[LINK] Students left to their own devices

[David Boxall]

From: 
<http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/students-left-to-their-own-devices-20121007-277h7.html>

October 8, 2012
Linda Morris

While technology could revolutionise learning, budget constraints are 
impeding its uptake.

It's writing, just not as we know it. The Boogie Board tablet is a cross 
between a Magna Doodle pad and Magic Slate, toys that use a special 
stylus to write on a plastic sheet.

About the size of an iPad, it's an electronic scratchpad that 
illuminates on-screen markings and scrawls and wipes them out at the 
press of a button. The distributors have pitched the Boogie Board as a 
green alternative to paper and as an interactive tool to teach young 
children or those with poor control or muscle tone to improve their 
handwriting and spelling skills.

As a teaching tool, it is one of the relatively cheap, low-technology 
options on the market.

At the other end of the learning spectrum is Scratch, an open-source 
programming tool created by the MIT Media Lab, the research centre of 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to motivate learning among 
upper-primary-school students through interactive stories and games.
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To create programs in Scratch, children snap together graphical blocks, 
much like Lego bricks. Along the way, they learn important mathematical 
and computational concepts while thinking creatively, reasoning 
systematically, and working together.

Both Scratch and the Boogie Board are being used by students of Mowbray 
Public School in Lane Cove for different educational outcomes. The 
Boogie Board helps students' fine-motor skills and is useful for 
small-group activities, maths games and in brainstorming sessions.

A Wednesday lunchtime group of 20 year 5 and 6 boys is using Scratch 
graphics and art to create simple games. ''They share their ideas and 
mentor each other on a group blog, working on their games at school and 
at home,'' the assistant principal, Sarah Critoph, says. Next term, 
Mowbray will hold its first gaming day, where students from kindergarten 
to year 6 will play the boys' games throughout the day.

''Scratch is also being used in our gifted and talented programs this 
year,'' Critoph says. ''Early stage 1 and stage 1 [kindergarten and year 
1] students are using Scratch for storytelling, while stage 2 and 3 
[years 3 and 4] students are designing apps for people requiring 
communication support. The problem-based learning approach engages 
students in solving real-life issues with a clear purpose.''

For a decade or longer, Australian schools have been said to be on the 
cusp of technological revolution. But for all the promises of a paradigm 
shift in the chalk-and-talk mode of teaching, of more flexible and 
interactive forms of learning and the breaking down of walls between 
school and the wider world, the classroom looks much as it ever did, 
give or take a whiteboard or classroom computer.

The pace of technological change is speeding up at exactly the time that 
schools are being asked to do more with less and the cost of the 
technological revolution is being picked up by parents and their 
fund-raising arms.

The managing director of Crayons Distribution, Jonathon Ladmore, says 
given government budget limitations, the future lies in students 
supplying their own mobile devices, with schools acting much like a 
telecommunications provider, responsible for the safety, security and 
connectivity of the hard-wired classroom.

Interactive software, mobile devices and low-cost innovations will need 
to stand in for more radical digital classroom redesigns, Ladmore says.

The New Media Consortium, a non-profit group comprising more than 250 
colleges, universities, museums and corporations dedicated to the 
exploration of new technology, has looked at the time frames for the 
mainstream use of technology in schools.

It predicts that tablets and smartphones, with their internet 
connections, imbedded sensors, cameras, GPS and other multi-functional, 
feature-rich tools for assignments, will remain the primary method of 
delivering ever-smarter software to schools for much of the next decade.

Current applications for such devices include high-school physics 
classes using the iPad's ''clinometre'' to measure slopes, objects, 
surfaces and angles; social studies classes using interactive maps; and 
a cultural exchange between six schools in the US and six in 
Afghanistan, facilitated by the internet.

Single-player and small-group games for learning, for example counting 
and spelling games, have already been integrated into the curriculum by 
individual teachers and are likely to become more sophisticated and 
reward based.

In other realms, social-networking sites enable students to join 
homework and study groups. Apps catering to special-needs children and 
slow learners are also proliferating.

OverDrive, which recently acquired Melbourne-based e-book business 
Booki.sh, is also developing ways to deliver school textbooks via the 
internet directly to students' tablets or smartphones without the need 
for schools to install special software. It is hoped that students and 
teachers will eventually be able to share notes and annotate and 
bookmark passages.

The same team has launched a new School Download Library providing an 
interface for students to borrow a wide range of e-books, audiobooks, 
music and video from their school library, place them in a virtual 
locker and enjoy them on almost any desktop, laptop, tablet, e-reader or 
smartphone.

Raspberry Pi is yet another low-cost entry to the future. The $40 to $50 
circuit board has been developed by a non-profit British foundation and 
has only recently gone into mass production.

Using the palm-size board, children can write and store software, 
turning it into their own personalised computer. Pi teaches them the 
rudimentaries of computer coding.

''We make the assumption that by playing a lot of computer games, our 
children are computer savvy, but many are not,'' Ladmore says. ''What 
Raspberry Pi does is go back to the basics; it asks a child what makes a 
computer work and gets them to build on their knowledge.''

MaKey MaKey also unites the physical and virtual worlds to instruct 
children. An invention kit developed by two MIT Media Lab PhD students, 
it turns everyday objects into touchpads. Connected to the internet, 
bananas become piano keys; finger-painting is a sensory exercise of 
music appreciation and touch.

Pi and MaKey MaKey are at the cutting edge of what the New Media 
Consortium's Horizon Project predicts will be the next wave of 
technological change, featuring game-based and group learning. With 
these kits, children shift from being passive consumers of technology to 
its creators, while teachers become their enablers.

Several years away from being adopted in classrooms are 
augmented-reality games, in which, with a digital click, a dinosaur 
skeleton might transform into a life-size dinosaur.

As with all technology, it is only as good as the investment in 
teachers, says Greg O'Connor, the professional and consultancy services 
manager for Spectronics, a large Australian supplier of special-needs 
software and assistive technology. O'Connor describes the use of iPads 
in some schools as akin to placing a pane of glass over documents that 
are no more than learning sheets converted to PDF files.

Teachers, parents and therapists must have time to familiarise 
themselves with the technology and be trained to use it.

Touching an electronic board is engaging and entertaining, but it can 
represent an advance on the exercise book only if teachers guide the 
child's early experiences of writing and drawing.

O'Connor has coined the term ''shiny-object syndrome'' to describe how 
fascination with new technology tends to govern funding decisions, when 
the needs of students ought to take priority.

An associate professor with Macquarie University's special education 
centre, Jennifer Stephenson, says there is little quality research to 
demonstrate the impact of new technology on learning. Even for devices 
such as the iPad, which show promise for children with learning 
difficulties, there is not a lot of critical appraisal. She says: 
''iPads at least can offer very user-friendly and mainstream - hence 
non-stigmatising - support for students with disabilities, for example 
the text-to-speech programs that let students read text on websites and 
from documents.

''The ease of use for video, drawing and so on, as well as supported 
writing - text prediction, spell checking - also helps students 
demonstrate what they have learnt in ways other than handwriting.

''A lot of the academic apps that are in a game format can also be 
useful for essential practice in number facts and early reading skills, 
but teachers need to be discriminating in what they choose as there are 
a lot of poor-quality apps out there marketed as educational.''

Ladmore says the focus of any technology has to be on the end result. 
Stephenson adds: ''You have to think, what exactly do you want the 
student to learn? How might an app help? Is the app any better than the 
''old'' way? It will always come back to the individual learner and 
exactly what you want them to learn.''

-- 
David Boxall                    |  When a distinguished but elderly
                                |  scientist states that something is
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  possible, he is almost certainly
                                |  right. When he states that
                                |  something is impossible, he is
                                |  very probably wrong.
                                                  --Arthur C. Clarke