Educational Technology

The Pair

Our pair’s outcomes in the Remote Teacher Resources website addresses the immediate need of teachers: the ability to generate class content that assists and encourages learning and the ability to curate (select, organize and exhibit) online class resources to foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs. Included in these abilities were the need to identify appropriate technologies, to predict difficulties students would have accessing the technology as well as the content and address these concerns, to construct interactive materials, to differentiate through the materials, and to design a variety of static and interactive tools for students to access both synchronously and asynchronously. A final aspect of the creation and curation of content was to be able to evaluate student learning.

Our resource activity included a large array of selected applications for a variety of methods of creating and curating content as well as suggestions on how to evaluate curated resources. Our posts directed readers to posts from other members of our cohort who focused on accessibility, communication between various stakeholders, and wellness. Included in our personal posts were examples of both created and curated content for students: a two-day lesson plan of created and curated resources, two curated resource pages, and a description of how those resources were evaluated. These examples are evidence of achieving the goal of having generated good class content and curated resources, and the reader can compare their materials to these exemplars. The current site, generated in a short period of time, is still rough around the edges but has some great content.

The Cohort

A focus on Ted Aoki’s lived curriculum is part and parcel of our group’s created resource. We have not created a traditional curriculum document; we provide no position of power by stating what must be done. Our cohort is providing content which the student has a choice in how they will explore and how they will utilize the information inside their own practices, choosing as much or as little as they can manage to master. In our own way we have provided a resource where we are not requiring teachers to participate in a set way and order, but we are responding to a need of teachers responding to the pandemic’s teaching requirements. We are not face-to-face with the teachers, but our narrative will provide teachers with the opportunity to live in the moment between our curriculum-as-plan with its numerous outcomes, and the curriculum in which they will live (Aoki, 1993).

By creating this resource as a list of resources and then a created resource based on those resources, we have a significant hidden curriculum. Our unwritten, unofficial, lessons, values, and perspectives are about how teachers should interact with students, other teachers, and their students’ families. The ideas and behaviors that we consider acceptable are obvious from what is included on the site. The framework of the curriculum we have created is fluid, and our positions as teacher and students are interchangeable as we contributors can learn from the site, other teachers (our ‘students’) can learn and can also contribute through comments, interaction, and requests to have their posts linked. The role of teacher and student is re-visioned (Nahachewsky and Slomp, 2009) and this is probably the main point of our hidden curriculum; the teacher is not the ‘sage on the stage’ but is the facilitator.

The Community

We have stretched our digital resource further than the resources referenced in Nahachewsky and Slomp’s (2009) article, as our digital classroom has little formal interaction. Our site recognizes creating a community in the digital classroom is extremely important as is evidenced by the number of posts on community and communication. Through linking to other blogs and sites, we hope to raise the site’s level in search engines so a community can be established. I, for one, also plan to encourage use of this site with my International Baccalaureate colleagues. Our hope is that having comments allowed on the blog posts and enabling connections with Twitter will encourage some real community, but it will depend on how well the site is utilized.

For many Indigenous peoples, community is at the centre of interactions (Donald, 2009). Our site’s focus on community and communication is a hidden curriculum on ways to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing. Focusing on the community and building up each other rather than competition for the ‘highest grade’ or getting done first becomes more possible in the digital classroom where asynchronous work takes place and where student ability to monitor others’ progress is limited. Students are put into a situation to learn and seek ‘wisdom’ where they can – internet, books, each other, teacher . . . According to Donald (2009), one of the most important ways to foster ethical educational space is through work that requires human connectivity as a critical starting point.

As we are not a large group of people and our time for post creation is short, there are some missing elements from the entire website, including specific posts on how to include Indigenous content authentically, how to fully incorporate First Peoples Principles of Learning, how to encourage inquiry and how to address motivation and self-management, although there is some reference to most of these elements in the site. I am hoping more posts will be written to address the missing issues.

References

Aoki, T. T, (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3). 255-268.

Donald, D. T. (2009). The curricular problem of Indigenousness: Colonial frontier logics, teacher resistances, and the acknowledgment of ethical space. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnston (Eds.), Beyond ‘presentism’: Re-imagining the historical, personal, and social places of curriculum (pp.23-41). Sense Publishers.

First Nations Education Steering Committee. (2015, September). First Peoples Principles of Learning. [Poster]. http://www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PUB-LFP-POSTER-Principles-of-Learning-First-Peoples-poster-11×17.pdf

Nahachewsky, J. & Slomp, D. (2009) Sound and Fury: Studied response(s) of curriculum and classroom in digital times. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnston (Eds.), Beyond ‘presentism’: Re-imagining the historical, personal, and social places of curriculum (pp.139-151). Sense Publishers.

Well, I haven’t been posting much because it seems so much of what I am doing is revolving around creating posts for our University of Victoria Masters of Educational Technology cohort’s project for our summer courses! We do have some guests joining us, so if you have something to contribute on Remote Teaching Resources, including suggestions for future posts, head on over and look at our site! It is a work in progress, so visit often, and send your friends!

As part of our summer work, my partner and I have chosen to evaluate our learning design and content contribution to the site separately as our posts were on two halves of a whole – creating vs curating content. While in the end we wound up doing both creation and curation in our example resources, the choices made on our resource posts were significantly different as we were approaching content from two different directions. We are both using the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines for a holistic review of the learning design against our outcomes:

• Content Creation: Educators will be able to generate class content that assists and encourages learning.
• Resource Curation: Teachers will be able to curate (select, organize and exhibit) online class resources to foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs

The content of our posts was assessed against journals and articles as part of the information provided on the Resources for Content Creation post.

Why? Engagment: For purposeful, motivated learners, stimulate interest and motivation for learning

Recruiting Interest:

By curating a list of digital tools, organized by function, teachers needing help will find a short list of tools with that functionality. Teachers would have autonomy in what they trial without there being overwhelming choice. I debated incorporating my personal evaluation of the tools within the remote teaching resources website, but I decided it didn’t fit the parameters of the site. It is linked so teachers will be able to read the rationale if they are wondering. To stimulate interest, there is an example pair of lessons utilizing a number of the tools as well as an explanation of where the unit is leading. This optimizes relevance and value and lends authenticity as I describe how I ‘transcribed’ the lesson I, an experienced teacher, would normally use. Hopefully, it gives teachers the opportunity to give themselves a few appropriate expectations as I note how not everything has to be created from scratch and that a quick search found suitable formative assessments.

I repeated the paragraph referring to digital literacy on every page to ensure someone only accessing one page would read it. As stated in my Decision Time blog, I had originally planned to include comments on the privacy of each application, but I realized different districts have subscribed to different learning management systems which will change which privacy policy is in effect for a particular application. Therefore, consultation with the technology team in a district is imperative before choosing to use any of the resources listed. As for appropriate attribution, my example lesson includes attribution but my only mention of it on my base page is in the paragraph with the link to my partner’s page, as my pages were focused on creation tools rather than curating resources.

The learning design did not aim at building or internalizing means of engagement, though hopefully the example lesson including the amount of time it took to recreate resources digitally will encourage reflection and promote realistic expectations.

What? Representation: For resourceful, knowledgeable learners, present information and content in different ways

Perception:

I struggled with the accessibility requirements as they were unclear on what is best for hyperlinks. Other than the listing of applications which link to where the application is located on the web, I believe my other hyperlinks are explanatory for those who may be using visual accessibility options. No auditory information is included in my posts, but my lesson has a slideshow and a video. The slideshow has audio on the distinct slides and students can make the graphs larger for better viewing. I also edited the automatic closed captioning on the video so it is more accurate and clear for those reading. I am unsure how accessible the content on Quizlet and Kahoot are for visually impaired students, though I do know the print is large and there is good contrast in the question area.

Language & Symbols:

I purposefully kept most of the language simple, though the term ‘openware’ may be unfamiliar to a teacher – it will not be unfamiliar when they share the description with their technology department. Each application was linked to their base page so teachers could quickly check it out if the short description I provided was interesting. I also made the choice for the first bullet to be a short description, the second about cost, and the later bullets were about groups working together, learning management system, age group suitability if suggested or how to log in with the final bullet about support or tutorials. Thus, teachers could just scan the first or second line and then move on if not interested.

Comprehension:

This was hopefully encouraged by the example resources created and the explanation of how I transcribed my ‘regular face-to-face’ lesson. I included a short, curated resource for the 2 lessons on slope, and some of the formative/practice activities were also curated (with attribution) so teachers could see how creation can include curation. Hopefully teachers will be able to look at that exemplar and begin to create their own digitized lessons.

How? Action and Expression: For strategic, goal-directed learners, differentiate the ways that students can express what they know.

By providing teachers with a large, but not vast set of tools for creating their lessons, teachers have choice. They can use as many tools as they are comfortable with and slowly increase suitable tools. I included the mention of EdPuzzle not being employed as I imagined as I did not think it was a good use of my time considering my goal with students watching the video. This shows teachers that their personal expertise can be used to make choices. As there are no set ‘assignments’ for completion, the design is totally open.

Personal Requirement

I had planned to include a post on teaching digitally through inquiry, but I linked a previously created site a number of times, and my example has a guided mathematical inquiry exploration, so maybe I have pushed my personal preference sufficiently for this site that is supposed to support teachers from more jurisdictions than just British Columbia and International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme which both encourage an inquiry-based approach to teaching.

References

Center for Applied Special Technologies. (2018, August 31). UDL: The UDL Guidelines. https://udlguidelines.cast.org

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (n.d.). Design and develop overview. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). https://www.w3.org/WAI/design-develop/

Photo by Stefano Zocca on Unsplash

Choosing resources is difficult – there is so much available but you can’t have EVERYTHING! As I was researching applications for creating content for our Remote Teaching site, the questions I asked myself were:

• • Do I or people I know use them?
  • Are they free or cheap?
  • Are they intuitive to learn?
  • Are they useful from K-12?
  • How does their privacy policy align with BC’s FIPPA?

Choices

The resources I chose to list in my posts on Content Creation in our Remote Teaching site are mainly tried and true applications that my educator friends have been using. There are many programs out there, but I felt more comfortable recommending ones that I knew about first or second-hand rather than from a blog or magazine article that might be benefitting from advertiser dollars. My goal was also for free applications, programs that have a good price for educational institutions, and programs that link well to Learning Management Systems. I also wanted applications that were easy to learn how to use so they could also then be used by the students and to not overwhelm teachers that are not used to using much tech. Most of the chosen resources are ones I have suggested to less technically savvy teachers and they were able to utilize them fairly easily. Many of the applications are usable to create content by high school teachers and all the way down to teachers of non-readers. There is really no program or online application that provides a learning management system for non-readers well; yet. SeeSaw has some capabilities, but it still needs to be overseen by an adult. I think this is a market that is just waiting to be exploited. There are many games for non-readers, but so far there is no platform that serves them in an audio and picture-based way so that they can just mouse over and click what they need. Unfortunately, that is way beyond my capabilities.

Accessibility

To be honest, I wasn’t thinking much about accessibility of the content creation resources, but more about how they might make content more accessible. If a student has a video, including good images and possibly a whiteboard or pre-prepared presentation, that makes it more accessible. There is hopefully good audio; there is the ability to change the size of the video; there is the opportunity to add closed captions; there is the ability to speed it up and slow it down , particularly if it is uploaded to youtube, or stop and replay. That helps on many levels with accessibility AND with differentiation. I did encourage teachers to keep activities to under 20 minutes. If an educator uses multiple modes of presenting materials (and my posts list a few different ways) and then has additional resources they have curated for their students, this will increase accessibility. One of the things I didn’t like was that each link in my post shows up in a pale blue – not the best colour for those with vision difficulties. I am still not done going over the resources from our workshop with Kim Ashbourne who you might want to  follow on Twitter and visit her blog for more resources, so I expect I have more edits to do before my posts are totally done. (Follow up – Linking options was a huge discussion as requirements are different for different accessibility needs– too bad there is no widget where the reader can choose how they prefer links to open. I also redid all the headers on my posts.)

Outliers

VoiceThread was a bit pricey for my thoughts, but I do have a number of educator friends that really like it and maybe it is a good price when you look at it from an institution price. The same went for Sketchboard, although from my point of view, even the institution price was high. Ryeboard was an application I hadn’t heard about before, but it is so new that it may provide something interesting in the near future therefore I included it. Backchannel Chat looked very interesting though I don’t know anyone that has used it. It would give the availability of multiple small groups chatting behind a group video room that would mimic the classroom environment. I also have not tried Bubble but it looks REALLY interesting and I have some international education friends using it. The Whiteboard apps were difficult to decide what to cut so I cut none of the ones friends say they like. Each is slightly different, so it really depends what you are using them for.

Changed My Mind

Finally, I changed my mind about analyzing the privacy of each of the resources curated. Every teacher/school/division has different levels of what they consider acceptable. Plus, school division plans for certain applications are much more secure than individual plans. I did decide to link the BC FIPPA in each post to encourage teachers to talk with their tech people. There is no use learning an app if you are not allowed to use it!

For May, June and July, I was/am both taking online courses/workshops on teaching using technology (4 in total) and facilitating 2 online workshops.

I took an online MOOC on Indigenous Perspectives that was quite old-fashioned in its approach. It had recorded video lectures with limited inclusion of pictures or text, so it made a great podcast listening experience. At the end of each of the sections was a downloadable reading on the topic (and the closed caption was also copying) as well as a short quiz for checking your understanding. Not my favourite format, but the material was interesting and even thought-provoking at times. I wished it had a little more variety than one person lecturing or a guest speaker being interviewed.

My second course was a workshop facilitated by two leaders from the International Baccalaureate. It was on facilitating IB’s online workshops, which are already set up with an informational slideshow presentation and required learning engagements. As a facilitator, you are allowed to customize somewhat within the Moodle platform, but they want evidence of learning basically through forums. They are encouraging the use of Padlet, FlipGrid, Bubble, MindMeister, VoiceThread and Google Docs. Our workshop also encouraged us to branch out to other apps as we saw fit, but it was interesting to note that the experienced online educators, when we shadowed them, were mostly only making use of the old-fashioned forums. The use of Big Blue Button (a video meeting tool, BBB) was just being released as part of the platform, so June/July participants have access to it but since their workshops started earlier in May, our workshops appeared to be the first ones with access to BBB.

My two university courses are run by an extremely experienced online educator and a less experienced online educator. They are using Slack (communication tool), WordPress (website tool), Zoom (video conferencing), Google Docs, Calendly (appointment tool) and we also have access to BlueJeans to meet in pairs or pods. They are having online drop-in office hours and offering to meet one-on-one. Both are being amazingly available even though they are balancing other university duties as well as working from the midst of their families (and the issues all that entails). This really pointed out the lack of instructor availability in my other two courses, so there was limited ability to clarify difficulties.

I have been working on my Google Trainer certification so I provided a workshop for an elementary school on the use of Google Classroom. Some of the participants had never heard of the program although they were in a Google for Education school and some had used it for a couple of years, so I set up a classroom with a little over 20 assignments that went from very basic to how to teach yourself new things. Teachers had two hours to interact with the materials while I sat in a Google Meet. Some needed some help just starting up their classroom and in most cases, my instructions were clear enough that teachers could start using their room. I was busy clarifying during the two hours and spent another few hours in the evening responding to all my assignments.

My other online offering is an IB Mathematics workshop for teachers just starting to teach in the programme. I gave them all my email and my phone number although they can also contact me through the moodle platform (which has a 15 minute delay in sending emails). I provided an email with some tech tutorials before they started and those tutorials are also linked in the platform. All the forums they are to contribute to have been started and some useful tech options have been included. I have had participants email me, text me, phone me, WhatsApp me and contact me through the platform, with some of these contacts trying to arrange a face-to-face in the BBB room. I had hoped to have some teaching time in the BBB, but trying to organize a meeting with 24 people 2, 3, 8, 9, 14 and 15 hours ahead of you is extremely difficult. Instead I have tried daily office hours, spread out at different times each day according to what looked good based on a Doodle poll. I reach out to the group weekly, every couple of days to individuals who are posting, and weekly to individuals who are not actively completing learning engagements. Between the office hours and private meetings, I have met half of the participants in the video room and the course is 3/4 done.

What do I see while experiencing online learning as a student and a teacher simultaneously.

• instructors are struggling with the new technologies even in courses that have always been online as those courses are integrating even more interactive tools.
• students/teachers are struggling to learn all the new interactive tools and often just want to have an old-fashioned talk through of what they need to learn and/or how to use the technology.
• students want to have variety without being overwhelmed and everyone’s level of overwhelmed is different, so options are important.
• students want community, but they want it immediate, so if the instructor does not reach out and try build that community, it won’t happen.

SO, what does burning the candle at both ends show me? KEYs for success are:

• Instructor availability for some face-to-face instruction
• Clear written instructions
• A reasonable amount of tech with tutorials available
• Consistent reaching out to individual students personally will make it easier for them to reach out to you when they need it, even if they are not reaching out to each other. The instructor has to be the starter.

Looking at these requirements, I am worried about instructor burnout as our teachers go online this fall without proper support in many cases.

For me, as a teacher, curriculum is like planning and hosting a wedding. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of ‘curriculum’ is “the courses offered by an educational institution” and of ‘wedding’ is “a marriage ceremony usually with its accompanying festivities”. They are extremely broad definitions and present the idea of one constant in each situation; in a curriculum there is education involved, and in a wedding some formal ritual occurs. You expect that there are a number of elements that could take place in some fashion:

Creating a guest list = creating a learning community
Wedding ceremony with Canadian legal requirements and possibly church requirements (yes, the church encourages that there be a community witnessing) = the prescribed provincial/state requirements including testing with the possibility of some other curriculum included (such as the International Baccalaureate)
The schedule of events (ceremony, reception, meal, dance, party, etc.) = the learning experiences planned
Speeches = Feedback
Wedding pictures = documentation of achievements, learning experiences, feedback, and celebration of learning.
Guests gathering and interacting = Group work and interactions between learners and teachers

Bare Bones

Many people do not consider everything I included in my list as part of curriculum. Egan defines curriculum as the study of any and all educational phenomena. Yet you need to know your guests/learners in order to effectively plan and present your wedding/curriculum. The legal bare bones is that you can be married with only 2 witnesses. Many people consider a particular textbook or the ministry guidelines to be the curriculum. As a trained teacher, you need to take those bare bones and create something that will engage your learners and encourage them to be involved – how many weddings are planned where people only attend the oath-taking part of the ceremony and none of the festivities? Curriculum as a document should be a basic list of topics, subject skills and soft skills that can be adapted to the context of a classroom situation just as a wedding has to be carried out with just the legal requirements. Too much prescription is not useful, but too much vagueness is also useless. From the view of the learners/guests, there needs to be much more than these bare bones.

Filling the Frame

Planning a wedding for my daughter and her partner and the limited Covid guest list was very different than the original plan for a larger guest list which would be very different from the wedding Joanna and her partner planned for June 30th as opposed to the wedding they had planned for April. Yet, no matter how much you plan and think ahead of possible alternatives, the reality will be slightly different. The same goes in the classroom. I have taught private music students as well as in schools for over thirty years and although some of the high school and middle school math, information processing, band, choir and Christian ethics (with a smattering of science and accounting thrown in) were the exact same courses, I cannot say they were presented the same or even covered the exact same concepts or learning objectives. You can plan and postulate, but when you get your ‘guests’ in front of you, the ‘atmosphere’ affects what can be accomplished. The context affects the presentation of the content. I found there was an equal amount of similarity between years of teaching the same course as there was between teaching the same year of students from Saskatchewan to British Columbia curriculum (which granted, was similar for mathematics and music but wildly out of date in a variety of ways for information processing/design courses). Even our well-planned wedding celebration changed significantly due to drizzling rain and the relaxed nature of our guests. We were able to incorporate some of the frame while making a consistent effort to remove and edit the parts of it that were not working for us, just the way you need to work a curriculum according to Blades.

For me, hosting a wedding or presenting a curriculum needs to include a flexible plan so reaction to the immediate context is possible. You do not want to lose the voices of your guests or your students because this diminishes their joy and engagement in the experience.

Resources

Blades, D. (1997) Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse: Conversations from Home. JCT, 11(4), 125-155

Egan, K. (2003) What is Curriculum? Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 9-16.