Defining Technology Integration

Ubiquitous: That is how I see successful and effective Technology Integration no matter which model or framework you follow.

Do I get the A+ for this post Kim? 🙂 Probably not yet, unless I expand on my statement. Right?

This first post for this course 4 of COETAIL has brought me back to my thoughts I expressed in course 1. Remember, we had to express our understanding of information technology, BLOOMS and SAMR, 21st century learning etc. and my blog posts were full of my own interrogative dialogues about my own views. I think Course 4 is going to see me expanding on those narratives and coming to a conclusion, my conclusion. It remains to see how my course mates and my instructor see my understanding and help me improve on it. Improve I shall, via my own research, work, experiences and more importantly by peer and instructor feedback for life long learning is what I believe in.

I would like to start talking about understanding of instructional technology by connecting to my first COETAIL blog post. I found this interesting YouTube video which, in 5 minutes, takes us through some of the highlights of educational technological evolution of the past century.

What I found most interesting in this video is how the advancements in communication and media technologies were associated and tied with their impact in education and how at every milestone moment the limits of those impacts were prematurely judged. I am also amazed by the images of classrooms used where you do not see a redefinition of learning spaces till the later years of the first decade of the 21st century.

Connecting back to my thoughts expressed in first course I believe that in past 30 years there has been a fast paced evolution in the computational and media technologies with visible large scale impact on communications and information sharing. That in turn has brought about an evolution in our ideas and approaches within learning and teaching practices. All the frameworks being designed, tested and used are an attempt by education sector to catch up with this ‘evolution’. For me the key word is ‘evolution’ and I see this current phase of evolution in the same way printing press enabled the knowledge of a single person to spread out in the world in form of a published and printed book. There were challenges then, there are challenges today and there will be challenges tomorrow.

My approach and understanding in implementation of technology integration in educational practices is always geared towards its effectiveness in personalising the learning experience for every student and to fire up the creative and higher order thinking skills in them as well as providing a mechanism for instant and effective feedback from the teacher. SAMR, TPACK, BLOOMS or any other new framework for understanding such processes will fit in fine as long as we keep our goal in sight.

1001 Nights

Yes, that is the name of a restaurant in Beijing which serves great middle eastern food but that is not why I mention it as my blog post’s title 🙂

The art of story telling is probably as old as we humans are. As I expressed my thoughts on the use of imagery in story telling of old times I can continue to expand on the techniques and strategies which old time story tellers used and how with time we have developed them especially in the 21st century how the technology has improved the way we tell stories. I do not see it as a change because our essential underlying goal is still same. We have only developed innovative ways to use the methods and technology available to us today in the best possible manner to enhance our abilities in this skill.

To me digital storytelling has various shapes and forms and not limited to the

conventional way of our understanding. It is not only when special apps are used but usage of any form of imagery and all that falls under the heading of visual literacy to then create a story to connect with your audience and share your learning is digital storytelling for me.

At Western Academy of Beijing media and digital storytelling is engraved into the technology integration and the proof lies in the fact that for last five years our media server has been used with nearly 50000 videos available online created by students to relate their learning journeys. From early childhood to high school our students create wonderful narratives using techniques learned in the lessons and by themselves. Here is a wonderful example:

Visual Literacy: Why we need it?

Dr. Kennedy in his TEDx talk covers a lot of information about visual literacy and if you do not want to go through all the 16 minutes I picked up some highlights of it below?

• Visual literacy is the ability to construct meaning through images
• Visual literacy is not a new concept: In 1969 International visual literacy association was established
• Humanity took 2500 years to get to typing / printing information
• But only another 500 years to where we are now!
• Everything is an image and a text: Visual literacy is multi modal, multi disciplinary, interdisciplinary and collaborative.
• 90% information taken in by a human is visual
• 30% of brain cortex is dedicated to vision
• We shall look, see, describe, analyse, interpret and construct meaning
• Why is it that educational leaders do not think about including visual literacy as an interdisciplinary part of curriculum and not only as visual arts subject?

I, myself agree with Dr. Kennedy that it is through images that we learn. It has been proven time and again through so many research and educational works that visual literacy is more important than any other forms of literacy required by the human.

You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.

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S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

From: LiveScience

What I have quoted above is an example of “Typoglycemia” which I believe utilises the power of visual literacy in our brain. Even the words are stored in form of a shape in our brain and as long as the outward shapes of the word are recognisable it does not matter which order the characters are arranged within!

I have so many examples to give in order to express my belief about the importance of images in our lives and the role they play in our learning. We all know subliminal messages and the research which has gone into it. We now watch more than we read. The technological revolution has assisted our ability to consume more via images. So much so that I just read this article today in BBC. What do you think about this article? Do you think we have become too visual? I am not sure of the answer but one thing I agree with. We have digital image overload!

Imagine what the reaction of world could have been if there were no handheld camera integrated devices to record the Charlie Hebdo shootings and then no TV and Internet to spread it around the world in minutes! Imagine how the political conflicts and wars are manipulated simply via images! This subject is too deep for me to cover in one post hence will continue to ponder over my thoughts on this and establish a way to communicate them with you: my audience. Excuse me if I start using imagery to convince you of my point! 🙂

Course 2 Project – Wikispaces

It is always difficult for a non-teaching COETAILer like myself to find time, sources and connections in order to complete the course projects which involve interacting with teachers and students. However I am grateful to have wonderful colleagues like Madeleine Brookes who happily have allowed me to be part of her ITGS class in order to satisfy my thirst for stepping into the world of teaching for a wider and deeper understanding of the learning process in a classroom as well as to accomplish my COETAIL course projects 🙂

For this course I sat in few sessions getting to know about the global learning project Madeleine’s class was carrying on with students in Kristin School, New Zealand under supervision of their teacher Andrew Churches

If I start to reflect how being part of COETAIL is stretching my own challenges all the while I enjoy them, would be an interesting post in itself. I gathered a lot of information only being in few sessions of this class and collected the data I needed in order to accomplish the GDoc task for this project. Students thoroughly enjoy and had very positive comments to make about this online collaborative learning initiative their teacher had launched and  although the process is slow and ongoing they are thoroughly understanding and enjoying the concepts of digital citizenship and their roles in global online learning and sharing environment. I will certainly continue to pop into these classes in order to not only enhance my own first hand ‘class’ experiences but also to share my learning and ideas from my COETAIL courses. Although WAB does not have any standards defined for its Educational Technology I studied and have used ISTE standards for the purpose of this UbD document.

Empowering the Tribe

This image from an ‘ISP’ back ‘home’ is what popped up in my head when I read Kim’s blog post about ‘Tribes’ but then I decided to use this for my 5th post which is about ‘Empowering Connections’ and the example of Wi-Tribe is excellent. Their logo says

‘Create your own world’ and that is exactly what we normally do when we get ‘connected’!

Tribe is explained by Wikipedia as being used in 12th century middle English literature as referring to one of the tribes of Israel and comes from French word ‘tribus’ which was used to describe the original tripartite ethnic division of the Ancient Roman state which ones historian believes to be squadrons of knights, rather than ethnic divisions. Now, whichever explanation may be right, the word to me has ‘powerful’ meaning. It means bringing identity to a large population and it fits well in describing what is happening in large scale across the globe today via Internet.

At my own school, WAB, we have students, behind the Great Firewall, utilising to the max, the platforms like TigerTube, WAB Blogs, Moodle we provide them to facilitate collaboration, online presence and sharing for learning and we see that they use it to the maximum. More than 50K videos in 4 years and in excess of 108000 visitors to their blogs from around the world.

China, the country where I currently work and live has recently been suggested to surpass US as an economic power but remains tightly controlled and shut behind the Great Firewall and we see that not only expats living here but ordinary Chinese too are craving for free access to the ‘Information Highway’ and resort to all kinds of techniques which keep improving at the same pace as China keeps blocking them. Many of my own Chinese colleagues and friends have active profiles on Facebook and continuously access foreign sites to verify the news and information they obtain from Chinese sources.

If I compare that to my country of origin, Pakistan, the trends seem to be similar despite the lack of infrastructure and tardy arrival of broadband technologies. The stats delivered by ‘The Express Tribune” clearly identifies this by finding that half of Internet users in Pakistan connect via mobiles. There is more information on history of Internet in Pakistan on this Wiki article and based on European and UK Educational & Research Networks Pakistan has it’s own connecting all the centres of excellence in research and learning providing access to and sharing of information at faster speeds. Government in Pakistan has realised the potential of technology and access to information in the process of education and learning as much as to launch a scheme of nationwide laptop distribution which I see being ranked more important than access to student loans, training and skills here at the website – see the sequence of link tabs.

Role of connections, information sharing and access to information via technology at our fingertips cannot be better explained than Sugata Mitra’s celebrated TED Talk. It is a bit long hence I will end my blog post here giving you time to watch it completely 🙂

Citizenship: rights and responsibilites

Wikipedia defines Digital Citizenship as “Citizenship is the status of a person recognized under the custom or law of a state that bestows on that person (called a citizen) the rights and the duties of citizenship.”

How does hits translate to digital world, in my opinion, is simple and straightforward. No change. How you go about your life in real world is exactly same as you would do in the cyber world.

As soon as we understand this it becomes easy for all parts of our society to relate to their responsibilities and the role they have to play in bringing up our young generation. In our capacities of parents, friends, peers, teachers, school administrators and other staff as well as businesses we all have same duties and rules to follow when it comes to electronic and digital media as we would do for our general interactions.

When looking for an image to put in my post I came up with this image about ‘think’ and I realised that if you take away the Facebook, Messaging, Twitter and Blogger icons you could insert statements like ‘speak to other people’, ‘take pictures’ etc. because the rules listed are same. Aren’t they?

Another aspect of this topic is that I always feel when ‘Digital Citizenship’ is mentioned it is always understood and explained in terms of ‘safety’ and ‘rules’. Even the Wikipedia defines Citizenship in terms of obeying the laws and knowing your rights. I wonder why we do not think of it in terms of how ‘I can understand the context and environment in a way that will help me to make myself a better person and share my creativity with my fellow citizens and to benefit those who are in need’.  This short video (below) from Family Online Safety Institute talks about Digital Citizenship on the same lines as my thoughts in this paragraph. It is interesting to read the comments by viewers on the video. As one of the comments goes ‘Digital citizenship. What a joke. Its an excuse for governments to regulate the internet. Don’t let them.’  I feel that if we always link Digital Citizenship to the concept of rules, filtering and don’ts we will fail to involve our young generation in a positive and constructive discussion and this responsibilities, as said before, lies with all of us and not only school and teachers.