How to reduce achievement gap using technology_Final project video_Chloe & Sungmin

Week 8: Being a lion, not a lamb ---Educational Technology needs a new image

Technology applies current knowledge for some useful purpose. It uses evolving knowledge to adapt and improve the system to which the knowledge applies. Using technology, teachers can create environments in which students actively engage in cognitive partnerships (Hooper & Rieber, 1995).

In Hooper & Rieber's article "Teaching with Technology", they emphasized the importance of using technology in today's classrooms so as to optimize the class‘ engagement as well as efficiency. Then pointed out a melancholy phenomenon that although education has witnessed a multitude of both technology and innovation over the past 50 years, the educational system has scarcely changed during that time. But what about the before-and-after within the 50 years of the hospital OR room or the dentist's office?

old classroom

new classroom

old O.R. room

new O.R. room

old dentist's office

new dentist's office

If you walk slower than others, you will fall behind, regardless that you are walking forward. As we can see from the pictures. Compared to the vintage classroom, today's classroom has fancy chair-table sets and new type of "blackboard". This new form of multimedia took place of the traditional blackboard, helps the teaching in terms of time saving and clarity in display. However, are we satisfied with it? Is this enough that we can accept the change within 50 years' development, compared with the huge differences of O.R. room and the dentist's office?

I believe it's a big "No". Then how can teaching with technology facilitate deeper, more meaningful, cognitive processing? Effective technology-based teaching is more likely the result of teachers' abilities to design lessons based upon robust instructional principles than of the technology per se (Savenye, Davidson, & Smith, 1991). Hooper & Rieber then draw a conclusion that guidance for designing effective technology-based classrooms should be grounded in the literature on effective pedagogy in general.

Three principles to guide effective teaching:

Principle 1: Effective learners actively process lesson content.
Principle 2: Presenting information from multiple perspectives increases the durability of instruction.
Principle 3: Effective instruction should build upon students knowledge and experiences and be grounded in meaningful contexts.

Idea and product technologies must be united and teachers must venture beyond Familiarization and Utilization and into the Integration, Reorientation, and Evolution phases of technology use, all of which might contribute to the effectivity.

Educational Technology, should be acting as a king of lion, leverage the teaching to a higher level, rather than being a lamb, always led by a shepherd.

Reference:

Hooper, S., Rieber, L. (1995). Teaching with Technology, In A.C., Ornstein (Ed.), Teaching: Theory into Practice, (pp.154-170). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Storyboard for educational opportunity equility

By Sungmin and Chloe

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Augmented reality in education: opportunities and challenges

Let us see some data first.

In middle school in the U.S:

• 70 percent of middle school students use laptops for learning;
• 66 percent use desktops;
• 47 percent use smart phones;
• 25 percent use small tablets;
• 23 percent use larger tablets;
• 17 percent use basic e-book readers; and
• 12 percent still use netbooks.

In high school in the U.S:

• 75 percent of high school students use laptops for educational purposes;
• 65 percent use desktops;
• 60 percent use smart phones;
• 19 percent use full-size tablets;
• 17 percent use small tablets;
• 16 percent use basic e-book readers; and
• 10 percent use netbooks.

(Referred David Nagel, Report: Students Use Smart Phones and Tablets for School, Want More, 2013)

Some may call an “unsurprising” that more than 70% of middle school students use laptops and approximately 50% of the students own smartphones, so we might think about one question: why not schools and teachers begin to utilize these ubiquitous technology devices in the classroom? Would the use of these devices are going to detract students from the learning process or from contributing to future workplace skills?

Well, I say “almost yes”.

Now it’s time for students to obtain a new experience — augmented reality (AR)

What is augmented reality (AR)?

Wu et al (2013) summarized that as a bridge of virtual and real worlds, augmented reality creates a reality that is enhanced and augmented, through which allows learners to visualize complex spatial relationships and abstract concepts, experience phenomena that is not possible in the real world, interact with two- and three-dimensional synthetic objects in the mixed reality. It helps develop important practices and literacies that cannot be developed and enacted in other technology-enhanced learning environments.

Google Glass is probably the most famous AR cutting-edge devices, and one vivid example of the AR applications that is allowing you to get instant digital facts of your surroundings according to the use of GPS. As a technology readily available now, augmented reality holds great potential in education. Imagine how boring and abstruse a traditional geography lesson would be at school if the children could only be exposed to watch a text book or view some video of the lesson. However, with augmented reality technology like a 3D Solar System Model or Galileo talking directly to them, and they were able to interact with this augmented information. Teachers wouldn’t have a headache when teaching some phenomenon such as autorotation, revolution and retrograde motion. Children tend to learn better in the lesson if they see it from “a bigger picture”.

Augmented reality is a trend that is worth following as new apps and technologies are developed to make learning innovative, interesting and fun by scaffolding students’ curiosity to transfer complicated science learning to visually obtained design solutions. For example, AR allows students to add digital content to printed material, geographic locations and objects. Then using a smart device or tablet, they can scan an object and the digital content will appear immediately. The digital information can range from a link to a website, an invitation to make a phone call, a video, a 3D model or any other supported digital information.

Despite the fact that has been shown how AR systems can improve the learning in several education stages, there are still criticisms of AR. Will AR be widely used in education? Unlike Virtual Reality, which aims at replacing the perception of the world with an artificially created one, Augmented Reality has the goal of improving the user’s perception of the surrounding world, complementing reality, rather than completely replacing it. So, augmented reality has the potential to break into the education in following years, not as replacement but as helpful tool for teachers and students. I believe we should be embracing these opportunities.

Multiple Design Ideas and Parallel Prototyping

“When people create multiple alternatives in parallel, they produce higher-quality, more-diverse work and experience a greater increase in self-efficacy.” —Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L., and Klemmer, S. R. (2010.) ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 17, No. 4, Article 18

First, the definition:“ Parallel Prototyping” is the process of considering a range of potential design ideas simultaneously before selecting and refining one specific design approach. When applied before iterative design, parallel prototyping enables teams to more fully experiment with and investigate a wide range of opportunities in a design space. It can also help designers to avoid becoming fixated on a design, and avoid “hill climbing” toward a less superior result, which has been a long-standing criticism of the iterative design methodology. (Bella Martin, Bruce Hanington 2012)

According to S.P. Dow et al, theoretical benefits of parallel design:

·         Promote Comparison

·         Encourage Exploration

·         Foster Design Confidence

Contrasting the parallel design is the serial design: among multiple designs at the beginning, only one design concept is ever considered. This one design is repeatedly critiqued and revised. The only difference between the two conditions above was a matter of when participants received a critique on their ideas, after each concept or after multiple creations.

The following graphics explain the two different processes:

Fig. 1. The experiment manipulates when participants receive feedback during a design process: in serial after each design (top) versus in parallel on three, then two (bottom).

Fig. 2. Procedure for serial and parallel conditions, with timing.

Our goal is to combine the parallel design with our group’s (Sungmin and I) educational challenge question. As mentioned in my last blog, our challenge question is “how to overcome students' achievement gap caused by their family background”, such as (1) Parental education, (2) Parental occupation, (3) Home educational resources, (4) Home possession related to classical culture, (5) Books at home, and (6) Wealth. We decided to focus on the middle 3 items (i.e., Home educational resources, Home possession related classical culture, and Books at home).

During our last class meeting, we received tons of invaluable feedbacks and productive comments from our classmates. These helpful feedbacks all contributed to improve or rebuild our prototype.

We consider using technologies at the classroom level and the school level would be one of many possible ways to get over the gap. At least at the very beginning, the students would be supposed to be equally exposed to these resources. Furthermore, if students were provided with an opportunity to access these technologies later on through continuing school programs, such as after-school activity, equality in education in terms of educational resources would be guaranteed to some extent. For example, each classroom would be equipped with a lot of mobile devices (e.g., iPad) and students could have a free access to these devices. Teachers provide education mobile apps, which contain content knowledge or on-line resources (e.g., e-library information) for students. Or students could be invited to a virtual museum or music performance. All of these possibilities could contribute to reducing students' achievement gap to some degree. Besides, we are thinking about a “big family study plan”, or a “resource-sharing plan”, that is, different families (a mix of low-income, mid-class as well as affluent families) take turns to take care of a group that consists of 5 to 8 children on weekdays after school. On one side, the students can study in groups, having more interactions with each other, sharing ideas as well as learning materials and expensive devices. On the other side, this approach would provide more free time for parents; they only need to take care of the group of students once per week.


Since integrating the parallel approach into design practicum can inculcate healthy prototyping habits and help foster a positive outlook toward critique. We hope that by learning and using parallel design, we could gain more feedbacks then come up with a perfect, useful and practical solution to our challenge.