STEP Learner Study

STEP Learner Study

Goal

Study learning problems. Using participant observation, study and report on the learning problems STEP teachers face in learning with and about technology.

Methodology

John Kim, Ami Mehta, and I worked with a STEP student, Risha Krishna, for about two weeks. During this time, we had an initial meeting to learn about her technology needs and two additional meetings to help her address the needs .

We asked questions, made observations, assessed, and instructed.

John, Ami, and my technological experiences:

John, Ami, and I all brought different technological experiences to the group. John is a fantastic graphic artist and designer. He is also savvy with ways to design and create web pages. Ami and I are both relative novices when it comes to web design ,but Ami is a Power Point expert and I am comfortable with Word and Excel. Between the three of us, we knew that we would have most of the skills needed to address any of Risha’s needs.

Our initial meeting:

In our first meeting, we introduced ourselves and the purpose of our collaboration with Risha. We emphasized to her that we were here to help her learn how to meet her technology needs, and that we were not here to do the work for her. We stressed that it was better that she learn how to use the software available so that she could use it later, without our guidance.

We learned several important things about Risha:

1.  She sought our help in order to complete a multi-media final project.

2.  She sought our help in order to do a smaller, self-elected project for a paper

3.  Her background and current technological skills

4.  Her technology needs and learning goals with regard to technology

5.  A glimpse into her attitude toward technology in the classroom

The multi-media project:

In the first meeting, Risha described the final multimedia project, which has been the central focus of our time together. The assignment is a 3-5 minute multimedia presentation that is to inform her class about a particular child’s literacy problems. As part of the STEP program, Risha has been working in a school every morning and she is to choose a student from that school. In her final project, she is to relay a few key points about the student, including his level of literacy, his literacy problems, and why he has them. She is supposed to relay her ideas with as little text as possible. She has been instructed to include pictures, graphics, sound, and other non-text based forms of communication.

Risha has chosen Alex* as the subject of her final project. Alex is in the 6th grade, but his skills suggest that he is currently working at a 2nd grade level of literacy. He has difficulty with spelling and mathematics in particular but has an amazing awareness of his own trouble areas. He has been able to construct coping methods in order to help him deal with the challenges he faces in the classroom.

Risha found Alex very interesting because of his actions in the classroom and wants to share her insights about his literacy as well as how and why he is at a significantly lower literacy level than was expected.

Risha brought with her some of Alex’s drawings about his family, samples of his writing and mathematics work, as well as some quotes of his participation in class.

She would like to make her presentation simple, clear, and original. In the presentation, Risha wants to relay important information about

·  Alex’s coping strategies and how they relate to the theory she’s learning

·  his daily struggles

·  how Alex is different from the other students in class

·  his behavior in group and social activities

*name has been changed to protect the identity of the child

The self-elected smaller project

In addition to this final multimedia project, Risha had a smaller project she wanted to work on that had to do with creating a graphic for a paper on her ideal classroom. In her paper, she was to describe her ideal classroom and the rationale behind it. Although it was not required of her in the assignment, she thought that it would be helpful to have a graphical representation of her classroom, in order to relay her thoughts more clearly.

Risha’s background and current technological skills

Risha is going to teach social studies at the middle school level.

Risha has a computer at home and is able to send and retrieve e-mail easily. She is also comfortable with browsing the Web. Risha has experience using Microsoft Word, which she uses for her word processing needs.

Risha had been taking the technology class on Fridays through the STEP program. She gained experience with Netscape Composer and HTML, but found that somewhat difficult. She was learning HTML in order to build a web page, which was the first task in the technology class. She did, however, make links and scan photos in the class. The technology class also gave her a little exposure to Adobe Photoshop, but she felt far from adept with the program.

Risha’s technology needs and learning goals with regard to technology:

It seemed that Risha’s technology needs were driven by her final project. She needed a way to complete the assignment successfully, and it appeared that she may not necessarily have decided to include multimedia in the presentation, had she not been required.

Risha’s self-declared learning goals are :

1.  To gain familiarity with the technological resources as a teacher.

2.  To not be intimidated by the complexity of the media.

A first glimpse about Risha’s attitude towards technology in the classroom

We asked Risha if she would use technology into the classroom, and her answer was along the lines of, “No, I wouldn’t bring it into the classroom. I would rather have kids look up the facts in a book.”

I found this wildly interesting and revealing of her attitude. It seems that she does not think that technology is beneficial in the classroom. She thinks that students would not benefit from exposure to it. It also appears that she thinks that technology is limited to an information source. She does not think of technology as a way to share information or to more effectively relay and share ideas. In short, she seems to have a somewhat limited view of technology and its potential.

Her answer is even more interesting in light of the fact that earlier in the meeting she said that she felt that part of her job as a teacher was to expose students to computers, because they are going to be an integral part of their future. She said that she thought it was important that students have experience with computers in order to be informed adults. Unfortunately, I did not think to ask her hHow she could does she sharebelieve both of these seemingly contradictory views statements?.

How to address In our final meeting we concluded focusing on Risha’s needs. and the conclusion of our final meeting

After listening to Risha about ideas on her final project and the smaller project she wanted to do for her paper, the group, John, Ami, and I brainstormed about ways she could complete each of those tasks.

Since tThe final project needed to be presented using multimedia. was the focus, we brainstormed ways that she could create the presentation. We thought about using iMovie, a program that is on the iMacs. I have seen this program and know of teachers who have learned it pretty easily after investing a full day into learning it. Unfortunately, no one in the group had any experience with it and we decided that it did not serve our purposes to learn a new and somewhat limited software program. We then considered using some form of conventional video, but this also had its difficulties since it would require first videotaping the child, which may have some legal implications, and second digitizing the video which would require substantial time and space on the computer. We decided that it might be better to use a more accessible software program, such as Power Point. Ami is very comfortable in powerpoint because she used it frequently in her job. We finally decided on Power Point because Risha thought that she had the program at home, and because it is a program was flexible enough to accommodate her needs. Furthermore, we were pretty confident that she could learn pretty easily

We decided to tTacklinge the smaller project first, since it was due before the final one and Risha seemed eager to learn how to make create a a graphical picture of her ideal classroom. We considered using Power Point to make the drawing, but eventually, we decided to try Microsoft Word’s drawing capabilities. Risha had the software at home and was already familiar with Word, even though she had never used the Draw menu and was not even aware of this particular capability of the program.

By the end of our first meeting, we:

1.  sSet up and made a plan for the next meeting

2.  sSuggested to Risha that she come to the second meeting with a drawing of her ideal classroom

3.  sSuggested to Risha that she take a look at Power Point and Word at home, to see what she could do on her own and familiarize herself with the applications.

Our Second Meeting

Risha came to the second meeting prepared and excited to work on making a “graph”, as she called it, of her ideal classroom. She brought a hand drawing of the main floor as well as the reading loft of her ideal classroom.

I We found the second meeting extremely informative. Risha revealed her attitudes towards technology and its place in the classroom. Her drawing of the main floor of her ideal classroom was composed of the following:

1.  A “collaborative corner”,

2.  A “computer area”,

3.  A horse-shoe layout of students’ desks,

4.  A chair for her to sit in, which was at the mouth of the horse-shoe,

5.  Her desk, which was located behind the students’ desks,

6.  Four walls that would hold inspirational figures, ideas, and the like from people of various cultures and backgrounds.

Behaviorist Model

1.  Lacks of familiarity with the use of technology

2.  Doesn't possess skills to know what to do with technology.

3.  Unfamiliar with the various uses of technology for her own work or in the classroom.

We set out to create a digital form of her classroom using MS Word.

We went into the media lab and found an open computer. Risha sat in front of it and the three of us sat around her. She opened up a new document in Word, and I pointed to where the Draw menu was located and briefly described some of the key functions. I emphasized to her that the icons represented the functions and that she could always look to the pictures or the guides that popped up if the mouse was over one of the icons. I showed her that there were some standard shapes that she could use from the AutoShapes menu and that she could represent the furniture in the classroom with some of these shapes. The first item she created was the horse-shoe layout of the students’ desks. In doing this, we showed her how select the shape from the AutoShapes menu, how to resize it, and move it to the space on the page that she wanted it to be. Ami gave a lot of positive reinforcement, as her interactions with the computer were very timid. She appeared to be afraid of doing something "wrong" or making a mistake. Re-assuring her that the computer was very forgiving, she slowly became more comfortable the Microsoft Draw.

This initial figure led to another teaching moment. We John suggested to her that she might want to reorient her page from portrait to landscape. This was an interesting idea for her. I Wedo not think that she had ever tried this before or even knew that it was a possibility with Word. John showed her how to do this within the File menu. This was somewhat confusing for her, because the command to change the orientation was nested within a further option. She wrote down the process so that she could do it later, for another drawing. It was interesting to see that the menu options that we, John, Ami, and I, found somewhat obvious and logical were not for Risha. Her experience with technology was somewhat limited and it suggested that she did not do much exploreation new software capabilitieswith the software. She used Word for what she needed to do, write documents, which were oriented like most books were oriented, and did not seem to care to find out the other features and capabilities of the program.

During the time we spent helping her create the drawing, we also showed her how to copy figures, add text, remove text boxes, maneuver the objects using the arrow keys on the keyboard, and how to fill objects with transparent and opaque colors. By the end of the time together, she had completed the drawing of the main floor of her ideal classroom. She was very satisfied and excited about using the Draw menu at home when creating her reading loft, the second floor of her ideal classroom. She was amazed at the types of functionality available.

It was the print- out of the main floor of her ideal classroom that revealed the most about Risha’s attitudes towards technology in the classroom as well as her ideas about her role in the classroom.

Cognitive Model

She also lacks the mental model of what a learner centered, collaborative, technology infused classroom could look and be like.

The print- out of the main floor clearly depicted her mental model of the classroom. Her mental model of the classroom was compartmentalized, teacher-centered, and relatively non-collaborative.

Risha has a corner devoted to “computers”. I am not sure what students will be doing on the computers and it is not clear to me that she knows what she would like students to do with the computers. She has a corner devoted to “collaboration” or “group work”. She described this space as a corner for students to work together, when they needed to. Her horse-shoe layout of the students’ desks was so that she could everyone in class, when she sat at the opening of the horse-shoe.