Edmodo was introduced in course module 1. I have downloaded the app and made an account, but I've never used it with students. I find Moodle and Google’s applications very useful and I’ve been working with those. In Moodle there is plenty of opportunities to create different kinds of assignments It also provides many possibilities for assessment and it enables peer review as well. Basically it includes all the functions that Edmodo does and a whole lot more, but of course it is far more complicated to use.
I have used Google Forms in order to gather feedback from students and for creating self evaluation sheets for them. For these purposes Google Forms is one of the best tools. Google Docs is useful for creating and sharing. In Google Docs I can both comment students’ works and see what kind of feedback they have been giving to each other.
From quite early on I realized that I can’t carry on the business as usual. Up until the moment our first student group got their iPads I had been encouraging my students to discuss and share ideas about the issues at hand. I wanted them to practice the art of thinking and challenge each other and teacher as much as they cloud. And every now and then we managed to create some good discussions in my class - at least at Finnish scale. But not anymore. Things had changed and I wasn't sure whether it the change I wanted.
I had been in favor of using tablets in classroom, but sometimes you should be careful with your wishes - as Oscar Wilde put it - those may come true! After introducing these deceitful devices in my class the student seemed to become more passive and less willing to take part on our common discussions. It should have been another way around!
I thought that using tablets would make my students more active and that they would be somehow initiative in finding new ways to learn. But instead of having a group of active learners I ended up having passive consumers of social media and entertainment - if I may exaggerate a bit. I really had to find some new ways to activate my students. Interesting topics and provocative questions were simply not enough anymore since too many of my students found the attractions of the internet far too tempting. On her video Diana Bannister mentioned rules as one solution for this problem. Yes we can discuss about the principles together and try to engage students to the proper use of tablets, but I am afraid that in my case it is not enough. Upper secondary education is optional and students in this age should start to guide themselves. I can't always be there defining boundaries, they should start to do it themselves. I think that the key is new kind of practices in the classroom and a whole new way of assessing students learning.
I've been constantly asking my students through questionnaires how we should use iPads in the classroom. The most common answer is “making notes” and “to look for information”. Really? You've got a quite expensive notebook there if the only thing you going with it is making notes! Yes they are very skillful what comes to iPad games and entertainment. And at the same time they don’t seem to have any kind of idea how to use these tablets for educational purposes or how to use those as a tool for thinking! But I cannot blame them. How could they know better? Nobody taught them these things and I guess it’s now my job to fill this gap.
What do I need to consider at a classroom level when using tablets? I've been thinking about this question nearly two years and I think I've proceeded a bit, but not much. Let me put here some of the questions I have noticed to be important:
How to find meaningful tasks or projects which would advance the learning?
How to create collaborative learning?
How to assess the learning with tablets?
How to exercise thinking skills (or 21st century skills / competences) with tablets?
But we don’t have to be alone with these questions, 'cause there is many useful networks. For me the facebook groups were indispensable in finding good practices of using iPads in the classroom. But those groups can be pretty discouraging as well, since they seem to be full of techno-pedagogical superhumans with no leisure time or family. Besides the help of the social media I I've tried to take part as many in-service training events as I could. That is the reason why I wanted to join this mooc, I’m eager to learn more.
And one more thing. Here I have one outcome of our projects (the only one in English):
As I have mentioned we have been lucky enough to have iPads provided for every student. But to be honest we didn't implement this technological renewal as well as we could have done. I think we didn't got enough updating education for teachers and it took some time until we could understand the possibilities which came along with the new technology. For me personally the new technology wasn't any problem, the pedagogy was. This kind of tablet-pedagogy was pretty new for all of us and it didn't matter how well one could handle all the apps and technological contraptions if there was no change in pedagogical practices. I guess I wasn't the only one who didn't quite know how to plan lessons which could fully benefit these new possibilities.
So, what do I need to consider at whole-school level when using tablets?
I think it would be wise to choose beforehand some applications, a learning environment and some cloud service which would be used in the whole school. Then teachers should be introduced with these and made familiar with the pedagogical opportunities included in these applications and platforms. Then I would provide enough time for teachers to share their good and sometimes not so good practices so that they could encourage each other.
There is rarely enough time to plan and think your everyday pedagogy in the middle of these occupied school routines. So how could one ever have the needed time to carefully plan this kind of major pedagogical shift? I guess we just have to prioritize. Definitely one of the key things is to create time and space to think how to teach and learn with tablets. Because it can't be the same old thing with a fancy new toy.
Using tablets as part of learning makes it possible to practice many important skills. Amount of knowledge is increasing all the time and we can only absorb a tiny part of it. So I am convinced that now and increasingly in the future we have to concentrate on teaching children different kinds of skills rather than pieces of information. With tablets we can learn thinking skills, collaboration skills, technical skills etc. Of course one can exercise these skills without tablets as well, but tablets offer many helpful ways to do this.
In short I think that tablets as a part of new kind of pedagogy will enable the following:
Collaborative learning
Personalized learning
Critical thinking
Learning by doing
I assume that we'll get back to these issues later on this course.
