UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

I took on writing a Scratch application as my immersion task for Elective ‘E’. To avoid starting from ’scratch’ (is that where the name comes from?) I loaded an existing Maths project (solving quadratic equations) from the collaborative web site and improved it by changing the interface and adding a graph of the parabolic curve.

My fairly modest effort can be found here.

It may be interesting to recount how my efforts went. I am an experienced programmer so it didn’t take long to pick up the basics of how the coding was done and how events were handled in Scratch. The biggest difficulty I had was understanding how the ’sprites’ interacted with the ’stage’. From there things went fairly smoothly. Say about 2 hours all up. Putting in all the changes and additions I wanted took probably about another 8 hours. I would say 90% of that was fiddling with the GUI aspects of the application and the effects I wanted. Only about 10% of the time was actual coding.

Since this was a Maths application, is this something I would give to a Mathematics class? Definitely not, as there is too much superfluous activity and very little in the way of actual learning about mathematics. However, I would certainly consider it (or something similar) for an IST class.

Todd Oppenheimer is the author of a book “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved“.

He participated in an interview with an on-line education site in which he was asked to put his views on the use of technology within schools. I have to confess that I found myself nodding as I read each of his responses. My favourite quote:

“There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t — in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage.”

He does concede however that technology (computers) has a place as a supplement to the teaching of many subjects, but not as a replacement for traditional studies.

“Some of the best software offers great tools (again with older students) for expanding understanding of sophisticated mathematical procedures such as scientific modeling. And obviously, the Internet offers valuable resources for research projects.”

Hey, someone had to be an antidote to Prensky!

“Why mindmap?” is a very good question raised by Matthew. I’ve seen a few mind-maps now from both teachers and students at UTS and invariably they have been complex, with connections going everywhere, and difficult to read and understand. One part of me thinks, yes that looks pretty and obviously a lot of work has gone into it. However, another little voice in my head is saying “what is the point of this”? Is it just me? Does the emperor have no clothes?

Some of the mind-maps presented must have taken hours to do. I mean, you put one up for a discussion point for a few minutes and then it’s over. Is that a good use of a teacher’s valuable time? If the mind-map is overly busy or crowded, my eyes glaze over anyway and I suspect most students would react in the same way. What learning outcomes are being achieved?

I decided to review the literature to see if it could shed any light on my problem with seeing relevance. There is no shortage of papers that wax lyrical about using graphics organisers such as mind-maps (aka semantic maps). However, there is very little hard evidence of the benefits that they may provide.

Here is a skeptical view from a UK newspaper.

“They are no good as planning tools for those with a linguistic bias, as the process of creating one is too bloody slow and, maybe because of all the left-brain-right-brain-cross-filtration-action, they can give you a headache. But they are a useful piece in any teachers’ repertoire, given the right circumstances.”

What about student use of mind-mapping? A research paper (PDF) compared the effectiveness of using mind-mapping (a graphics organiser) compared to outlining (an advanced organiser) and to a control group when learning Life Science in the seventh grade.

“Important differences did result between groups on the unit test scores. The outlining group significantly performed better than the mind-mapping group and control group. However, there was not a difference between the mind-mapping group and the control group. There was no difference in the one-week delayed comprehensive post-test scores between groups.”

Having said all this, would I use a mind-map in teaching Mathematics? I could see a possible use as an advanced organiser when starting a new unit of work. However, I would keep it very simple and colourful, with large bold text. I would not have more than six or seven boxes up on screen. Any more is too confusing and won’t be absorbed and remembered. (From psychology earlier in the year, we should take note that our short-term memory limit is only about seven items).

This is a reaction to Don Black’s article on “OpenOffice“.

I have been using OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org for more than two years. It is very compatible with MS Office. That includes not just Word (.doc) documents but also Excel (.xls) files. My wife and I exchange documents all the time (she is a die-hard MS Office user).

The only current problem is that OpenOffice doesn’t read documents from MS Office 2008. However, neither do earlier versions of MS Office! The next version of OpenOffice is due for release very soon and will support MS Office 2008. The only other issue with OO is the lack of an Australian dictionary, but I managed to find one eventually.

There is a bigger concern here than just the office suites themselves that you may be missing. The problem is that Microsoft as a private company has control of the dominant document format. It is proprietary and they don’t release the details publicly. If some other company wants to read Word documents, they have to reverse engineer the format. It’s only recently that the European Courts have forced Microsoft to publish some of their formats.

Not everyone is happy that a private company controls the format that billions of documents are stored in around the world. There is a vast legacy of stored information that could be lost forever if Microsoft should ever decide to stop supporting older formats. An international standard named Open Document Format (ODF) has been ratified by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to overcome this problem. OpenOffice supports ODF. Microsoft with MS Office refuses to (they have a competing ’standard’).

I believe it would be a very good thing if schools switched to OO as their office suite. After all it is free! Support is not really an issue but can be bought from various companies for a price. The company behind OO is Sun Systems.

Here’s a site where you can read more about it.

In regard to who is using OO, it’s a little hard to tell. The US Defense Department is one that I know of. Since the software is not sold but downloaded for free, it is hard to know exactly how many organisations are using it and who they are. This article might shed some light on usage. I suspect the majority of the downloads are for home use at present.

Annie posted a youtube video on this amazing new technology being developed by Microsoft and others. I must admit that even I, someone who has seen quite a few IT fads in my time, was impressed! Annie commented:

“Whilst this clip is about commercial applications imagine what you could do in the classroom…How much fun could this be??”

Yes, I agree entirely about how much fun this could be. The thing that concerns me is the educational value that this might bring (and at what cost). We have seen quite a few new technologies in past decades that were going to ‘revolutionise’ the classroom:

1950’s Overhead projectors

1960’s Audio

1970’s Television / video

1980’s Personal computers

1990’s Enabling software (Word, Powerpoint, etc)

2000’s Interactive whiteboards

However, in my last practicum I saw none of these things in my co-operating teachers classroom. We have to be careful not to confuse the medium with the message. The technology can be as ’sexy’ as you like but unless it is properly integrated into the syllabus content, it will end up not being used.

This has been, and continues to be, the challenge with the introduction of new technology into schools. The technology by itself won’t create a better learning experience for students. Educators have to think very carefully about teacher training, provision of content/resources, quality of instruction and alignment with the curriculum. If these things don’t happen then there is a danger that technology will end up not making any real difference.

My partner and I chose the elective ‘E’ with the immersion task of analysing a couple of games in our KLA of Mathematics. This seemed like it would be a fairly straightforward exercise. We both read “Game-Based Learning” by Richard Van Eck and were enthused to find some Maths games to play with. The article breaks the educational approach to games into three areas:
(1) Have students build games from scratch
(2) Have educators develop the games
(3) Purchase commercial off-the shelf (COTS) games

The article focuses on the latter as the best solution, at least in the short-term. However, that was clearly not an option to us because of the costs involved. So we decided to investigate if there were any free internet games that had mathematical content. First starting point was this reference in the Van Eck article to Prensky’s list of 500 “serious” games that can be used to teach different content. It turns out that there are only about two hundred games listed on the web-site and only 40 are educational. Out of those 40, there are three relating to Maths:

Algebra – The Algebots: Beat the Game, Pass the Course
Agebra – DimensionM
Math – Green Globs and Graphing Equation

The first game is “under development” and the other two require paid subscriptions. No luck there. The game DimensionM looks very promising from the screen shots and might be worth investigating in the right school environment. It is American and seems to be aligned to their curriculum but, nevertheless, it could be a useful resource.

The next possibility was to try locating suitable games for ourselves using Google with search words like “math game educational”. This took literally hours of time trying to track down promising software. In the end the results were very disappointing. We could only come up with these fairly trivial examples:

Golf – A SuperMath Game
Quadrilateral Quest
Nim Skulls

Golf seems like a simple golf game where you need to put in angles and estimate distances to play a game of golf. The documentation says that It can involve decimals and fractions but I couldn’t see that when I played it. However, it is very good for getting the students used to estimating and applying angles in a full revolution. The golf scoring system itself is useful arithmetical practice too. The game is very limited and has some design flaws. However, it could possibly be used in the Stage 4 Measurement and Space & Geometry units.

Quadrilateral Quest is, again, a fairly simple game for testing student’s knowledge of quadrilaterals (four sided shapes). It is a drag and drop Flash game where you need to match shapes with their properties and are provided with positive and negative feedback. It is more of a “drill and kill” game and very limited in its scope. It is applicable to the Stage 4 Space & Geometry unit.

Nim Skulls could not even be classified as a game. It is fairly deterministic — it’s actually more of a puzzle than a game. (Once you’ve solved the puzzle, you can win every time). It could be set as a one-time challenge in the computer lab but that’s about it.

Overall, the experience of searching for appropriate digital game-based learning (DGBL) software for Mathematics has been very frustrating. It involves way too much time for too little reward. I don’t think the average Math teacher should be expected to shoulder such a load. My feeling is that if DGBL is to be introduced in schools, in needs to be a top-down approach. DET would not to do the research and “push” any relevant resources down to the schools. Such an approach would also avoid problems with software licensing/installation and ethical issues associated with playing games as a means of gaining knowledge and skills.

The Van Eck article mentions a study undertaken in the USA in 1985 to examine how games could be used to teach varying learning levels. A total of 11 games for different grade levels were developed for the study. I wonder what became of these games? Why aren’t they around today in some form as part of the Maths syllabus? It is disconcerting and disappointing to think that no apparent inroads have been made by DGBL in the intervening 23 years.

I have just discovered an even better resource here:

Wikipedia selection for schools

“SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, has released a complete 2008/9 revision of the Wikipedia Selection for Schools, which is perhaps the most successful ‘checked content’ project derived from the English Wikipedia. Previous revisions have been distributed off-line widely across the globe including by the Shuttleworth Foundation to South Africa Schools, by the Hole in the Wall project to rural Indian children and through SOS offices worldwide. The updated selection has the content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia – with 34,500 pictures, 20 million words and articles on more than 5500 topics. This revision, which can be freely downloaded or collected free from SOS Children is selected and organised around the UK National Curriculum and aimed at 8-17 year olds who broadly follow the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere in the world.”

This looks like an absolutely fabulous resource to draw upon, especially given that adult topics have been removed making it safe for students. The best place to start is the pictorial subject index. I have had a look at the Maths section and it looks quite good. There are several hundred entries ranging from elementary to advanced. Something for everyone.

It’s probably time for a little rant on my part. I worry about the prospects facing us as teachers in our first year of full-time teaching. It seems to me that the current system of assimilating graduate teachers is inherently flawed and in need of reform. Let me explain why.

We come out of our university training all fired up with a burning desire to avoid direct instruction teaching (yuck!) and put the theories of student-centred learning such as constructivism and discovery based pedagogies into practice. But what are we typically faced with? We will be teaching an average of five classes each day. Every Maths teacher I have spoken to has told me that we will be leaning heavily on textbooks. When you have to prepare lesson plans for five lessons per day together with all the administration matters, preparing assessments and marking, is it reasonable to expect a teacher to produce a great student-centred lesson for every class? Bear in mind that such lessons require a great deal more planning than following a textbook.

On top of all this we are being encouraged to incorporate technology into our lessons to make them more appealing to the ‘digital generation’. We all agree that this would be a good thing, but who will have the time to do the legwork required? The sad truth is that most beginning teachers will resort to teacher-centred instruction with perhaps a smattering of other approaches as time and opportunity permit. What is even sadder is that, in this all-important first year, a pattern will have been established and it will be difficult to break out of it. For many the die will have been cast even when pressures ease in subsequent years (assuming the teacher survives their first year).

A related problem is the reinvention of the wheel that seems to occur throughout the education system. In teaching practice, schools are islands that are cut off from each other. Even within a school each teacher is usually left to their own devices in preparing course work. In my experience I observed very little sharing of lesson resources. This simply has to change in future if we don’t want teachers to end up teaching out of textbooks.

A rethink is sorely needed in the way that new teachers are thrown into the workforce. Obviously mentoring and support will vary from school to school. However, I believe a more consistent approach is necessary. One suggestion I have heard, and with which I agree, is that new teachers should be allocated only a half-workload in their first year. This would certainly enable them to be more courageous and creative with their lesson planning than has to be the case at present.

There is one ray of light in all this gloom that I only just discovered today during the “Portfolio” lecture. Apparently the NSW DET Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) has been in the process of developing multi-media teaching resources for some time now. Why weren’t we made aware of this in our course earlier in the year? I, for one, could have incorporated some of the content in my lessons during first practicum when I was teaching using an Interactive Whiteboard. My feeling is that such initiatives will be invaluable to teachers in the near future to ease their workload and improve student outcomes as they draw upon such rich resources to formulate lessons.

These are not really specialised e-learning resources as such. However, used wisely, these two relatively recent innovations to the Internet can be invaluable learning aids. As an example, if you went to wikipedia and entered the topic name “Mathematics” the following page would be displayed.

Mathematics

Not only is an interesting history of mathematics provided, but the various fields are presented as separate sub-topics:

• Quantity

• Structure

• Space

• Change

• Foundation and philosophy

• Discrete mathematics

• Applied mathematics

Under the sub-topic of “Space” are links to:

Geometry

Trigonometry

Differential Geometry

Topology

Fractals

It is clear that this can be a wonderful resource to students in doing mathematics assignments or gaining a more complete understanding of mathematical concepts. For teachers, the “External Links” section of each topic usually contains an excellent set of resource links. Sometimes even links to lesson plans for the topic are provided.

In terms of multi-media content, most topics have a number of images on them. Some can also have embedded animations such as:

Sine drawing process

Whilst it is recognised that the level of the material can vary (too advanced or too basic) depending on search being performed, nevertheless this can be an excellent starting point for self-directed research by students.

This is educational software for mathematics that is widely available in Australian schools. I have seen it used in both of my practicum experiences and it seems to be accepted and enjoyed by the students, mainly in years 7 to 9. The software can be used in two ways. The first is that the teacher assigns a task that all students must complete but it can be done at their own pace. This is usually revision on a unit of work and ‘drills’ the students on typical exercise problems the students may encounter. The second mode is that the students can test themselves against other students anywhere in the world at a particular level (age level). There is a time factor involved as to who can complete a series of related problems first. The students seem to particularly like the live ‘play’ mode.

One very good feature of the software is that it provides a help button. If a student is stuck on a problem, they can press the help key and it will then step them through slowly and meticulously on how the problem can be tackled and solved. The software also provides certificates when the user has accumulated certain levels based on a points system. A major plus is that the product is completely web-based and so it can be used at home (as homework) or at school (in a computer laboratory).