by Neil Anderson
Just over four years ago in QUICK, I described a program which engaged a 12 year old girl with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities in higher order computer tasks (Anderson, 1995a). The rationale behind the program was that the student, Belinda needed to improve her communication skills, her self image and her social skills in order to be effectively 'included' in the regular primary school setting. Studies by Means and Knapp (1991), Gerber (1994) and Sutton (1991) provided the influence to reject simple drill and practice software in favour of alternatives that would provide higher level cognitive challenges. Traditionally, disadvantaged groups have often been overexposed to simple, remedial style 'drill and kill' activities at the expense of more thought provoking and creative avenues for learning. Belinda worked on the program intensively during the first year and continued to peer tutor other students during the following two years.
At the completion of the program results were gathered and published elsewhere (Anderson, 1995b,c, 1996, 1998a) but could be summarised as including increases in spoken and written communication skills, improvement in social skills, computer skills and some self concept areas. A scale of general computer skills was administered individually to the 29 regular class peers and the participant as a post-test measure. Belinda's score of 78.26% was 2.8 standard deviations above the grade norm. This supported the original proposition that she could achieve higher levels than the norm in an area requiring higher order thinking skills. Unfortunately no formal testing was undertaken to prove the perceived increase in other dimensions, although they were strongly supported by observation from teachers, parents and independent research teams (Bigum & Lankshear, 1998).
Due to the success of the program and the fact the students with learning or intellectual disabilities displayed some similar problems to Belinda, the program was continued with a larger group as part of a PhD research program. The group chosen included all the students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities enrolled in Year Five or Six at three different schools. This meant that students selected were not just those with a particular interest in technology and it ensured a wider range of socio-economic status. Intervention steps were developed, measurement tools and strategies selected and participants chosen. Full details of these aspects are available at the 'Literacy Web Australia' site (Anderson, 1988a).
An examination of the pilot study was undertaken to determine critical aspects that led to success with Belinda and these were thought to be:
a) The use of software that provides a cognitive challenge as well as being interesting with a potential for 'fun'.
b) Peer tutoring. After the students master aspects of the software they reinforce this learning by teaching others. This also leads to extra spoken dialogue between the student and other members of the class as may lead to other class members viewing the students as being 'experts' in the computer area. Peer turoring lessons are provided as part of the intervention.
c) Feedback needs to be given constantly to the students about their progress.
d) Students need to be able to actively experiment with the tools inherent in the software.
In the initial pilot program, Microsoft Publisher was chosen as the software to provide the necessary challenges, although after a certain amount of time it became obvious the new challenges were necessary for the new group to undertake. SCALA MM200 was chosen as an excellent piece of software to further advance the progress of the group and it had the potential to allow transfer and extension of skills gained by using Publisher. It is the recent use of SCALA in the program that I'd like to focus the rest of this article on.
SCALA is a multimedia-authoring package that can be used to produce standalone multimedia shows or can be used as an effective presentation tool. Students through using Publisher had familiarised themselves with concepts such as importing graphics and changing font sizes and styles. SCALA allows this manipulation to a greater degree and extends the students by allowing the importation of animated gifs and captured video. In order to facilitate the inclusion of video, the school invested in a high quality SVHS camera and a video capture card.
The same instructional strategies employed with Publisher were used with SCALA. The intervention group was introduced to the software before regular class members and after mastering functions of the software they reinforced their skills by tutoring others. Each student chose a topic of interest and then typed sentences relevant to the subject while being instructed in text manipulation via SCALA's different user interface. Later came graphic importation, animated gif importation and video importation and transition effects between pages. During the previous work with Publisher I noticed that the students responded positively to tools that created special or unusual effects such as 'word art'. SCALA offered spectacular transitions between pages and interesting uses of animated gifs and movies in different formats. Discussion of design aspects has been a focal point of the intervention and SCALA offered a chance to look at design in relation to a 'moving' as opposed to a 'static' production and therefore offered more opportunities to cognitively extend the group. Exposure to a different type of user interface proved to be an interesting challenge for the students and provided a good lesson in the diversity of computer tools. Programming could be introduced through editing of scripts but it was decided that the students would not be able to cope with this level of computing until later in their development. If they later reach a stage where this is possible, the functions are available in the program.
Using SCALA has given me the added bonus of being able to effectively present details of the program at conferences such as the recent, 'Australian Computers in Education Conference' and the 'Queensland Parents and Citizens Regional Conference' in a way that looks different and more appealing than other presentation tools. When the students are finished their presentation it will be able to be shown on parade or at parent nights thus demonstrating to the students that their work is valued by the whole school community.
My constructivist leanings dictated that the group did not learn skills associated with Publisher or SCALA in isolation, so each activity centred on an area of interest to the student or involved a relevant task. With Publisher the students started with something of interest such as an incident at school or home and created a page to illustrate the event. This was extended to the student choosing a general topic of interest, such as 'Motorcycles' and producing a major document on this topic. With Scala, the students created some pages to extend their previous topic and then moved on to creating a class presentation. In the presentation students wrote about themselves and included a digital photo. Later, video clips of individual students and the class will be included. This presentation is now partially complete and will be used as a permanent record at school and will be sent home to parents who have the appropriate technology at home (a Win95 or 98 computer with CD-ROM). Presentations such as this can be saved as standalone .exe files and run on another computer that does not have SCALA installed. To facilitate this process we have purchased a CD-burner and the presentations will be copied onto CDs in order to be sent home for parent use without having to worry about copyright issues.
Students from the different schools come to Monkland State School each Monday afternoon for extra tuition sessions with the software and to learn the peer tutoring steps. I often set aside Tuesday afternoons to visit the students at their own school and to stay in touch with their classroom teachers and special needs support teachers. I managed to do this by amalgamating my specialist music, P.E. and LOTE lessons into blocks so that I could use my 'non-contact' time to pursue the program. Now that my work with this group is drawing to a close (after two years), I am beginning to review results of formal tests, interviews, school records, videos and audio tapes to determine changes in the student's academic scores, communication skills and social skills. These results will be rigorously examined in the final data analysis section of the Ph.D. document but at this stage it is obvious that many positive changes have occurred especially in the area of verbal communication and computer skills.
References
Anderson, N. (1995a). No, Belinda set everything up ... QUICK - Journal of the Queensland Society for Information Technology in Education, 54, 8-12.
http://www.schools.ash.org.au/litweb/page202.html
Anderson, N. (1995b). Inclusive education: Using technology to provide higher cognitive challenges. Australian Disability Review, 2, 32-39.
Anderson, N. (1995c). Beyond drill and practice: higher order thinking skills through technology. Proceedings of Second Australian Conference on Technology for People with Disabilities. Adelaide, 167-170.
Anderson, N. (1996). When Technology and Equity Become Partners. Wide Bay Regional SPSS Project.
http://www.schools.ash.org.au/litweb/page204.html
Anderson, N. (1998a). Small Steps to Success with Computers. Education Review - Journal of the Australian Council of Education, July, 14
http://www.schools.ash.org.au/litweb/steps.html
Anderson, N. (1998b). Literacy Web Australia. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Illinios, in press.
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/facstaff/chip/jaal/JAAL5-Feb/5web
Bigum, C., & Lankshear, C. (1998). Digital Rhetorics: Literacies and Technologies in Education - Current Practices and Future Directions. Vol. 2 DEETYA Federal Government Report, Australia.
Gerber, B. (1994). Beyond drill and practice: Using the computer for creative decisionmaking. Preventing School Failure, 38, (2), 25-30.
Means, B., & Knapp, M. (1991). Cognitive approaches to teaching advanced skills to educationally disadvantaged students. Phi Delta Kappan, December, 282-288.
Sutton, R. (1991). Equity and computers in the schools: A decade of research. Review of Educational Research, 61, (4), p. 475-503.
A preview of the U.S. journal edition with the Literacy Web Australia review can be found at http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/facstaff/chip/jaal/JAAL5-Feb/index.html