Spring 2005

Online teaching & learning

Changing landscapes

As CHERYL DOIG demonstrates, information and communication technologies (ICT) have new roles to play in an era in which students and teachers share responsibility for learning.

Pervasive and powerful, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has the power to enhance learning in new ways. Students of today are often referred to as ‘digital natives’. They have grown up with ICT and cannot imagine a world without them. Their digital world is increasingly mobile and the boundaries between home, school and other aspects of their lives are blurred. Schools need to keep up with this changing landscape and meet the needs of these students and their increasingly complex lives. This is not just a matter of having more ICT tools available, for as McCain and Jukes (2001) tell us ‘the issue is not just a hardware issue. More and more, it is a headware issue’.

I would like to take you into two schools, to show you the possibilities for children to be involved in the assessment of their own learning and for parents to be able to contribute to the conversation. In both examples staff are trying to push assessment in new directions, using ICT as a powerful tool to do so.

The first example comes from a class of year 6 students at Fendalton Open-air School. These ten year olds log in to share their ideas with each other using a collaborative program called First Class.

One group is logging into their story writing rubric, identifying which element of their personal narratives they need to work on. One of the boys discusses his next steps with a partner, highlighting his own thoughts about where he is and creating a key showing who else he will gain feedback from. Their conversation indicates that the children know exactly where they are at and how to improve next.

At another table a student is rereading his learning goal.

My goal is to work with other people more effectively by staying on topic whatever the topic is without talking too much about something else.
I will know I have done this by asking others like people who are around me or ask Mr Clarke once a week or once or twice a day. I can also do a PIMS (Plus, Interesting, Minus and Solutions strategy) on this goal once a fortnight. I will do this by the end of term 2.

The teacher, Rob Clarke, has already completed skills teaching in the area of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed).

SMART goals, providing resources for children to refer back to, and modelling the setting of goals to the class. The student clicks on to Rob’s feedback and discovers that there are some ways he can improve his goals—breaking it into smaller chunks, maybe making it less ambitious. The student listens to Rob (via ‘First Class’) giving practical ideas for revising the goal, then arranges a meeting to discuss this further once revisions are completed. The power for this student is that he can refer to his work at any time (reading it and listening to it), share it at home or with classmates and continually add to his learning.

Yet another student has published her poem online and recorded it, focusing on using expression as her goal:

The Mall
Buying, looking, running
People scurrying about like ants on an ant farm.
People with happy faces that makes the day alive and some with faces that turn the day grey.
Teenagers texting and hanging out with their friends.
Elderly looking at the jewellery shop at diamond rings that are the most expensive in town!
Mothers finding stuff for their children.
Fathers trying to find something romantic for their wives
And children bubbling with excitement because they are going to McDonalds!
The mall is the Village of today.

The use of ICT to record oral language provides the student with direct feedback and enables them to share with others immediately. As the records accumulate during the year there is clear evidence of growth and the process is just as explicit as the product.

Across town Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti (UPT) secondary staff and students are also using ICT to track their learning—using Inquire, a program developed by teacher Andrew Robertson. After completing an Individual Education Plan (IEP) three-way conference (directed by the student), each student meets with their learning adviser (teacher) to finalise their course of study for the next five weeks, generating goals into student records. These goals are selected from the curriculum, from IEP goals and those generated by each student’s individual inquiry.

Staff is allocated half an hour per student per week to meet with each student in their home base. Inquire provides a record of conversation and gives learning advisers prompts for discussion. Each student is different. For one a record of learning is directly taped into the program—what went well, what were the challenges, how I dealt with the challenges, what differences would I make next time, what will I focus on as a result of my learning? Another student may be typing an individual reflection. A third student may be working on a video record of work completed for their year 12 English program, while another scans work as evidence of learning. Assessment can be tailored to the individual and the use of ICT allows this to occur in an organic and meaningful way.

Every staff member at UPT has a digital camera to capture evidence of learning. The school of 200 has 40 laptops and 30 desktop computers, and over 80 students have leased or bought laptops for themselves. Of course this makes the use of ICT a vital and transparent tool for learning across all curriculum areas and learning contexts. It allows for sharing between home base and specialist staff; and for liberating discussions and debates to be kept in a way that was impossible as a paper-based system.

In both cases the ‘so what’ is that ICT have the power to provide evidence of learning in new and powerful ways, creating a strong record of learning that can be shared. It can be used to reflect on learning—self-critical reflection, feedback and feedforward, and providing outcomes based on goals. The assessment informs the student’s next stage of learning. Learning is authentic and contexts are real rather than contrived for the sake of assessment. The work being undertaken is being reviewed constantly. Initial indications from parents suggest that the feedback is useful and provides them with much more information than traditional forms of reporting. Students are finding the assessment meaningful and they love to revisit the work they have done. Assessment supports the innovative ways in which the schools are trying to deliver the curriculum but does not drive the learning—student needs do.

Future considerations

When setting up an environment that uses ICT as part of the learning, important considerations will need to be made.

• Make sure the systems are safe from external sources and that internal processes are robust.
• As schools explore new ways of using ICT for learning there will be a greater demand for the use of video and audio information to be stored. Accessibility via the web needs to be fast and cheap for schools to make maximum use of new technologies.
• Keep the focus on powerful learning and using ICT as a tool for enabling this to happen rather than as an end in itself.
• Develop assessment ideas from a learning and teaching perspective. The ideas need to come from educators, not programmers.
• Staff training needs to be ongoing.
• Time and support for these forms of assessment need to start right from the culture of the school.
• The way of starting new forms of assessment needs to be planned for success. Will it be one staff member who tries things out? How will the students be involved in the process? Will there be school-wide requirements?

Conclusion

Why would anyone bother to undertake this form of assessment? Having the students more involved in their own learning is certainly not a soft option. It is a time-consuming, demanding process and students have to be taught the skills of self-assessment and must be able to use ICT well. The difference that ICT can make in the program is by providing powerful new ways of recording information, being able to add to work continuously and the ability to share learning at home. However, the staff knows that the assessment work being undertaken is only as good as the learning and teaching in their schools. The ‘headware’ and the ‘heartware’ have to be right before the ‘hardware’ can be transformational.

References

McCain, T & Jukes, I (2001). Windows on the Future: Education in the Age of Technology, Corwin Press, California.

First Class information can be gained from www.centrinity.com

Cheryl Doig is principal of Fendalton School in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au