Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Reflective Digital Media in Teacher Education
Timo Portimojarvi, University of Tampere, Finland

• Developing curriculum of teacher education
  • Cultural view of curriculum and profession
    • Historical, cultural, and political objectives
    • Teachers are social and cultural actors
    • The development of the curriculum is a practice-based research process
  • Three-level curriculum model
    • Personal level - autobiographical and individual process of developing a personal and professional identity
      • Experiential life world
        • Streams of situations, feelings, actions and ideas
        • In Te, experiences in teaching practices, studies, and personal life
      • Rich multimodal documentation
        • Record of situations, experiences, and moods collected easily and quickly without critical selection
        • Basis for reflection on action (or already reflection in action)
      • Personal mobile devices
        • cellular phones for imaging, recording, and making notes (”lifeblog”)
        • Blog-based digital portfolio
    • Group level - social processes of becoming a member of the profession
      • Conceptual and practical life world
        • Practices, requirements, and cultures of the community
      • Combining and considering information
        • Dialog with peers and proportioning individual and shared new conceptions with formal requirements and personal prior knowledge
      • Shared virtual spaces
        • Group blogs and an aggregated entity of the personal blog
        • Wiki-based collaborative document creation
    • Public level - skills and attitiudes in participating in public discourses
      • Discourse of teacher profession
        • Developing curriculum and the working culture of the school
        • Connection to larger networks of colleagues, parents, and other partners
      • Producing, reproducing, and publishing formal information
        • Outlines, plans, and statements for the future
        • Reflection for action, done for preparation of future moments in various contexts, based on re-interpretation of earlier reflections
      • Public forums of participation
        • Open forums, blogs, wikis, and other environments
        • Skills for participating and the use of tools learned in teacher education
• Reflective learning in teacher profession and education
  • Teacher as reflective practitioner
    • inquiry-based approach to his or her own work
    • critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development (revising curriculum, improving their work environmenent, professionalizing teaching, developing policy)
  • Teacher education (reflective action in 3×3 levels)
    • Refection on, in, and for action
    • Reflection about content, process, and permises
• Enhancing documentation and reflections with digital media
  • Student journals or portfolios
    • Often used in higher education context
    • Can promote reflection in many ways through varying strategies and devices
  • Digital media supporting learning and reflection — new tools for:
    • Recognition and awareness
    • Documentation
    • Sharing
    • Discussion and dialog
    • Presenting
• Framework for reflective media in teacher education
  • Aspects of the study
    • Type of media
    • Forms of activity
    • Focus of reflection
    • Digital media skills
    • Relation with information
  • Levels of study
    • Individual
    • Group
    • Public
• Results of implementing this framework will be shared in the future

Technology-rich Teacher Education: Faculty Concerns During Involvement in a Technology-Rich Cohort of Teacher Candidates
Loretta Donovan and Tim Green, Cal State-Fullerton, USA

Can We Model Wiki Use in Technology Courses to Help Teachers Use Wikis in Their Classrooms
Swapna Kumar, Boston University

• Project Steps
  • Began by looking at wikis — invited them to find three wikis used in education
  • Looked at good and bad wiki designs using Wikispaces or PBWiki
  • Dicussion on the challenges, questions, usefulness
    • Activities that the wiki is useful for
      • Reconsidered projects that they had students do in collaboration previously
        • Brainstorming
    • Instructions for using it
    • Grading of wiki work
    • Boundaries for students
  • Individual use of wikis
    • Teachers developed an activity for an element of their curriculum
      • Teachers say that students are writing better: more explicit in detail and more careful in language
• Follow-Up Study
  • Gather data from how teachers used wikis in thier classrooms and student reactions

The Mash-Up of Web 2.0 Technologies: The Future of Podcasting and Social Networking
Brad Reamsbottom and Calvin Toth, University of Lethbridge, Canada

• Podcasting: Subscription-based audio and video available for students
• Where are students accessing podcasts?
  • News
  • Entertainment
    • Current TV
  • Education
    • iTunesU
  • Social Networks
    • Digg
• Students prefer social networks
  • We went there, and they don’t want us there
• Why did we forget about other places besides social networks
  • It takes more time to create a blog, podcast, vidcast
  • It needs to be entertaining (not just a lecture on YouTube)
  • News has to entertain and make minds inquire
  • iTunes U requires lots of setup
• Podcast Problem Solving
  • Create synamic content — students don’t want to hear more lecture
  • Make it available using the tools that they use
    • Viddler
      • Video-based website that allows dynamic commenting and blog integration
      • Acts as an informant and supporting resource
    • JumpCut
      • Online video editing tool; import video, photos, and audio and edit them into a creative and fun presentation
    • TokBox
      • Web-based video conferencing
      • Send video email and make video calls
      • Video emails can be embedded on blogs
      • Blogs can hold extra resources to support the podcast
    • YouTube
  • Let your students make it viral
    • If it is attractive to them, they will repurpose it and repost it in their blogs
• Remember the Rules
  • Keep it fun and creative
  • Don’t lecture
  • Don’t limit yourself
  • Share it, don’t force it
  • Create inquiring minds
  • Imagery and sound
  • Tag it

A Digital Storytelling Implementation Experience with Early Childhood Students
Aslihan Kocaman-Karoglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

• What is digital storytelling?
  • Story telling as an ancient tradition; digital storytelling integrates visual, interactive, and reiterative with constructive ideas
  • “combining the art of telling stories with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video…” B. Robin, 2006
• Purpose of the Study
  • Outlines application of DS in pre-school and effects discovered on students’ learning (age 6)
  • Fall 2007, two pre-school classrooms with 28 students and 2 teachers total
• Stories in pre-school
  • Great way of communication in classrooms
  • Teacher tells story, students “dial in” on the words
  • May use music and interaction
• Story for this study
  • Story of the first president of the Turkish Republic
  • Used historical photo graphs, his recorded speech, songs he liked, etc.
• Procedure
  • Pre-knowledge from students
  • Data gathered through classroom observation, teacher interviews, assessment of students’ drawings
  • Students drew a picture of the story and explained the drawings
• Results
  • Students had a good understanding of the subject from the digital story
    • Although their drawings were simple, they were able to retell what they saw in the story
    • Only 3 of the 28 students couldn’t explain the main idea from the story
  • Teachers felt that the content was more understandable, were willing to create stories, agreed that it helped get across more content in a limited time, felt that they didn’t have time or technical knowledge

Implementation of Digital Storytelling in the Classroom by Teachers Trained in a Digital Storytelling Workshop
Bulent Dogan and Bernard Robin, University of Houston, USA

• Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling Site
• Used to teach content, empower students, teach writing, meet technology standards
• Little structured research on digital storytelling
• Purpose of study
  • To document teachers use of digital storytelling right after the workshop
  • If they used DS in the classroom, in what ways were they used? What purposes did teachers have?
  • If they were not used, why not?
• Results
  • 78% were unaware of DS before the workshop
  • After the workshop, half did not use DS in their classrooms
    • Almost all the teachers said that they would want to use it,
    • • For students
        • Video yearbook
        • History project
        • Description of field trips
        • Social and science investigation
      • For teachers
        • As alternative to power point
        • Used to present content
  • Impacts on students
    • Helped students understand presentation skills
    • Increase in motivation and 21st century skills
  • Impacts on teachers
    • Barriers: Time, access to hardware
    • Technical support was not as much a problem
  • Other results
    • Affected teaching style
    • Shared DS with other teachers and family members
    • Easy to use and make
    • “Director’s chair” effect
• Resources
  • Allen Levine’s 50 Ways to Tell Digital Stories

Thinking Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content (TPACK)
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler, Michigan State University

• Three points to the refrain
  • Teaching with technology is a wicked problem
  • Wicked problems need creative solutions
  • Teachers want to create solutions
• Teaching
  • It is messy: Teaching is always “about something” — the content
  • Yet every discipline is messy, too — the canon, phonics vs whole language
  • PCK from Shulman — content and teaching need to be transformed together
  • Learning to Think by Janet Donald
  • But, where is technology? — Too much for teachers to keep up with rapid change
  • Instead, we argue for developing a thoughtful and playful attitude towards dealing with the new media ecology
  • Take, for instance, the iPhone
    • Lots of software, highly unstable, opaque
  • Yet, information technology changes everything
    • Technology and content — the move from orality to writing (Plato “writing will implant forgetfulness)
    • Victor Hugo — the book will destroy the cathedral because people don’t have to go to a place to get knowledge
    • Technology changes practice and societies
  • Pedagogy and technology
    • Combine Google with open courseware and one laptop per child, and we are looking at a fundamental shift in learning and human culture
    • We teach using Moodle, but we worry about the “I agree” phenomenon where students do not put in their own ideas
    • Moodle prevents you from seeing other postings before you post your own
    • Teaching two sections of the same course — one in Moodle, one in Facebook — studying how this changes the social and educational discourse
  • Context: pedagogy, technology, and content work in a context
    • One laptop per child compared to a computer lab children visit once a week
    • Firewalls
  • To sum up — it is complicated with different contexts and no stopping rule
    • Solutions are not right or wrong, but good or bad that are unique and context dependent (and generate new problems)
    • Teaching with technology is wicked and typical solutions don’t work
• Creative solutions
  • How do we survive in a context of change?
  • Trindadian guppy — flexible reproductive strategy with fewer babies in good times, lots of babies in bad times
  • In a world characterized by change, the best idea is to have lots of creative ideas for the new media ecology
    • What is creative?
      • I know it when I see it; easy to recognize, hard to define
      • Fantastic social innovation with educational payoff in the future — microcredit loans
      • Getting my son interested in reading by doing the March Madness brackets — he reads the newspaper every morning
  • What is creative
    • It is novel and unique in a useful way
    • It is effective
    • It is whole — complete and elegant
  • When you think about wicked problems, you need to have a “new” (novel, effective, and whole) idea
    • What does creativity have to do with it? A variation on a theme
      • Rubik’s Cube examples; tweaked to “Double Maze” by Scott Kim
    • We live in a new media ecology where standard approaches do not work
  • What are teachers and teacher educators to do?
• Teachers are designers of the total PACKage
  • We have technology, pedagogy, and content with overlaps
  • It is at the center of these three that we have technological pedagogical content knowledge
  • TPACK (also stands for “total package”)
    • What does it do?
      • Opens new possibilities (such as Moodle and the “I agree” problem)
      • Is it NEW (novel, effective, and whole)
    • 3rd graders understanding maps
      • Mapquest, KidPix, Satellite, Virtual Trips
    • A possibility — sand creatures (the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds)
    • The walls between technology and content only exist in our mind, if we are willing to play
  • Typically, pedagogy, content, and technology are separate (or, at least, technology is separate)
    • Like learning to play jazz one note as a time
    • Need an integrated, interdisciplinary, creative approach
    • Glenn Gould ‘- Implicit in electronic culture is the idea that multiple layers are a part of the creative process
  • Play a game where you mashup different ideas of content, pedagogy, and technology
• Outro
  • Where do educators live? In a box, or in the middle of technology, content, and knowledge

Reflections
Punya and Matt continue to push me to think about how I think and talk about technology. Next week, when I return to teach ENG 315, we are talking about multiliteracies in the classroom, and I think that I will use TPACK to frame the discussion. Thinking about pedagogy (the writing workshop model), content (the expectations for K-8 writers), and technology (based on the Michigan content standards for technology). I need to come up with some ideas for scenarios, I think, to really prompt my students’ thinking about technology use. For now, I will keep mulling this over as I prepare yo deliver my presentation on Project WRITE.