I have just returned from the Australian Computers in Education Conference in Adelaide, weary and jet lagged but inspired and full of reflection on current issues facing teachers on sensible classroom implementation of technology. I was very fortunate to have my trip sponsored by QSITE after receiving the QSITE Educator of the Year and a national award for research. Membership of state organisations such as QSITE provide an effective way for teachers to share ideas online, at meetings, state and national conferences and through their various journal publications. This year’s ACEC conference was superbly organised and featured an amazing venue and an array of shared experiences from Australia and around the world. Teachers looking to expand their technology horizons or to share their ideas would be wise to the next ACEC in Melbourne.

I hold a common view that merely placing computers in classrooms will have little affect on student outcomes. A recurring theme at the conference was the shift of focus from the ‘technology’ to the ‘pedagogy’. Educators are now more concerned with the learning process and how we can design more effective delivery strategies so that we can help students to engage in meaningful, authentic activities that make use of today’s tools. These tools should not be used in the classroom to merely replace existing tools. Word processors can replace the pencil or biro, paint programs can replace the drawing pad and crayon and drill and practice booklets can be replaced by on screen versions. In doing this we’re merely taking a small step sideways and ignoring the true potential of emerging technologies.

I’ve been involved in many projects involving technology over the twenty years that I have been teaching in a primary school classroom and most of these have started with very small, modest steps and have grown with the help of others. Each of these three examples have led to profound changes in the way that I go about the business of teaching.

a) Inclusion - Can Teachers and Technology Meet the Challenge? My research project investigating how a computer based intervention increases higher order thinking skills and communication skills of children with disabilities.

b) Development of ‘Literacy Web Australia’ to assist educators with professional development and sharing of case studies.

c) A series of thematic units boosted by technology to provide authentic tasks for students to engage in the total curriculum.

Inclusion Program

Six years ago our school volunteered to be a pilot for a program in our district to ‘include’ children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. This caused some concern to all the teaching staff as we were worried about not having ‘special education’ training and other issues. One of these children, Amanda, a ten year old child with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities entered my classroom. Her obvious problems were a fear of text and reading and lack of communication skills with her peers as well as being behind in all areas of the curriculum.

I saw her interest in technology as an avenue to assist her to improve academic and social skills and to raise her status in the classroom. My strategy was to teach Amanda desktop publishing skills before the rest of the class and then have her engage in peer tutoring, so that she could share her expertise and gain experience in communication. I choose desktop publishing software as it offered opportunities for higher level cognitive tasks such as considering design issues and reflecting on how to use the various tools effectively.

Using computer technology was like giving Amanda a clean slate to work with in a positive way. She had already developed negative perceptions of traditional print material and would not cooperate in trying to produce handwritten materials. Desktop publishing offered the tools to easily use graphics and text effects to communicate ideas in different ways to pencil and pad work. The end result was a complete turn around in Amanda’s work and the way that the rest of the class perceived her. She became accepted as a genuine expert in this area and children would independently seek out her assistance. More details of the history of the initial program appear elsewhere (Anderson, 1995a,b,c).

After working with other students it became apparent that Amanda’s problems were common with the newly included group and that there might be value in developing the steps used with Amanda into a more formalised, improved intervention. This idea became the basis of my current PhD research that involves developing intervention steps and engaging children with intellectual disabilities in different schools in the process and carefully measuring the results with both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Improving the intervention steps meant studying learning theory, self-concept literature, peer tutoring research and computers in education studies for eighteen months and then reflecting on ways of applying it. Full details of the PhD study can be found on the Literacy Web Australia site.

Teachers often devalue research and claim that research is too theoretical and not related to the practical business of teaching. Let me give an example of how it has assisted me in a practical way. With the pilot intervention the peer tutoring training given to Amanda was very haphazard and often not very helpful. After studying the research literature I found two studies where very effective steps had been developed after years of painstaking work. I melded and modified the steps of both programs to devise steps best suited to the particular students that I would be working with. The accompanying research literature enabled me to fully understand the importance of the various steps in the process and I was convinced by the evidence presented that a formal peer tutoring training program could make the whole process more beneficial to the students. I can’t think of anything more practical than saving myself a lot of work developing steps from scratch and I’m confident that it has led to more successful student outcomes. Learning theory and research are crucial to successful use of computers in classrooms.

Literacy Web Australia

Computers in schools and classrooms can be used effectively as a means to share successful examples of practice and helpful literature. The project that I have been working on in this area is called Literacy Web Australia. This Internet site was created with the express purpose of providing teachers and researchers in the literacy field with practical case studies of teachers implementing the latest ideas and pedagogies in literacy education - many of whom also use technology to enhance their work. The use of new technologies in classrooms is a ‘secondary’ theme of this web site. Many of these teachers are also concerned with equity issues and how these factors impact on outcomes for students - this provides another important secondary theme for the Literacy Web Australia site. Australia has a long history of schemes to assist students who are disadvantage in schools and initial funding for Literacy Web Australia came from one of these schemes. More details on Australian equity schemes can be found on the web site.

The web site comprises three distinct sections: (1) the cases, (2) a set of hyperlinks to relevant sites, and (3) a ‘library’ of recent written articles by literacy researchers. This third section includes recent, often yet-to-be-published articles by leading Australian and international researchers in literacy and technology fields. Accordingly, users of Literacy Web Australia will be able to access papers that discuss or develop new theoretical and pedagogical trends in the literacy and technology education arenas, often before these ideas appear anywhere else.

Case Studies

The case study section will expand rapidly over the coming months but already includes sections on improving communication skills of children with disabilities through the use of technology, creating a multimedia history of a school, using peer mentoring to improve reading, using the latest technology to improve the literacy outcomes of infant students and looks at the types of language used by teachers to effectively teach the new digital literacy skills.

Literacy Links

This section includes hyperlinks to library search engines and other Australian and international literacy internet sites.

Articles

My feature article by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel is the keynote address of the last Australian Literacy Educator’s Conference and examines the ‘clamour to integrate computer-based technologies into curriculum generally, and language and literacy education specifically’ by discussing four ‘snapshots’ of technology practice from different research sites. Allan Luke, in his article, discusses the current preoccupation with method in recent literacy research debates and offers new perspectives on developing relevant literacy skills in classroom contexts. James Paul Gee’s article examines the ‘social turn’ in literacy studies away from a theoretical and pedagogical focus on the individual towards sociocultural conceptions of literacy and how this relates to the ‘New Capitalism’. Colin Lankshear’s new article sketches an interpretive and evaluative framework for examining literacy policy agendas and Jay Lemke’s article provides a comprehensive examination of ‘metamedia literacy’. This article section will be expanding constantly to include the work of more leading Australian and international researchers.

URL

The site is stored on an Australian server at <http://www.schools.ash.org.au/litweb>

or can be accessed from an American server at <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/3605>.

Themes

Perhaps the easiest way to integrate technology in a meaningful with the curriculum in the primary school is through the use of themes. During the year I cover the themes of the sea, inventions, music and ‘digging up the past’. In each theme I try to weave technology into the total unit in a seamless way rather than having a ‘technology section’. Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (1997, p.6) observed and described a section of the inventions theme in my classroom, "Sallie, Kate, and Emma were sitting at one computer working on their animated movie. They were using Microsoft’s 3D Movie Maker software to produce a movie featuring an invention - in this case, a jet-propelled device for personal aerial transport. As they worked on each scene, they consulted their script overview and discussed character selection, placement, actions and speech, background music and sound effects.

Meanwhile, a group of four students sat at another computer, engrossed in a software program challenging them to construct on-screen a 'working' apparatus that enabled a ball to travel from point A to point B. They discussed possibilities, tested out their ideas, and cheered when they added a successful component to their design.

Mark, Brendan, and Liam sat at the computer with the Internet connection, using a search engine to locate invention-related sites. This was their first experience of the Internet, and Neil had provided a task sheet requiring them to fill in particular information about the web page (e.g., its location or URL, the invention showcased, etc.). The group located a comprehensive and well designed Japanese web site presenting a range of wacky inventions, including dusters for a cat's feet so that the cat can clean your home while you're at work, a hat that incorporates a roll of toilet paper for dispensing 'tissues' to people with severe colds, and the like. While reading and laughing their way through the text they commented on some of the syntax used, and discussed with Neil whether or not the writer spoke English as a second language.

During a second round of activities, a group of students was at the computer with the desktop publishing software. They were learning how to create text boxes, and insert text, graphics, and borders, in order to make posters advertising their movies, and personal invitations to attend the premiere. (As with the scripts and character development for their movies, the ideas and content for the posters and invitations had been discussed and mapped out during previous writing and discussion segments of the rotations. This conceptual work was done with assistance from structured activities provided by Neil - worksheets and question prompts - pertaining to language features of the genres involved. Many activities involved in the unit of work required students to reflect on their work by describing the processes they used to solve a difficulty encountered in, say, using 3-D Movie Maker, or to evaluate the pluses, minuses, and interesting aspects of a piece of software.) The trio were being introduced to the desktop features by a gentle and unassuming Year 7 student, Amanda. Amanda patiently demonstrated how to perform needed functions, drawing on the students existing knowledge of computing functions. Then one student sat at the computer, mastering the routines while aiming for the textual effects desired - with suggestions from the others on choice of fonts, borders, etc., and technical responses from Amanda when requested.

Meanwhile, other groups of students were variously engaged in searching through newspapers for reports on inventions which they would then use to analyse the structure of the genre, practising for their upcoming oral presentation of their report on an invention or inventor, reading aloud to a teacher's aide, or working on independent projects (e.g., constructing an invention from found objects that will water both the plants and the gardener during hot afternoons). Neil circulated among the groups, monitoring their progress and providing advice or feedback when asked."

Conclusion

One presenter at the ACEC conference expanded on a theme that teachers not using technology in their curriculum delivery should start with small steps and build from there. This has been the case with my projects, Literacy Web Australia started with an idea to allow two schools to share information, my PhD research started with attempts to assist one student to fit into the classroom. I started with theme work because it was familiar territory and no major modifications were needed initially to introduce technology. When these small steps are made, they should be forward towards meaningful use of technology in the classroom in order to develop modern communities of learners and not to merely follow a commercial software package or to teach a ‘computer skill’ that has no direct relationship to the current classroom work.

References

Anderson, N. (1995a). Inclusive education: Using technology to provide higher cognitive challenges. Australian Disability Review, 2, 32-39.

Anderson, N. (1995b). 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. (1995c). No, Belinda set everything up ... QUICK - Journal of the Queensland Society for Information Technology in Education, 54, 8-12.

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (1997) "Ways with Windows - What Different People Do with the Same Equipment" keynote address to the Australian Literacy Educators' Conference, Darwin.