. The smartest phones may be the ones we keep outside the classroom.
From the editors
Apple America
Why Canada’s learning technology experts say tech handouts are lackluster
When they enter university, freshman are often told that with all the social and educational opportunities before them, the world is at their fingertips. But, while online educational resources have given new understanding to that phrase, just within the past year it takes on an even more literal meaning.
At Seton Hill, a Catholic liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, the new catchphrase is “An iPad for everyone.” On March 30, the school made headlines as the first in North America to announce it would put the latest Apple touch technology in the hands of its new recruits—at no cost to them. “The iPad will lighten the backpacks of Seton Hill University students,” said president JoAnne Boyle in a release from the school. The school hopes Apple’s iBook application will allow students to ditch the heavy textbooks they lug around, and even make carrying a pen and paper unnecessary.
The initiative is part of the Griffin (the school’s mascot) Technology Advantage the school promotes to entice students. Not only will freshman receive an iPad for the first time this fall, but the school is also handing out brand new 13” Macbooks as part of the all-encompassing technology program, which upper-year students can opt in to for $500 a semester.
And while Seton Hill is the first American institution to announce it would gift iPads this fall, it isn’t the first American institution to offer Apple handouts to new students. In 2008, Abilene Christian University, in Abilene Texas, began offering iPhones or iPod Touch devices to its incoming freshman, citing at the time students’ ability to use them for “homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances.”
George Fox University in Oregon also announced it will give first-year students the choice of scoring a new iPad instead of the MacBook the school normally gives out. The price is offset in tuition, but students get to keep their new device when they graduate.
Though it may just be the latest incentive to drive recruitment at some U.S. schools, Canadian students may be feeling left in the digital dark age. With the buzz created over the possibilities of the iPad in academia, the question is whether it will prove to be a valuable education tool. And is the attention the new device is getting south of the border a sign Canadian schools are falling behind in learning technology innovation?
The answer, simply, is ‘No,’ said Ken Coates, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Waterloo. Coates recently chaired the learning stream of the Canada 3.0 conference on digital media, held in Stratford, Ont.—the birthing grounds of Waterloo’s newest satellite campus designed to house niche programs in digital media and global business. He said even though the traditional approach to education is still a recent memory in the minds of most Canadians, the country isn’t lagging in a race towards digital academic innovation.
“I think we’re pretty much on the curb with other countries,” Coates said. “It’s a hundred yard race, and now we have one foot out of the starting block.” Coates said while there is no doubt students would be happy with the latest Apple technology, the nature of the Canadian university system functions much differently than the for-profit attitudes of some American schools. In fact, he said, the idea of handing out the latest in technology is not a new concept, even to Canadians.
At Acadia University in Nova Scotia, the technology advantage program saw the incorporated use of notebook computers loaned out by the school as part a blended learning approach more than a decade ago.
But, Coates said, the focus for Canada and the 3.0 conference was to take the thousands of projects happening in the country today and collaborate on how to move forward to meet student demands for digital, accessible and virtual learning. “Our country needs to make a huge move into this space if we’re going to be competitive in the 21st century,” he said. But, he said in the process of giving students the learning opportunities they want, the real concern becomes: “Can we ensure that the learning occurs with the level and with the intensity that we expect?”
While university is supposed to encompass a certain aspect of experimentation, the real purpose of higher learning is to be intellectually challenging, Coates said. “Technology lets you do that, but the idea of post-secondary education is that you don’t just turn students over, but you guide them.” And while the iPad is nice piece of hardware, Coates said what’s important to remember when moving learning-specific technology forward is that every program and course can’t be fulfilled by one blanket solution. What might work for teaching an English class won’t suffice for a chemistry lab, Coates said.
The SketchBook Pro app on the iPad may be an advantage for design and arts students, but for chemistry students, beyond displaying the periodic table and other reference matierials, it isn’t an asset for lab work.
Program-specific tech may be the way forward for Canada’s innovators, but Blackboard Inc. mobile developer Aaron Wasserman said offering students the flexibility of having learning materials wherever they are is a growing expectation of today’s student, American or Canadian. “It’s very natural that they would expect to be able to get academic information . . . on-the-go,” Wasserman said. “That is a commonality.”
Still a student at Stanford University, Wasserman developed an iPhone application called iStanford, which provided his peers with at-hand course material, as well as content on school life, such as transit schedules and the latest in campus news. When Blackboard, who specializes in learning management systems in North America acquired Wasserman’s design and expertise, they turned the iStanford model into Mobile Central, so the technology could be retrofitted to schools who sought the system for their students.
But Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, said while handout technology and mobile apps are impressive, most don’t serve to improve student learning. “They seemed to be geared towards recruitment and student life as opposed to enhancing learning and education,” Lamb said. “They’re shiny and they’re fun to use . . . but I do worry a little bit that we might be reinforcing a new kind of Internet,” Lamb said.
He said in a way, incorporating and investing closed-content devices like the iPad into higher education would not only be a waste of public resources, but would take a step back from open education and nationwide collaboration the federal government promoted and funded in the early 2000s. “When I entered this field in 2002, there really was something like national strategy happening in online learning,” Lamb said. “It would be nice to see something like that again.”
Lamb said these collaborations lost momentum with the Paul Martin administration. After his term in office, in 2006 and 2007, Industry Canada released two strategies—Advantage Canada and Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage—to enhance science and technology infrastructure and innovation and included a focus on advancing learning in universities.
Industry Minister Tony Clement was a keynote speaker at the Canada 3.0 conference. In his address he announced the country’s newest Digitial Economy strategy, which puts an emphasis on digital technologies. “I don’t need to remind this audience how important these new tools can be—to propelling our economic growth and enhancing our quality of life,” Clement said during his speech at the conference. “Already, these technologies are transforming the way we communicate, run our businesses, conduct commerce. They’re revolutionizing how medical professionals keep us healthy, how research is done and how students learn.”
As far as the gap in technology between Canada and the U.S., Lamb said from his experience at conferences in emerging technology, Canadian institutions usually have a strong innovative presence. “I think Canada stacks up reasonably well,” he said. In some ways, thanks to the smaller number of institutions, Lamb said Canada has greater possibilities to collaborate on best practices in learning technology and learn from one another, an advantage the U.S. doesn’t have. “We can actually know who all each other are,” Lamb said. “And that’s impossible in the United States.”
Networking U
How IT is helping educators engage students in new ways
She wanted to engage the “we generation” in a new way. In 2007, Jean Adams, a professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, took two classes of almost 400 first-year business management students, divided them into groups and handed tablet PCs to those who didn’t have their own notebook computers. (That was made possible by a Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching grant that Adams won that year.) The students’ challenge: to work together in real time, through screen-sharing on their laptops, and create storyboards to solve the viciously difficult business cases Adams had presented to them. She then put their work on a projection screen in front of the class, where she could comment on and pull ideas from it—making the classroom experience more immediately gratifying and highly visual. “This ability to get what’s in their heads in a very practical way—it’s just really quite amazing,” Adams says.
Once upon a time—before laptops, cellphones and iPods—a professor’s only competition for attention in the classroom was her students’ wandering imagination. But at today’s leading institutions, the digital classroom is no longer a novelty. These days, high school graduates, armed with shorter attention spans but greater expectations that their teachers go beyond “chalk and talk,” pose a real challenge to educators. How to inspire students to conduct their own research or engage with course materials, when the traditional lecture no longer measures up to the eye candy and possibilities of new media?
The good news is, universities over the past decade have been adapting to meet students at the level of technology they’ve come to accept. That means not only deploying state-of-the-art hardware and software, but also embracing the concepts of social networking and virtual communities. “Learning is a social activity,” says Adams, who is now in the third year of her learning and technology project. “I’m trying to use the technology to make the face-to-face contact even richer.” There’s also the challenge of teaching students themselves how to use these new technologies productively—learning the ropes in university, Adams says, puts her students at a huge advantage.
Piggybacking on the popularity of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, educators see new opportunities to engage students in their studies. It’s now common for institutions to use an online learning management system, such as Blackboard or Moodle—“the academic Facebook,” as Adams’s students call it—in order to organize and distribute lecture notes, assignments and quizzes.
At the University of British Columbia, the Learning Enhancement Academic Partnership program—or LEAP—builds on the idea of multi-platform learning. It’s a portal for tools and resources that’s been online since 2005. Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at UBC, says that weblogs and wikis aren’t new phenomena at UBC—in fact, the university pioneered the use of these learning tools in Canada. LEAP takes online resources even further by giving students and those managing the site the ability to aggregate their own content. On LEAP, students blog about campus life and academics; there are also helpful links and tips on various tech topics, such as how to find and use academic podcasts, or where to find and download flash card software for studying. (The portal also lets students share the tools with friends via Twitter.) “Getting students to manage their own learning experience is extremely important,” says Michelle Lamberson, director of the Office of Learning and Technology at UBC.
Calgary students might soon use iPods in the classroom
Tech tools range from periodic tables and calculators to audio books and news feeds
Calgary students told to turn off their iPods might soon have an excuse to keep the small gadgets glowing – they can say they’re just doing homework.
The Calgary Board of Education is starting a series of pilot projects that could see many types of technology such as iPods, video conferencing and green screens incorporated into classrooms and school libraries.
Most students have grown up used to having digital tools on hand at all times, says Erin Hansen, project lead for the new initiative. Teachers may be able to make learning more personal for students by helping incorporate these familiar gadgets.
“How deeply are students using these tools? Are they just using them to text message and to telephone, et cetera? What deeper purposes can we use them for?”
Hansen is currently trying out some of the tools in the board’s resource library for teachers ahead of a classroom rollout that could begin within a few months.
For example, she’s found a vast variety of educational applications for iPods. While they’re not included in classrooms just yet, possible tools range from portable periodic tables, astronomy charts and graphing calculators to downloadable audio books and news feeds.
Videoconferencing could link classrooms to museums far beyond the reach of a school bus, and green screens could let students put themselves anywhere, doing anything.
Students in Calgary seemed enthusiastic about seeing more technology in their classrooms, but were cautious about whether the gadgets they use for fun could also be educational.
“All teens use technology, but whether or not they learn better, I think it’s on more of a personal basis,” said Derek Vogt, 17. “It definitely can aid, it’s more of a tool or a resource rather than something that creates the final product itself.”
Fifteen-year-old Corrine Tansowny laughed that currently, teachers usually ask students to turn off their iPods in class.
She said while educational applications might be great, an increase in certain types of technology can also present challenges.
“People can put stuff on their iPods and cheat,” she said. “I know that you can put SparkNotes and get the notes off the Internet for a book you’re reading in (English), or whatever.”
