Last Last Thoughts Part 3 / 3

Final Thoughts

I do believe technology is useful in helping students learn technical subjects, like math, science, and computer science. I don’t think we are anywhere close to the potential that technologies are capable of in providing the intelligence, the motivation, the scaffolding, for our students at this point in time. One of the recent advances in teaching has been the application of constructivist theory. Learning has fallen on the shoulders of the students to construct their new knowledge. But without the appropriate level of guidance or scaffolding, students can be lost in the process. The technologies that have been covered in the course seem to have produced some positive results in students’ learning, especially those that engage students with diverse background and with a common goal in their learning. Such social constructivist learning coupled with authentic learning have been demonstrated to engage students and increase their understanding much better than traditional learning. But the use of technology in these environments has been minimal. There is no significant use of new advances in computing or Artificial Intelligence built into these TELE’s. Granted that one should not simply use technologies for the sake of technology, this may be the case that educators do not have a good learning model for the advance use of computing yet. Perhaps educators have been too shy in exploring what digital technologies can be used in education for fear that they are used simply because they are available. However, I believe that given the capabilities of computer science and the availability of digital technologies, educators should look at what these technologies can do and at the same time explore how learning models can be developed in parallel to make the best use of them.

The TELE assignment has been a great experience in working through a number of mini assignments to come up with a design of a lesson plan. What has been disappointing, though not surprising, is the amount of time and effort required to put together a lesson plan for a simple topic. After a number of weeks of collaboration, our assignment is still only a skeleton of what the final lesson should look like. For a teacher with a regular load, it is almost impossible to devote such time and effort to prepare lessons like this for their teaching. There are so many educators around the world, and yet, the pool of resource seems to be very small. Indeed, there are significant amount of teaching material available on the internet, and for our TELE, we have found lots of games in the internet, even educational games, but none can be used easily in our lesson development. Frame games or game templates, which allow teachers to supply the content in a game, seem to be useful tools in developing TELE’s. But they are not readily available. SFU has been working on games and simulations for teaching (http://www.sageforlearning.ca/), but to use one of their game templates is not a trivial process.

In conclusion, much has been done in the development of digital technologies for teaching math and science. However, lot more research is needed. Our generation of students is changing fast. They have grown up with technologies and unless education keeps up with the use of modern technologies, students will be left behind. It seems that education has been just trying to catch up with the types of technologies that are available. Perhaps it is time to develop new education models which technologies need to be invented for rather than the other way around.