TQ#6: Assessing Web Conferencing Tools for Educators

I am going to break the following TQ response on web conferencing for educators down into the following 4 sections:

1. How might teachers make use of such web conferencing/collaboration tools?

2. What things do we need to be thinking about as ed. tech. coordinators or administrators when we think about choosing web conferencing tools for our teachers/students/classrooms?

3. Given the criteria laid out under #1 above, what did our group think about the tools we looked at?

4. What might be some of the difficulties with using such tools (i.e., areas for training)?

How might teachers make use of such web conferencing/collaboration tools?

I am not a K-12 teacher myself (I have taught at college level—undergrads and grads); K-12 teachers would clearly be able to come up with more ideas than what I have laid out here. For the college classroom, these tools have obvious relevance to distance learning programs, and I have used them in that way in limited ways.

For the K-12 setting, these tools could be used to have meetings with students in other parts of the state or world by which the learners can compare their notes on some study they have done and gain valuable additional perspectives not only on their data (e.g., studies in the science field) but on methods and approaches to study and life in general. it might be quite fun and a great learning experience to do such studies during class time and also record them for later reference. Students are “in their element” with this kind of interaction.

Teachers also might use these tools for in-service sessions—for instance, to save on travel time and fuel. Administrators could make similar use of the tools.

What should be some of our considerations when choosing these tools?

The considerations, obviously, depend on the institution and total context where the tools will be used, but I would think that the following criteria would be important across the board, with the first three being most important.

• What is the cost of the technology? We want to minimize this, but not give up too many of the features that we will consistently make use of.

• What is the technical integrity of the product? This would include things like how well the tool will work with limited bandwidth as well as cross-platform compatibility. The tool has to run on different network infrastructures and OS’s and has to run with minimal lag times or delays. If it does not, people (students and teachers) get tired of it quickly and will not use it. Considered under this sub-point is also what plug-in’s will need to be installed and how stable or consistently they work.

• A third criterion would be ease of use. Teachers have enough on their plate so we do not want these tools to have steep learning curves. How intuitive the interface is is another closely related concern.

• A fourth concern would be ‘the feature-set for the price’: Does the product/tool have the feature-set we need? We would want to maximize the features we need while at the same time get them in the most cost-beneficial way. We may need to give up some things to get a price-point that meets other goals.
What would be some features we might look for? Obviously, this depends on the actual setting or school we find ourselves in. As an ed. tech. coordinator, I would try to conduct a focus group with teachers after choosing an initial collage of web conferencing tools, and then also follow-up with a survey to gain other views on what features they want. What are some of these features, across the board? A lot of the tools have the same general features:

• Whiteboarding
• Audio and video capabilities
• Chatting
• Upload of files and screen capture
• Presentation tools, such as the ability to sync everyone’s screen with what the presenter is doing and the ability of all users to interact with/modify the whiteboard and files.

Other bells and whistles come into play then—e.g., like commenting ability and voice annotations, and extra plug-in’s such as ready-made quiz creation

So what did we find during our quick survey of some web collaboration tools?

Here is what we (i.e., my group and I) thought: there are a huge number of tools (and growing almost by the day) to choose from these days; however, many of them, to put it frankly, are not so good—they either seem to be in their developmental stages or just have not been thought out all that well.

The tools we looked at and tested as a group were Vyew, Wizig, and Yugma. We did not look at Eluminate because all three of us had used it before. Individually, I also looked at Skype; I found Skype to be not as full-featured or perhaps just not directed at the same audience; nevertheless, I found it to be a tool that might have some limited use in classrooms.

All three of us had used Eluminate and the consensus was that we liked it a lot. It seems to meet all of the criteria laid out above—e.g., handled even limited bandwidth very well, was stable technically—even given its use of Java (I find that sometimes Java can be “funky”)—the interface was intuitively laid out (i.e., I and colleagues could pick up on how to use it in a relatively short period of time; perhaps moderator role a bit more of a challenge), and, finally, it was quite feature rich.

As for the tools we examined this time, we found none of them to be particularly exciting or promising. None of them were very good with lower bandwidths (I have a low tier DSL connection); my connection never crashed but my keystrokes were sluggish, something that also can take away from the experience and focus on one’s content. My colleagues on a LAN and cable modem said they saw no delays. All of the tools included the basic feature set listed above, but none were terribly intuitive; you kind of had to go through the tutorial and look around for extended periods of time to find how to do things. The process of creating new sessions and inviting persons to them was pretty intuitive with all the tools.

Vyew had a somewhat richer feature set I thought, but it was hard to sort out the screen quickly…you had to pay attention to the tool too much of the time instead of to your content. Vyew also was a bit quirky in some of its features—e.g., you could only seem to delete one page at a time of your uploaded documents. Vyew included features beyond the basic tools listed above, like sticky note and audio contextual commenting or annotating. Yugma probably had presenter tools most like those of Eluminate—i.e., it was always clear who the presenter was. The way the other tools worked might be a source of confusion in this regard. Vyew said that it had not yet implemented the ability to save your session; the others seemed to have this feature. This is an important feature, allowing students to review what was said or absent students to review what went on. Wizig was the least feature rich, I thought. One of our group members also had an issue with her microphone not being detected by Wizig. Vyew had problems installing or running Java more than once during our session for two of our members.

As for the cost of the tools, we found prices based on how many users were involved, but I could not find anything on cost to institutions. Wizig might have been the least expensive, but it was also the least in features. My conclusion on these tools is that I would not recommend any of them at this time—I think the low tolerance of poor bandwidth and relatively poorly designed interfaces made them bad choices no matter how much they would cost the institution. So far, until we examine more tools, Eluminate is the tool of choice, but cost-benefit to the institution and the needs of the institution would have to be looked at.

As for our last point listed above, Ed. Tech. Coordinators will certainly want to lay aside time for training on the tools (as well as for pre-purchase surveys), but we need to focus on tools that even the least tech-savvy persons can pick up on relatively easily. These tools do exist—we just have to look for them. The speed of the tools and the general technical stability are also key issues, as I see it. The goal is for the technology to disappear so that the content can become the focus.

TQ#5: The Role of Concept Mapping in Planning and Thinking

I am very excited about concept maps and their use in education. I have found that they have relevance to all age levels, from Kindergarten through college age and also that they are quite a bit more versatile than perhaps formerly thought—e.g., they can be used to represent both linear and non-linear thought processes or argument trails.

For one thing, I have found concept maps, at least in some form, to be quite helpful at the brainstorming stage of laying out a research paper or argumentative essay. While I may not necessarily lay out ideas with the same bubble icons or elucidate all my ideas and inter-linkages with the traditional concept map, I think I use the basic same formula. At the design stages of constructing a website, concept maps are also very helpful, and designing websites is something learners of all ages might often be involved in today.

So what is it about concept maps that are so helpful and facilitative of learning? For one thing, the visual and discrete nature of concept maps makes it easier to see the linkages between individual elements of the map—e.g., all the individual steps of an argument are laid out (or should be) in a easy to read format, unlike having to reread the steps toward a thesis embedded within paragraphs of prose. This visual and discrete representation probably makes retention easier also. Memory experts argue that visual cues can be great aids to retention. The discrete nature of the mapping process also should also mean that we have not missed any steps in the path to our conclusion. Related to this, researchers have pointed out that concept maps possess a hierarchical form, with general concepts at the top and proceeding to the more specific concepts going down (Novak and Canas, 2008). Concept maps also, finally, assist us in making linkages or applications of arguments that we already see as valid to other ideas or arguments in the same domain of knowledge as well as in other domains.

It thus almost goes without saying that concept maps operate from within a constructivist framework. For one thing, concepts maps are not created by a teacher for the students (at least for the most part), but rather are created by the learners themselves. Thus, we have self-regulation of learning going on right from the start. Concept maps also allow for self-regulation of learning since they can very easily be revised and also revised in an ongoing fashion (unlike arguments in a research paper format). Concept maps also stress the combining of concrete content (i.e., the links within each node to various kinds of empirical evidence) with the higher order conceptual frameworks. Finally, learners from all locales and literally from all over the world--wherever there are Internet connections--can add to and modify the concept maps we create, thus broadening and deepening them while also assisting the original creators in expanding their understanding of knowledge domains as well as moving on to higher cognitive levels in their thought processes.

The Cmap software package is a particularly handy tool for doing concept maps. For one thing, these tools make it quite easy to lay down concept maps in the same way that a word processing program assists one in writing and revising in contrast to writing on paper. The Cmap program also makes connections with others an easy thing to accomplish given its built-in collaboration tools. Also, Cmap allows one to add other media to a node on the map, such that the point or idea of that node can then be explained or elucidated with something concrete or empirical. In general, collaboration is also made easier by these concept maps because things can very easily be plugged into them in contrast to adding sentences to paragraphs of explanatory or expository writing. Finally, the Cmap maps can also be accessed on the web so the Cmap application does not specifically have to be installed on the computer where one wants to work with a map.

Some great examples of the aformentioned use of concepts maps are, in my opinion, the Austhink critical thinking website tutorials, found at link below:

http://www.austhink.org/critical/pages/argument_mapping.html

Another good example of the use of a concept map would be the CUNY school's "Intro to Philosophy" course materials posted by undergrad. students in the form of CMAP's, found at the link below:

http://cmapspublic3.ihmc.us:80/servlet/SBReadResourceServlet?rid=1229454598921_677508370_7013&partName=htmltext

My reaction to Wenglinsky’s views on technology and student achievement

My reaction to Wenglinsky’s views on technology and student achievement:

Discussions of how technology might influence student achievement are very important given the fact that, by many estimates, some one billion dollars was spent on just digital technology in all the nation’s K-12 schools in the last 3 years. Is this money being spent wisely? Wenglinsky’s book on this topic is welcome, given the relative dearth of studies on technology and student achievement; his study also helpfully draws attention to some of the inherent difficulties in measuring the effect of technology on student achievement. I read most all of the book by Wenglinsky, but will focus my comments on chap 4, given that we are to discuss technology and its effect on student achievement.

I liked the way that Wenglinsky included both anecdotal accounts of technology use (chap 3), and comprehensive numbers (chap 4). The former, as he says, puts a face on educational use of technology and also connects the researcher to the practitioner, so that the latter sees how the researcher is assessing the use of technology in classrooms. Quantitative, comprehensive data is needed so we can make judgments about technology’s overall effectiveness. The NAEP study sounds like a great study, including scores on student tests but also interviews with all stakeholders involved (administrators, students, teachers, etc.). Many of the results of the 1996 and 2000 studies laid out by Wenglinsky were intuitive, but it is good to see these intuitions confirmed—e.g., the fact that fourth grade teachers learn how to teach reading more through on the job training in contrast to how 8th grade teachers learn to teach a subject field like math or science, namely through their educational preparation. Other findings under the category of “non-technology instructional practices” also helpfully confirmed things like an ongoing need for teacher training in the area of special needs and cross-cultural understanding and the idea that students who test less (i.e., involved instead in project based learning) show more achievement on the NAEP (but how does this help us if we are constrained by PSSA requirements?).

In terms of technology use and its effect on student achievement, here are some things I found particularly interesting and/or helpful as a teacher. First, there continues to be a “digital divide” in the sense that poorer students have less access to computers an home. Due to increasing immersion of technology in all schools, all students have access to computers at school, but still not at home, but the latter where it seems to count most (see chart at top of p. 69). The student’s socioeconomic status still made the largest difference in effect on test scores. Second, teacher preparedness in his/her subject field (in the upper grades), teacher comfort with using technology, and class size seem to have a positive effect on test scores, as we have really always known. Third, the use of simulation, games, and data analysis tools seemed generally to have a positive effect on test scores. Computers do these things well, but the machine has to be made use of by the constructivist minded teacher, as Wenglinsky indicates (70). Specifically in the area of reading, word processing had a positive effect on test scores, but not the use of computers for reading stories (presumably, e-books or reading off the computer) or even spell checking. Fourth, frequency of computer use in school had negative effects on test scores whereas frequency of computer use at home had positive effects. Thus, teachers should be working with students directly during classroom time and saving the use of the computer as the medium for homework (but what if the student does not have a computer at home?). Finally, drill-and-kill exercises on the computer seemed always to have a negative effect on the 8th graders but had some positive effect for 4th graders, though I did not see the numbers in his charts. I want to think that drill and kill in some forms or at some ages still can be a good thing.

TQ #3

Reviews of educational effectiveness of some games:

Web based Oregon Trail game:

There was certainly a “whatness” (Prensky concept) to this game: the game set you in a certain social and historical setting, that of what it might have been like for early pioneers to cross this country. The challenges that had to be met were authentic and a true learning experience. They showed that you could not make shortsighted assumptions. You had to be ready to adapt to the challenges the real world forced upon you—sickness, weather, broken equipment, need for food. The tenuousness of getting these things was also represented. There was also a moral aspect or element to the game—what do you do when someone is near death?…do you push ahead to get to your destination or give up your time and possibly the sustenance of others to assist that one person? What is most important to you is a question you have to face? Beyond this, too, the game showed its users a very important lesson—that we fail at times. We must make choices and we might not always get it right. This is like real life.

The problems with the game were that its choices were too limited. Why, for instance, wasn’t there anything like medicine to choose as a resource or supply when you bought things? There was medicine in these days. The game did require some planning, but since there were not enough variables involved, the planning was not that involved. I felt that I was just clicking away on the mouse many times in a mechanical fashion because I just wanted to move ahead.

I also wanted to know the why of my journey—whey were we going where we were going…perhaps this is obvious, however.

Screen of last part of game for me:

Review of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 demo:

Enjoyed this game: the graphics are immersive and the simulation seemed sufficiently complex so as to approximate what real businesspersons and managers of themes parks would have to think about. Actually, the model might go beyond even what one person would have to know, since the player becomes park engineer, investment decision maker, and human resource manger.

There was a lot to like about this game/simulation. The game works very well at the level of the “What” and “Why” of Prensky: the 2 main rules of business apply: pleasing people while balancing this with making money. I was also left with a sense of the need for responsibility because when you design your rides you have to pay attention to safety concerns. The simulation I think teaches the student about how to plan (when you first put together your theme park, there are many, many things to think about and balance), but it also teaches that running a business is an ongoing art—other factors can come into play that spoil your initial idealistic plans, things like a rain storm at times of the day, a ride getting old so that customers no longer enjoy it or find it that novel.

The game teaches in an excellent way also the principle of being an honest business person: when you provide something above and beyond what the other guy does, you win! Competition is good. The game also allowed for different views of the park, so that one could see the aesthetics of your park form just one area but also see the variety you afford throughout the rest of the park.

I also felt that the game was very open-ended, in that there was no one solution offered to the student—the number of the solutions to this game were, literally, infinite. Thus, the student could get beyond the view we all so often assume—that there is one right answer and let’s go searching for it. It is not easy to get away from that assumption, but this game helps in doing it.

My final screen where I achieved 9,557.29 profit.

Sim City Classic Experience:

I was impressed initially by the need to have some greater direction or tutorial from the beginning. The quick start guide was ok, I guess, but there might have been more that listed some of the principles that should go into building a city and why? Probably, the game does not go into such detail because it is still just a commercial product and not intended for an educational setting.

I saw some positive things coming out of the game right from the start. E.g.,s: the planning of a city involves a number of complex and interconnected things, there is no one right decision (there are always tradeoffs), and planning can be gratifying when done right. (Why, however, does my city have to be based on fossil fuel technology right from the start? However, many alternative energy technologies may not be capable of producing the vast amounts of fuel needed to run any one city.) The “General Hints on Strategy” laid out in the main instruction area laid out several of the tradeoffs involved in building the city. The game did have a good bit of authenticity, including showing the impact of the major’s approval rating as one more factor for consideration.

I did not seem to be doing some things right in this game: for one thing I never could seem to get anybody moved into my city/village…I was building things, including roads and power lines between my homes and businesses, but no one moved in. My mayoral approval rating changed and so did my budget and timeframe. I did not like this game nearly as much as Roller Coaster Tycoon. I did understand why there had to be so many commercial areas (i.e., is one commercial area a zone or is it one business?...still not sure). What was the scale in general of the game? Was each residential zone a zone or neighborhood or just one property? Instructions did not help much. How realistic were the costs of each zone also?...did not seem so realistic.