Educational Technology – Page 3

Tag Archive for: Educational Technology

Open Education 101: Changing What You Know and How You Know It

If new developments in information communications technologies (ICT) are the bridge for the digital divide, what is the content — and, more importantly, the quality of it — that is going to be delivered?

This question, at the heart of developing any ICT4Education program, seemed more relevant and crucial yesterday while listening to US Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, give her keynote speech at the Open Source Higher Education event at the Center for American Progress here in Washington, DC.

Kanter clearly understands the potential value and opportunities for open educational resources (OER) as well as the government’s role in facilitating and monitoring their use. A long standing advocate for open education and government policies to make it sustainable, she and a panel of experts from several universities and OER interest groups discussed how these resources can impact the affordability and access to education in the US.

Giving a brief description of the current OER field, External Relations Director at MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), Steve Carson, used The Hewlett Foundation’s definition of OER as “high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” MIT’s OCW Consortium, a community of over 250 universities that offers roughly 17,000 courses in 20 languages, is just one of several examples of how institutions and education professionals are using this technology to build networks and pool information and resources that can be continually reviewed and revised, essential to setting high standards for the quality of the materials.

But how are OER programs and policies affecting the developing world? Sally Johnstone, Vice President for Academic Advancement at Western Governors University, spoke about a few exciting new initiatives such as the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Guidelines on Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, a new framework for using OER in appropriate ways. UNESCO has also created an OER Wiki allowing the global OER community to share and collaborate on developing new resources, as well as an innovative OER Platform for sharing resources between teachers, learners, and education professionals.

In addition, Johnstone mentioned OER Africa, an revolutionary initiative and first of it’s kind in the region which was established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE). Focusing on agriculture, health education, foundation courses, and teacher education, the program supports and develops digital materials to increase equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, skills and learning across the African continent.

It was clear by the end of the panelist’s discussion that open education is changing the way that classes and textbooks are being developed and accessed in America. However, some issues still need to be addressed such as creating standard quality evaluation techniques and developing policies for a sustainable market. The US government has already taken a step in this direction when the Department of Labor and the Department of Education created an education fund in January 2011 that would grant $2 billion to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges.

Perhaps with more government initiatives such as this, as well as guidelines that encompass both OER and ICT technologies, open education will create more networks and cross more borders to make education accessible on a global scale. When discussing the government’s role in open education, Under Secretary Kanter quoted president Obama from a speech he gave at Macomb Community College in Michigan in 2009. “Even as we repair brick and mortar buildings, we have an opportunity to build a new virtual infrastructure to complement the education and training community colleges can offer. We’ll support the creation of a new online – and open-source – clearinghouse of courses so that community colleges across the country can offer more classes without building more classrooms.”

February 9, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How ICTs Can Empower Blind Students: Souktel’s New Audio Service in Palestine

Lately there has been a lot of talk about how mobile phones can improve the access to and quality of education in the classroom. But how has the technology affected students with special needs?

Souktel, an organization that designs and delivers mobile phone services for finding jobs and connecting aid agencies with communities in need, announced Tuesday that it has developed a new mobile audio service that is empowering blind and low-literacy communities. The voice messaging system allows users to record messages online and send them to multiple phones easily and efficiently. The messages can then be retrieved by the recipients through using a voice-activated service or touch-tone audio menu, allowing easy access to information for the visually impaired and illiterate.

As part of Souktel’s mission to give low-income communities the information they need to improve their lives, Nureddin Amro, founder of the Siraj al-Quds School in East Jerusalem for both blind and sighted students, is now able to use this innovation to record messages online and send them to the mobile phones of students, staff, and parents. “It saves a lot of time and money,” says Amro, “I love using it. We sent a message just yesterday [to several hundred people] announcing the launch of a new program and the services and activities that will start February 1st … And I’ll send another one out tomorrow to advertise the beginning of second semester.”

Nureddin, visually handicapped and an innovator himself, has pioneered a new integrated-education approach to teaching visually impaired students, allowing them equal opportunities in school and providing them with the necessary skills to becoming accepted and integrated into their communities. Recognized for his advocacy for disabled students’ rights and groundbreaking work at the school, Nurredin was named an Arab World Social Innovator by the Synergos Institue in New York, the organization which funded the Souktel project.

Using mobile phones in education is certainly not a new idea but mobile learning, commonly referred to as mLearning, is such a new opportunity for many schools within developing countries that searching for documented examples of it’s application to aid blind students yields few results. Computer-based technology, or eLearning, has already provided tools that are helping visually impaired students. In fact, Nureddin’s Siraj al-Quds School is already using ‘talking computer’ technology which uses an assistive learning computer program designed for blind students.

But through identifying more cases where Souktel’s services can be used, as well as exploring new creative ways in how mlearning can be introduced to help, not only blind students, but all students with special needs, these new technologies promise to aid education and informing low-literacy populations. “In almost every developing country, illiteracy and disability are massive challenges,” says Souktel president Jacob Korenblum. “When a large percentage of the community can’t read, they can’t get the basic information they need for daily life: Where to find a doctor, where to find emergency food supplies.” For Souktel, mobile audio services have become a growing part of its work and will be a major focus for 2012.

February 2, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Learning, Freedom and the Web: Mozilla’s eBook Explores and Offers How-Tos

Mozilla published a book last month that offers a glimpse at how open-source technology is shaping the field of education. The book entitled Learning, Freedom and the Web written by Anya Kamenetz and some of the 400 participants of the first Mozilla Festival held in Barcelona in 2010, explores possible answers to the questions: How can the ideas of the open source movement help foster learning? What are the most effective ways to bring learning to everyone? How does openness help the spread of knowledge?

The book contains session notes from the festival, quotes and blogs from leading experts, key-findings from current projects, as well as several how-tos including how to create your own ebook. The format of the book itself follows the ethos of the minds which collaborated to create it so that printed copies are available for purchase but it can also be downloaded as a PDF for free or accessed in an easy-to-use web version that includes video clips.

Exploring ideas such as the concept of industrialized education, the future of the physical library, and the quality and sustainability of open content, contributors include promising new ideas and tools that can be used to develop and share educational resources. For people who are unfamiliar with these concepts or are interested in developing their own open educational resources (OER), the book’s easy-to-follow instructions and format make it a great introduction to open-source technologies and their applications.

Helpful how-tos include difficulty level, amount of time to develop, who they involve and benefit, as well as steps. Topics include:

Creating an open education resource
Contract grading
Adopting an open textbook
Creating your own how-to
Creating your own ebook
Creating your own festival
Teaching and learning with Wikipedia

Learning, Freedom and the Web, both the book and the festival, might well serve as a barometer for the level of involvement and development of this new open source movement. When faced with the question of the movement’s future, authors leave the reader with a need to contribute and collaborate. “What really keeps a community going? Shared work, shared goals, shared fun, shared vocabulary, and shared rituals. There doesn’t have to be one ultimate unified vision. The idea of what learning will mostly look like in ten years, 50 years, or 100 years remains fuzzy, and that’s by design, because one definition of an improved future is one that has a greater diversity of choices than in the past.”

January 31, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Report: 3 Projects for Policy Development

UNESCO released a report last week introducing three exciting new projects that promise to shape how policies are developed for mobile learning programs. Within the year, UNESCO will develop and release a set of policy guidelines, commission and publish ten working papers, and introduce four pilot projects in teacher development in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal.

The report was a summary of project goals as well as an overview of discussions and ideas organized by participants at UNESCO’s first Mobile Learning Week (MLW). The event which was held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris last month drew approximately 30 experts in mobile learning and 100 participants from the fields of mobile technology and education to discuss the use of mobile technologies in the classroom.

Policy Guidelines:

The most challenging but promising of the three UNESCO initiatives is the development of a set of policy guidelines due to be released by the end of 2012. There are currently many examples of the use of mobile technologies in the classroom but few are supported by – or the result of – effective and sustainable policy-making initiatives. Through discussions between UNESCO, MLW participants, and a growing global community of mobile learning educators and leaders, these new guidelines will be broad enough to encompass different cultural contexts, stakeholders, and technologies so that they can be used by national governments and educators and evolve with new developments in mobile technologies.

Discussions surrounding this topic generated general considerations and challenges including:

Consideration must be given to the perspectives of the stakeholders (mobile network operators, teachers, students, etc.) and their interaction with each other
Guidelines should be flexible and be able to adapt to new technologies and their applications
Costs of internet access and personal-ownership of devices remains a challenge
Efforts should be made to dispel negative views of mobile technologies within the classroom
Lessons should be learned from past examples of successful and unsuccessful projects
Mobile technology should support a well developed curriculum and pedagogy and not become the focus of the content

10 Mobile Learning Working Papers:

To provide research information for the policy guidelines and teacher development projects, UNESCO has commissioned ten working papers: five that will investigate mobile learning policies in the five major world regions (Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and North America) and five that will investigate mobile technologies for teacher development and support. Drafts of the papers were presented and discussed at the MLW.

Photo credit: http://www.redorbit.com

The five papers on mobile learning policies won’t provide an in-depth analysis of each region but should give a general overview and provide examples of policy development. The papers will explore the pervasive lack of mobile learning policies around the world, observing the misconception by some policy makers that mobile technologies are distracting from learning and should be banned in schools. They will also include lessons learned from success stories of initiatives supported by governments and tech-savvy model teachers.

The additional five papers will examine professional development for teachers using mobile technologies in the classroom as well as how professional development can be delivered through mobile technology to teachers across the five regions. These papers will observe how mobile technologies are being used already, how they can be used in the future, and explore the use of mobile technologies with other educational tools and resources.

4 Teacher Development Pilot Projects:

Finally, UNESCO will launch four pilot projects to explore how mobile technologies can be used to provide support and professional development for teachers in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal. Though the projects are still in the planning stages, MLW participants were able to provide input to important questions such as “What guidelines and understandings should steer the projects? What does the organization need to do, address, and keep in mind to best ensure the projects it launches are successful?”

To learn more about the MLW participant’s comments and ideas about these new projects and mobile learning policy development, see the full report here.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

ICTs in the Classroom: 8 Recommendations from Zambia

A new report by Aptivate and the Centre for Commonwealth Education (University of Cambridge) suggests that there are practices that can be utilized to make ICT use in classrooms more effective. The study, conducted in part by iSchool.zm, an online multi-media eLearning package designed to cover the whole of the Zambian school curriculum, examined underprivileged school communities in Zambia.

The project entitled Appropriate New Technologies to Support Interactive Teaching in Zambian schools (ANTSIT) was funded by the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID), and provided a detailed report including recommendations for introducing future ICT4Ed projects in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Future ICT4Ed programs can benefit from the researchers’ recommendations detailed in the report:

Purchase classroom sets, including a teacher laptop and student laptops, and don’t forget storage and transport needs

Provide training to teachers on the ICT tools and how to use them creatively, incorporating them into a participatory teaching approach

Use ICTs with non-ICT resources, such as mini blackboards, a cheap and invaluable teaching aid

Choose cheap netbooks (e.g. the Classmate netbook) over Android-based tablets which may be promising in the future but currently make keyboard-based entry activities difficult

Don’t mix multiple ICT devices within a single class if cost and maintenance problems are an issue

Invest time in setting up and configuring computers well so that tech problems don’t interfere with lesson planning or class time

Consider resource sharing between student computers through local wireless networks

Enable ICT ownership through microfinance

During the 6-month project, a team of researchers conducted over 30 visits to two under-resourced Zambian primary schools. Through observing classes and working with local science and mathematics teachers, the team was able to analyze and compare the effectiveness and applicability of a variety of mobile technologies in the classroom. Netbook, tablet and laptop computers, e-Book and wiki readers, digital cameras and mini-projectors along with Open Educational Resources and Open Source software were all considered when determining the most appropriate and versatile resources for creating an environment supportive of learning through active participation.

“Based on our understanding of ICT use in schools and of successful pedagogies such as interactive teaching plus collaborative, project- and enquiry-based learning, and given limited resources, what does an effective ICT-enabled Zambian school look like?”

The team worked with participating teachers not only to create lesson plans utilizing assigned ICTs, but also to ensure a participatory and interactive learning approach which research shows is key to ownership, sustainability, and replication. The report concluded that considering the often outdated and passive pedagogies used in many Zambian schools, the ‘most appropriate’ device is largely dependent on the particular classroom circumstances and the teaching goals and methods used by the teacher.

In addition to the full report, researchers from the Centre for Commonwealth Education, Bjoern Hassler and Sara Hennessy, created a video clip summarizing their findings that they presented at the “Mobile Technologies for Education: The experience in the developing world”, an event sponsored by Cambridge Education Services and co-hosted by the Humanitarian Centre and the Centre for Commonwealth Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The event was part of a themed year on ICT4D (ICT for Development) run by the Humanitarian Centre in partnership with technology company ARM.

January 24, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Learning Week: Paving the Way for Policy Development

Nearly 200 mobile technology experts and international education leaders met at the first annual UNESCO Mobile Learning Week last month, December 12-16, at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. This was the first such UNESCO meeting in which mobile technology took center stage.

Ministry of Educations’ officials, along with other experts from the fields of mobile technology and education, discussed the potential uses and benefits of mobile technology within the field of education in developing countries which has been informally debated and discussed the world over, the technology’s limited accessibility often hindering sustainable policy-changing actions. The meeting was prompted in part because of the growing access to mobile networks now available to 90% of the world’s population and 80% of the population living in rural areas, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in its “The World in 2010” report.

These figures have certainly gained the attention of top-policy makers. Discussions on how to use mobile technologies to transform educational processes will contribute to the anticipated Guidelines on Mobile Learning Policy which is currently being developed by UNESCO and due to be released in 2012. The guidelines will help to develop the future of mobile learning beyond the UNESCO global movement of Education For All (EFA) goals.

The weeklong meeting was split into two events. Leading officials in the ICT field gathered for the International Experts Meeting on Mobile Learning which was limited to selected attendees. Following the meeting, representatives from Nokia, Pearson Foundation, SK Telecom, ISTE, iLearn4Free, ICTP, Microsoft, Commonwealth of Learning, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Intel, Ericsson, KERIS and the Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Alliance showcased recent developments in mobile technologies and projects on mobile learning from the field during the UNESCO Symposium on Mobile Learning.

Several keynote speakers at the symposium identified and discussed major challenges to implementing policies and innovative ideas for creating sustainable solutions. Stephane Boyera, Lead Program Manager of the World Wide Web Foundation, stressed the importance of considering the sustainability, scalability, and replicability of mobile learning initiatives during his presentation, “Mobile Technologies, Education and Socio-Economic Development”. He indicated that the main obstacles to development are directly linked to policy makers’ understanding of specific cultural needs.

Dr. Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean for Stanford University School of Education, spoke about the contextualized innovations in education and mobile empowerment design in his presentation, “Future Trends in Mobile Technology Development: What Can We Expect in the Next 5, 10, and 15 Years?”

The event achieved UNESCO’s goal of promoting the potential contribution of mobile technology to education and promises to lead to positive changes in policy development. Working papers that were developed during the event are due to be released sometime in early 2012.

January 18, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Are Robots the School Teachers of the Future?

Have you seen the 1990-film “Class of 1999?” In it, a Seattle school system is so ridden with gang violence and drug abuse that not even the police will dare to intervene. The Department of Defense is brought on to implement a program where robot teachers, referred to as Cyborgs, are employed to educate students and provide discipline when students misbehave.

With programmed tactics for corporal punishment, they have no problem maintaining control of a classroom, but as they develop into more intelligent entities, their decisions trend towards opting to kill off delinquent students.

As a disclaimer, I will point out that I, in no way, recommend this movie for quality or even for entertainment. It does, however, instill appropriate fear of what can happen if we begin to rely on machines for educating students, particularly in developing areas or areas with unstable education practices.

Realistic educational technology

1999 was a bit of an opportunistic estimate for when robots would appear in classrooms. In the past decade, however, advancements in technology have made instruction simulation so effective that the necessity of a well-educated, high quality teacher in a classroom has been brought into question. Several benefits can even be drawn from allowing technology to dictate student education in developing countries.

Relying on technology for classroom instruction creates an even playing field where all students are learning everything that needs to be covered according to curriculum standards. They are all also receiving the same high quality information. This cuts out concern for poor, unreliable, or novice teachers, a problem that unfortunately is prevalent in many developing countries.
Making use of technology ensures proper assessment of students so that unbiased decisions can be made about student progression. This cuts out the worry of teachers “passing students along” rather than ensuring that they really know the material.
Taking advantage of technology for student instruction can greatly cut down on teacher salary costs. By placing the burden of teaching lessons on programmed instruction, paying extra for a well-educated teacher with lots of experience becomes superfluous.

There are currently plenty examples of schools in developed nations embracing this technology. Just last week I was in a classroom that made use of SMART Board technology and associated “virtual teacher” apps. The 4th grade teacher in charge of the room told me that she believed the technology would soon replace her job.

For those not acquainted with the technology, SMART Boards are interactive white boards that can project computer displays and allow students to interact with them through touch. SMART pens allow students to write on the screen, and the board is able to translate the student’s handwriting into computer text and then save it as a Document file on a connected computer. Resources and applications supplied with the board feature “virtual teachers” that provide a lesson, ask students for feedback, and then advance when students give correct responses.

Implementing this technology in a classroom requires existing infrastructure for electricity and Internet, an instructor device (desktop/laptop/iPad) to connect to, and software to enable the use of all aspects of the hardware.

Sound a bit sophisticated for use in the developing world? SMART Technologies doesn’t think so. In December of 2010, they launched the 400 Series SMART Boards, providing the technology at lower cost exclusively to schools in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Asia Pacific, Latin America and Mexico. These schools could now purchase an interactive whiteboard and short-throw projector for $2,599. This figure does not include software, maintenance, or professional development costs.

Even more outlandish, in 2009 the human-like robot teacher, Saya, was introduced to a classroom in Japan. By manipulating the rubber molding of her face, this robot was programmed to express six different emotions – surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, and sadness.

It could tell students to be quiet and was even reported to make children cry after reprimanding them. While not currently able to deliver classroom instruction, there is hope that by integrating this sort of “emotional” robot teacher with existing “virtual teacher” tools, this technology will change the way today’s classrooms are instructed. The cost of a made-to-order robot teacher from Japan: $51,000.

Let’s take a moment to not even consider these higher cost technologies. More prevalent in the developing world, software is employed on low-cost laptops, desktops, or tablets to simulate teacher instruction. In these classrooms, an entire curriculum can be imparted to students through a computer program, making a quality human teacher unnecessary.

So can technology replace teachers?

Through evidence pointed out above, I am inclined to say yes, or eventually yes. Should technology replace teachers in the developing world? My firm and whole-hearted stance is that it should not.

Think back to primary school. I bet that just about everyone reading this post can point out one teacher that was particularly inspiring. In developing countries where truancy policies are enforced to a much lesser extent, inspiring teachers are vital in encouraging kids to stay in school, rather than opting to stay at home to work and provide for the family. Expectations for students to continue education and earn a promising career are also lower in developing countries, a tendency that can only be transformed with motivational human role models within the classroom.

Unfortunately, there are no inspiring robot teachers. They are all programmed to spit knowledge out at students and expect students to spit it back at them. A computer cannot develop personal distinctions between students. It cannot develop creative or innovative ideas for teaching material in a new way. It cannot comment on papers, providing students with extremely valuable positive feedback or critiques. It cannot pull a struggling student aside and determine if there are personal issues related to his/her performance. It cannot encourage students with a particular strength and interest in a subject to consider certain career paths.

Many will make the claim that technology excites students in developing countries, and this makes them want to be in school and learn. While I agree that interactive technology can add a level of student interest over teacher lectures, once the novelty of technology and computer instruction wears off, students will not maintain this excitement level.

Furthermore, in developing regions where a baseline for education standards and expectations has not been refined, employing technology as an alternative to human instruction makes it much more difficult to gauge design specifications for effective instructional software. Creating instructional software requires having a firm grasp on student expectations and an understanding of what motivates students of a particular background to learn. This is more intuitive in developed countries where methods for effective student instruction have been extensively researched and practiced.

In developing nations, education should be viewed as more than just imparting knowledge. It is responsible for adequately preparing a student for a role in the world. While technology can be a great tool for promoting interactive learning and providing information beyond the scope of a teacher’s knowledge base, it cannot replace the intrinsic value of having a human devoted to a child’s educational development present in a classroom.

October 5, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Can Machines Replace Teachers in Education Systems?

“Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be.” – David Thornburg

Does this statement make you cringe? Squirm a bit in your chair? I’m not surprised if it does. As access to technology proliferates among schools in developing countries, a call for improved teacher training, curriculum, and methods of assessment seems vital to ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable. How else can you ensure that children are using time spent on a computer effectively and for educational purposes?

Despite this logical breakdown, research conducted in India over the past decade disputes these views. Let me preface an explanation of this research with a brief story:

January 2011, Arusha, Tanzania : A brand new computer lab has been set up at Yakini Primary School, and all of the students are extremely excited to use a computer for the first time. Even though there are 13 computers in the room, the solar-powered generator electricity only allows 4 to be turned on at a given time. When the third year class enters the lab, 8 students huddle around each computer.Today, after spending the past few days talking about the uses of a computer and its parts, we will finally be turning the computers on and seeing them in action. The plan is to practice using a mouse by working with windows. The class assignment is to open the ‘My Documents’ folder, maximize the window, minimize it, re-maximize it, and then close it. ”Once you have completed the assignment, please do not touch the computer. Just wait for me to get around to your group.” I begin working with the group of students at the first computer.

By the time I reach the students at the last computer, I am quite surprised to find that, not only have they completed the assignment on their own, but the desktop background has also been changed from the image of green hills to a Black Labrador dog. Awestricken at these novice geniuses, I ask the students, “How did you do that?” With each student chiming in his or her own input, they navigate their way back through the steps to where they changed the image. I’m so impressed that I do not bother reprimanding for not following instructions.

This story illustrates New Dehli researcher, Sugata Mitra’s, suggestion that students using technology in unstructured, self-organized groups can help each other guide their own learning. In 1999, Mitra began experimenting with educational technology by building a PC with a high-speed internet connection into a wall in the slums of New Delhi. He then left the computer with no instructions for use or devices for language translation, planning to observe how individuals interacted with it.

Soon two children were huddled around the computer. Within minutes they had taught themselves how to point and click and were browsing the internet by the end of the day. After repeating this “Hole in the Wall” experiment throughout rural communities in India, he came to the conclusion that children, living in areas that lack adequate resources for instruction, could teach each other how to use a computer by working together in groups.

He makes several arguments for the benefits of this type of learning in classrooms:

It reduces the costs of efforts such as One Laptop per Child. While Mitra supports the design of the laptop, he believes there should be one laptop for every four children so that groups can work through their setbacks together.
When children are learning technology and exploring interests in an unstructured setting, they become excited about learning and retain much more.
Expecting children to work through the dilemmas on their own teaches them innovation and creative problem solving, two skills essential to any job. Instead of producing students that are able to memorize a laundry list of items, this approach produces students that know how to pinpoint where to find the same information.
Having children work together in groups teaches teamwork and collaboration.

I do not doubt that there is a place for Mitra’s recommendation of self-organized group learning in ICT4Ed. It’s a great opportunity for students to explore their curiosities, learn skills in innovation and problem solving, and retain steps to a much greater extent than they can with rote memorization.

However, I do believe that it is important to discern an appropriate time and circumstance for this method of learning. For instance, providing students with an allotment of time each day to freely roam the internet together, researching topics of their own interests, could be a great opportunity to keep them excited about technology and to show them how they can find answers to pressing questions and work through problems on their own.

This, however, can not replace the role of a teacher and a curriculum. Knowing how to use the tools for gathering information is an excellent skill but will not help a student requiring computer knowledge at a time when tools are not at hand. Following a structured curriculum ensures that students have the foundation of fact-based information to make them productive even when technology is not readily available. Furthermore, it ensures that all students are participating and learning the skills that they will need.

To illustrate these points, let’s look at back at my story and point out some of the gaps:

All of the students may now remember exactly how to change a desktop background. This does not mean, however, that they know how to verbalize the steps that they took without the computer screen directly in front of them. If someone were to ask one of the students to write down the steps, the student would not know the terms needed to describe the steps discernibly. Having a solid, curriculum-based foundation in educational technology and being assessed on it without a computer screen makes a student much more productive in times when technology is not available.
Students may have worked together to describe their steps to me, but this does not account for the one student, towards the back of the group, that is not paying attention or contributing to the group’s input. Having teachers and providing assessments can make sure that all students are gaining knowledge, not just the ones that put forth the most effort.
Changing a computer background may have been a great lesson working through computer screens to bring about a change on the computer, but it is not much of a useful skill in technology. If computer instruction consists of students roaming about the computer, exploring their interests, there will be quite of bit of pertinent information that they will likely not take the time to learn on their own. Making the desktop background look pretty is much more interesting to a student than learning the difference between RAM and ROM or how a file system works. These are skills that are important, so it is necessary to have a curriculum in place.

Taking this into consideration, while Sugata Mitra sets forth an interesting model for student learning that may have a place during a fraction of the school day, teachers, curriculums, and assessments cannot be replaced by machines and curious children.

August 26, 2011/by actualize

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