Why e-learning?

While surfing away looking for new ideas to try, I came across the following great exchange in the comments section of this blog post. It's a very good question and an equally good answer, so I thought it was worth putting it up here.

Question: OK, at the risk of having to endure a barrage of shrieks about how I don't get it, why is your idea of having the students tweeting [posting their thoughts using Twitter] any better than my incredibly radical idea, which I have used successfully for over 30 years, of allowing them to talk to each other?

I don't mean to sound as facetious as I do, but being a devil's advocate, isn't this a solution seeking a problem?

I think questions like this really need to be asked, because there is always the danger of the 'too many tools' problem outlined earlier in the same comments section. Anyway, carrying on...

Answer: Quite right. Talking to each other is an excellent idea. Still works. Always will. Except when it doesn't.

Have you ever asked your class a question only to be confronted with the unscalable "Wall Of Silence?" Have you ever tried to have everyone in your class participate n a class discussion only to be faced with the kids on the fringes that refuse to speak up? Have you ever had a kid in your class so painfully shy that talking to them, even in a one-to-one context, leads only to alienating them as opposed to helping them learn?

The advantage here would be to give the quieter students a voice that is equally as aloud as any of their classmates. Also, in math class, kids are frighteningly shy of making a mistake. The anonymity afforded here may give them the courage to express their confusions and correct their misunderstandings.

Making students thinking transparent helps all of them learn for at least two reasons:

(1) It levels the playing field. The outgoing and verbally expressive student is heard at the same volume as the more reserved classmate without being stifled themselves.

(2) Experts think differently than novices. By making students thoughts transparent to each other the novices see how the better students conceptualize their learning. Moreover, the teacher gains a very sharp picture of the novice's misunderstandings and can help them make corrections.

We don't do away with group work and having students talk to each other; we give them another modality to express themselves so that they can take an equal stance as a member of the classroom learning community.

Interesting! Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wikis

We have been investigating whether wikis could be useful for us, initially as a department but eventually spread across the whole school.

Wikis are best known in Wikipedia, and the concept involves lots of pages which anyone can edit, and which are all cross-linked to each other. They can work really well for presenting resources as well as managing collaboration between people who are not in face-to-face contact. Although we are all in a relatively small site, any teacher will tell you that you don't always get time to see your colleagues from day to day, and this is doubly true in a music department!

We're going to install Mediawiki in school and see what we can do with it. In the end, I wonder whether a wiki system could end up as the best means of doing what we are currently trying to do with Simply Click? An RCT-wide wiki system could end up as a huge resource, both for collecting knowledge and for collaborating across the whole of the authority, opening up new means of communication between teachers, as well as between us and the other areas of RCT.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are very much considered a Scary Thing by many people, or just something for people to have fun with (think of all the pupils with their Bebo and Myspace accounts). However, business has begun to wake up to the useful communication and collaboration possibilities opened up by having their own versions of these tools.

Having worked with Moodle and seen the capabilities of wikis and forums in particular, I think this could be a very important thing to investigate. Moodle even apparently has a peer-review system, which I have yet to try and use. Sad to say that Simply Click does not have any of these collaborative tools as yet, being mainly a tool for creating microsites, or for sending messages and assignments around the place.

Suw Charman is a social software consultant who has written an interesting post on her blog about online social networking in business, and I think a good amount of what she says is relevant to the education world. I wonder whether we will eventually have a pilot project related to this interesting area of blended learning?

PS - wireless internet access installed on Friday, PDAs are go!

Could these kick-start mobile learning?

I've been wondering recently whether the Asus eee (see here) could be a great device for mobile learning.

It's very small, surprisingly cheap (considerably less than the PDAs we were issued with for the latest project) and has apparently been almost impossible to get hold of since it was launched! They have caused quite a stir, and have been top of many geeky-types' 'must-have' list since they were announced.

While PDAs are ultra-portable, the tiny screen size and lack of keyboard could be a real headache for some mobile learning applications. Could this be the answer? Could Gareth Rees be buying one each for us for Christmas as we speak? (only joking, Gareth...)

PDA Progress

Progress has not been the fastest with the PDAs so far, though that's mainly because my plans for them involve them being able to access the Internet.

Our school is very short of space for sixth form students to do independent study, so my idea was to use our PDAs to allow them to use all the strange little rooms you find in music departments everywhere (practice rooms, even instrument store cupboards!) to access our VLE and the Internet in order to do research. The collection of podcasts I have been working on would then be available for our students to listen to in free periods, anywhere in the department (or in the school!).

Although we have lots of computers, we also have huge classes, so often our keener students turn up hoping to get on a machine, and find that I've got 30 or more younger pupils in there, and every machine has three people in front of it. So a 'take-anywhere' Internet access solution would be ideal as we have four practice rooms and a store room that are empty more often than our main classrooms.

Unfortunately, we don't have any wireless Internet yet, though the equipment is apparently on order. It's always frustrating having to wait for equipment, but on the other hand we are being quite demanding as a department (in a good way!), steaming off ahead asking for all these new technologies, and to be fair the management are humouring us to a very high degree so far!

I have high hopes that we will be accessing the Internet early in 2008, and I will have plenty of evidence to share with you all.

In the meantime, I have been carrying one PDA around with me and thoroughly exploring its capabilities. Moodle (our chosen VLE for the time being) renders fairly well on the small screen, though it can be a bit slow, and scrolling around the screens can be quite tiring. With that in mind, I've taken today off timetable and have recreated some of the resource pages from our 'Music Podcast' course on Moodle in a PDA-friendly version, which I will host on the school's web server when I get back in next week.

The pages are kept extra-simple, with the text from the original Moodle screens presented with only the most basic HTML markup. This should allow the PDAs to display the pages in a much more usable format, and should also speed up page loading times significantly.

Watch this space for more, and if anyone wants to know about how I went about creating the pages, just ask!

Tom

UPDATE: You can see the PDA friendly site here.

Sharing project ideas

It would be great if everyone involved in the project could post a couple of lines about what you hope to achieve with your PDAs and what sort of activities you will be doing with your groups. There is so much evidence of how mobile technologies are engaging learners and enhancing the learning - we really are at the cutting edge of learning with this project.

Welcome

Welcome to the getmobile2learn blog where teachers and pupils in schools in Rhondda-Cynon-Taff can share their experiences of mobile learning.