למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District have immediately halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.

Teachers and administrators had programmed the iPads so that they were the only ones who controlled what was on them. But hours after getting them, between 300 and 400 students found ways to reprogram the iPads so they could download games and apps for social media sites, technology director Julie Bohnenkamp said.

As soon as the school learned what students were doing, teachers inspected each student's iPad, and the technology department had to reset the hundreds of tablets that had been altered by the students, Bohnenkamp told the Daily Journal.

Outside of the district's network ... a user is free to download content and applications and browse the Internet without restriction... As student safety is of paramount concern, breach of the ... system must not occur.

every student will be provided access to a personal computing device which will allow for a more individualized instruction

1. סטיב ווילר הוא מרצה בתחום טכנולוגיות למידה באוניברסיטה בריטית. ציטטתי אותו כאן בעבר, ועל אף העובדה שאיננו קורא אותו בעקביות, דבריו בדרך כלל מעניינים. אבל המאמרון שקראתי דרך ד"ר בוב, מתחילת ספטמבר, גרם לי לגרד בראש. במאמרון הזה ווילר מתייחס להשתמעויות החינוכיות של user generated content, והוא מציין מספר דרכים שהתופעה הזאת משפיעה על החינוך. בין היתר הוא כותב שהתפקיד המסורתי של המורה משתנה, וכתוצאה מזה, הלומד עצמו תופס מקום מרכזי יותר בתהליך הלמידה. מה אוכל להגיד? אמת ויציב! אבל ... האם עלינו להבין שרק עכשיו ווילר מגלה את זה? אפילו בפרסומות מלוקקות של חברות טכנולוגיות מלפני יותר מעשור יכולנו לקרוא אמירות כאלה.
   
2. בכתבה מסוף אוגוסט ב-eSchool News מאת פט לה-מורט, סגן מנהל של בית הספר בפלורידה שעליו הוא כותב, אנחנו מגלים ש:

   At Bishop Moore Catholic High School in Orlando, Fla., students are no longer looking to their teachers for all the answers. Instead, teachers are training their students to acquire knowledge on their own.

   שוב, גם אם נסכים שתהליכים לימודיים אינם מתרחשים באותו קצב בכל בית ספר, קשה להבין את ההתרגשות של לה-מורט שעכשיו גילה שהקניית היכולת לרכוש ידע באופן עצמאי היא מטרה מרכזית של החינוך. (אגב, לה-מורט כותב שהמורים "are training" התלמידים, ניסוח שרומז על כך שהמורה עדיין שולט בתהליך, ושהתלמידים עוברים הכשרה מסודרת ומוכתבת כדי ללמוד כיצד ללמוד בעצמם. יש כאן סוגיה בעייתית בפני עצמה.)
   
   
3. באתר של ה-World Innovation Summit for Education (הממוקם בקטאר) קראתי ראיון עם גרהם בראון-מרטין, מייסד Learning Without Frontiers. אין ספק שלבראון-מרטין קבלות בתחום החינוך, או לפחות בניבוי על הכיוונים שבהם החינוך של היום צריך להתפתח. אבל מה לעשות, ובשלב מסויים עודף תחזיות הופך למילים ריקות. בראיון, למשל, הוא מכריז:

A key issue I believe is why [has] technology, to date, had very little impact on improved learning outcomes? This could be because we continue to use technology to reinforce 19th century teaching practice to meet out-dated assessment models. Most of the world’s curriculum and assessment systems are based around fact recall rather than actually demonstrating that you have learned something and can deploy it within a problem solving situation.

אין שום פסול בהכרזה כזאת (ולאחרות שמופיעות בראיון), אבל היוזמה החינוכית של בראון-מרטין מתיימר לחדש, וכבר זמן רב משפטים כאלה הפכו לנדושים. כיצד אנחנו אמורים להתייחס לפרויקט שלכאורה מחדש, אם הוא בסך הכל חוזר על אותן סיסמאות שכבר עייפנו לקרוא?


4. כתבה קצרה מלפני שבועיים באתר Edudemic מציע ארבע אסטרטגיות שבהן מורה יכול לנקוט על מנת להבטיח שתוך כדי "יצירה" תלמידיו בכל זאת ילמדו משהו. בכתבה הזאת אנחנו קוראים:

Education, guided by a focus on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, is moving towards an emphasis on creation and innovation in the classroom. Though technology did not spark this movement, it has fueled the process by providing students with exciting and powerful tools. But is creation synonymous with learning? Can students even create without learning? How can we ensure that what they create has value?

הטקסונומיה של בלום נמצאת איתנו כמעט 60 שנה. הטקסונומיה ה-"מתוקנת" שאליה מתייחסים כאן עוצבה בשנת 2000, והיא שונה מהמקור בכך שבראש הפירמידה היא מחליפה את המקומות של ההערכה ושל הסינתזה, והסינתזה, שעכשיו בראש הפירמידה, זוכה לשם הנוצץ של "יצירה". השאלות שנשאלות כאן טובות וחשובות, אבל להגיד שהחינוך היום נע לקראת שימת דגש על יצירה ויוזמה מחדשת בזכות ההתמקדות בטקסונומיה שצריכה להיות מוכרת לכל פרח הוראה בתחילת לימודיו רומז על כך שכותב הכתבה מנותק מהחשיבה החינוכית של הדורות האחרונים, חשיבה שהיא דינמית בהרבה מהסתמכות על בלום.

Connected devices don’t replace textbooks... they destroy them. The last thing I want my students to do is to have a connected device and then have a traditional textbook on it.

1. Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?
2. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?
3. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?
4. Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

As one moves along the continuum, computer technology becomes more important in the classroom but at the same time becomes more invisibly woven into the demands of good teaching and learning.

The teacher’s tablet also has an app blocker and monitoring functions that can see and control what’s happening on student tablets, and a one-touch classroom-control feature to lock their screens, replacing whatever was on them with an eye symbol and the phrase “Eyes on Teacher.”

This growing stream of information, which can be analyzed down to individual keystrokes, yields a picture that will eventually progress in complexity from, say, a list of words a student looks up to a profile of metacognitive skills — like the ability to concentrate — and in time to a full-blown portrait of a developing mind. In theory, each student will generate the intellectual equivalent of a fantastically detailed medical chart.

Schools should not be turned into brain-factories, processing kids as if they were automobiles.

Rather, CAI should be used as one of the weapons in the struggle for the emancipation of the student’s mind. The computer should be used to create a learning environment of maximum variety and depth for each particular student. It may be possible for a combination of great freedom yet great variety of stimuli and great flexibility to replace lock-step school systems....

Not only is CAI not yet ready for the schools, but — and much more important — the schools are not yet ready for CAI.

…

It seems to me that CAI should not be used merely for the more efficient assembly-line production of armies of more efficient single-minded, stereotyped contributors to the Gross National Product.

Now, if we can re-create or simulate, to a high degree of accuracy, almost anything we want when we want it, what happens to our attitudes to “real” experiences? Should billions of dollars be spent on creating learning environments of incredible ingenuity which are almost indistinguishable from, say, a real walk through an African jungle? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to send the children to Africa? Wouldn’t it be cheaper — and better — to let children experience real life instead of a complex electronic simulation of it?

Are we going to need group instruction at all soon? Surely the main reason for having schools in the first place was to enable a few adults to look after the various needs of many children? With the help of modern technology — television, audio and video recordings, films, computers, etc. — it will be possible to give some sort of instruction to individual children without ever having to marshall them into groups.

If this is so, will schools disappear? What will there be left for them to do? Will they be reduced to youth clubs, sports clubs, baby-sitting services or child guidance centers? Children must learn to work and play together, but are they going to need a school for this? There are no easy answers.

The difference is in what we call attention to. Our tendency, as teachers, is to address the problem by focusing on the mistakes, red-penning what’s not accurate, not reliable, not valid, doesn’t make sense. It’s logical because what's not true is a fundamental problem to education. We work to keep wrong information out of our textbooks, whiteboards, libraries and lectures. We foster a learning environment where we can all take comfort in the assumption that the information is “true.”

Our position, as teachers, is based on this assumption.

If we teach our learners to research and communicate in order to solve a problem, then we entirely change the approach. We assess their work through conversations about the “best way” rather than the “wrong way,” and learners become active defenders rather than passive accepters of judgment.

Common Core testing will require digital literacy skills

The shift toward online exams aligned with the Common Core standards will require much more preparation than simply making sure networks can handle the extra bandwidth constraints and that schools have enough devices for every student.

It also will require students to demonstrate certain digital literacy skills that go beyond the core curriculum, observers say. These include technology operational skills such as keyboarding and spreadsheets, as well as higher-order skills such as finding and evaluating information online.

Ed-tech leaders brace for online testing

“The last thing we need is a drop in scores” that could result from not having enough time to prepare students for the rigor of the exams ....

Officials said they opposed a delay in part because new state and national tests will be taken on computers, and they don't want Los Angeles students to lack the necessary experience with them.

But that setup (מכשירים ללא מקלדות) might not satisfy the needs of older students writing term papers, for example. And if typing on them proves more difficult, that could frustrate or hinder students as they take new online tests. The device's touch screen could even obscure portions of a test item that would be visible in its entirety on a full screen.

Students’ use of laptops in class found to lower grades

While Sana and Weston are not calling for a ban on laptop use in classes, they do hope students consider that goofing off on their computers can affect their peers seating around them.