In any classroom attempting to hear
everyone’s point of view is a challenge. In a class discussion only a small
number of children can share before the responses are exhausted or the
attention has dissipated. Attempting to visit each individual to hear discrete
responses is time consuming and impractical. Individual interviews also rob the
students of the opportunity to learn collaboratively. By the time I get around
to my fast mathematical thinkers and ask them to explain how they reached their
solution, the moment has passed and their responses are usually along the lines
of “I just knew it”.
This project aimed to explore ways that
digital technology could be employed in an early years classroom to allow
gifted learners to express their knowledge and understanding in different
subject areas by capturing thought processes and ideas in a timely manner and
establishing a means of sharing ideas.
The group of learners targeted in this
project are capable young students with an energetic thirst for variety in
their learning experiences and a cheeky sense of creativity. These students are
keen to share their opinions on issues and are capable of lightning fast
thinking, particularly in Mathematics. Without a challenge the have the
propensity to become challenging, hence, their super-powers must be harnessed
for good, not evil.
My challenge became discovering ways that I
could capture my students’ thought patterns and opinions and provide them a
platform for sharing their thinking with an audience beyond their teacher.
Through this project, I experimented with a
number of hardware and software options in order to discover ways that the
students could successfully communicate their ideas. Often the first
experiences needed to be heavily scaffolded, but the idea behind the project is
to assist the students in developing the skills so they can work more
independently later.
We used laptops, digital cameras,
microphones, and iPads in our experiments but the iPad became the tool of
choice due to its ease of use, portability, and availability in our classroom.
Two projects were most notably successful
in allowing the students to express their ideas with a degree of independence:
an enhanced poster with a short persuasive video embedded via a QR code, and
brief explanations of mathematical thinking captured using the Explain
Everything app.
Our first success was the result of a great
number of failed attempts. As the teacher I was definitely in the learner seat
on this project. The children were enthusiastic about learning and were happy
to be part of the experiment. They were not easily put off by our setbacks. The
process which eventually resulted in success involved the children combining
quite a number of the skills they already had as well as integrating a few
skills that were new to me as well.
The students had been involved in a whole
class inquiry into how people, pets and native animals can live together
sustainably. Towards the end of our investigation the students suggested a
number of ways that we could change our behaviour to make our school and home
environments more friendly for native animals.
Working in pairs, students selected one of
the class suggestions and came up with three supporting reasons for their
proposal. They created a visual image using a free iPad app called Pic Collage.
The pair of Year 2 students then worked
with some Year 5 buddies to turn their ideas into a short persuasive speech.
The Year 5s had developed some good persuasive writing skills due to copious
amounts of NAPLAN preparation earlier in the year so we decided to put these
skills to a much better use.
The Year 2s then used the iPads again and
an app called Sonic Pics to record their speech using the image they created
earlier in Pic Collage app as an illustration.
The students have used Sonic Pics for a
number of projects throughout the year so this was a more practical choice than
iMovie or other similar apps.
Once the students had created their
recording I helped them upload the file to my YouTube channel.
Since it was the first time I had created
QR codes with the students, I assisted them in doing this, but now they know
the process, they may be able to do this step themselves in future tasks.
The students designed posters to promote
their message and painted these. Once dry, they fixed the QR code onto the
poster.
We displayed the posters around the school,
and as part of the Australia Post Kids Teaching Kids Week activities, the Year
2 students demonstrated to a class of Year 1 students how to use the Scan app
on the iPad to read the QR code and watch the movie they had created.
This experience with flexible and creative
technology will now allow me to set more interesting challenges for the
students, with confidence that they have the technical skills to share their
ideas and thoughts with others.
Our second project involved a small group
of students who are particularly talented in Mathematics. These young students
competently add three-digit numbers requiring regrouping in their heads and
have developed their own strategies for dealing with more complex calculations
and larger numbers.
Even though I have worked with the whole
class on using a variety of addition strategies in Mathematics, these students
had difficulty explaining how they were getting their answers. Their responses
were either: “I just knew it” or they would give me the name of a random
strategy that we had discussed in class but couldn’t articulate why that had
helped.
I was keen to assist these children in
developing some skills in explaining their thinking because I know that they
are going to be asked to “show their working” many times in their schooling.
There seemed little point in holding them
back with the regular Year 2 curriculum when their mathematical reasoning
appeared to be beyond this level, but I also wanted to be confident that their
methods were grounded in logic and that they had a variety of effective
strategies for basic calculations.
Rather than limiting their thinking about
addition to one rigid algorithm and subjecting them to hundreds of repetitions,
I encouraged them to use a variety of strategies and to attempt to explain what
they were doing to demonstrate their mastery of the basic concepts.
At first the explanation process was
awkward and slow, often not making sense to anyone but themselves, but since
they were able to capture their thinking using Explain Everything on the iPad and play it back, as well
as access the thinking of other students in the group, they eventually
improved.
The next stage of this project will be to
give these students an audience and purpose beyond having to justify their
thinking to a teacher.
I plan to use the QR code idea again to
create a series of “help posters” that can be used by other class members who
might need further explanation on a particular strategy. Another future project
might involve creating a “Maths Expert” blog as a platform for the students to
showcase their thinking but also provide a service to a much wider audience.
The challenges in exploring this project
were not related to the students but involved the limits of the technology in
the setting. With no carpet and an unsealed dividing wall, the classroom is not
the ideal location for creating good quality recordings. I experimented with
many options for improving the sound quality and have still not discovered the
ideal solution. Also, since the iPads are shared across the school and we get
access to different iPads at random, tracking down the students work or continuing
on saved work presented a number of challenges.
Despite these limitations, the project was
successful in discovering new ways of capturing student thoughts and ideas and
in empowering young learners to express themselves.
