My mind was blown at the end of Term 2 during the Primary ICT Showcase. Seeing the range of talent on show within the Primary School was inspiring and something to be celebrated loudly.
We began the showcase with Demo Slams, the opportunity for ordinary teachers to display their extraordinary tech integration to their peers. Ben Henry, Grade 5, Dover was one of the slam recruits and he showed the crowd his awesome use of QuickTime Player to facilitate giving feedback about a piece of writing.
I’ll let Ben set the scene:
The children had been working on their Historical Fiction stories during Writing Workshop and it was the week before their final edit. For their homework task, each ‘Writing Buddy’ was asked to read their partner’s story and to identify a couple of areas that they were impressed with, along with a suggestion for the final edit. The children had the option of drawing from my marking comments already in the Google Doc, but it was remarkable how accurate the buddies were at making a relevant suggestion that would improve the writing. The children communicated their suggestions for improvements and the elements they were impressed with using QuickTime player in the form of a screen recording. Since the children enjoyed making the screen recordings, and are equally (if not more) concerned with their partner’s comments as they are with mine, I will certainly be using this method in the future.
Here is an example of a student giving feedback to their writing partner.
Sean McHugh (DLC on the Dover Campus) has written about RAT and SAMMS in previous posts on this blog. What Ben demonstrated in his use of video feedback is in the transformative area of RAT; ‘technology as transformation’. Being able to give this level of useful feedback moves both the writer and the student giving feedback forward in their understanding of the concepts. The writer has demonstrated that they are able to listen to the lessons given in class about how to write this particular genre and process them to create a comprehensive piece of writing. The student giving feedback has to understand the genre well in order to give feedback to their partner and move their writing on. By allowing the chance for peer to peer feedback the skills being demonstrated and developed by both parties are immense.
The beauty of using technology to facilitate this process is listed in the SAMMS framework. The fact that Google docs can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection (Situational), allows for instant reworking of the piece (Mutability) and provides a space where two students and the teacher can collaborate on one document (Social).
It is also a brilliant example of Dylan Wiliam’s Assessment for Learning strategies.
Wiliam breaks down AfL into 5 key strategies
1. Clarifying learning intentions
2. Eliciting evidence
3. Feedback that moves learning forward
4. Students as learning resources for one another
5. Students as owners of their own learning (ownership - metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment)
(Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)
Ben’s use of feedback thoroughly demonstrated the third and fourth points in Wiliam’s list. The students receive feedback from their teacher and also from a peer to improve their writing. Before I saw this being used I would have guessed that the feedback being given from a writing partner would be a little shaky and inaccurate at best. After seeing this in practice the feedback being given is 90% accurate and very well articulated.
To anyone who would like to do less marking and give more feedback using screen casting come and speak to myself or Ben for more details.
Talking with a colleague about some of the common behaviours that we witness in terms of the working habits employed by students throughout the school when they need to work on a screen. Interestingly, completely separate from each other, and working in very different areas, we had similar concerns. I’ve always approached this from the point of view of inefficiency and a general lack of organisation, but she had the clever insight that maybe what we should really be concerned about is their well-being.
With that I set off on a literature review to find out what I could, and sure enough there is a considerable amount of material that has been written in this area, generally organised under the category of ‘clutter”.
Obviously, as is usually the case with these things, clutter is a problem whether it is digital or non-digital. But what I am noticing is that effectively the clutter that is commonplace in students' laptops is a big issue, because while this clutter it is largely effectively invisible to the teachers and parents, but
...the negative impact in terms of stress as noted by the research is the same, regardless or not whether clutter is in a physical work environment or a digital work environment.
I regularly encounter many (if not most) students (and adults!) who have normalised a cluttered digital work environment; their norm is to work in a browser with far too many tabs open, lots of different applications open at the same time, work scattered all over the desktop, with files very poorly organised and therefore very difficult to find whatever they need to work on, especially when they have opened the same file multiple times without being aware of it...
These key areas are encompassed by what I call the 'Fundamental 4" four simple areas to review regularly—ideally once a week. Check you are signed in properly, clear your desktop, close all/most of your tabs (bookmark the ones that are important to return to), and tidy up your drive, move loose files into folders.
Ignoring all of this is easy, and understandable, but as we all know, clutter accumulates without requiring any assistance at all. The longer you leave it, the worse it gets, combining to create a lose-lose scenario: an ineffective work flow, that undermines wellbeing. But don't take my word for it, I've collated the essential arguments below (my emphasis in bold):
Whether it be your closet or office desk, excess things in your surroundings can have a negative impact on your ability to focus and process information. That’s exactly what neuroscientists at Princeton University* found when they looked at people’s task performance in an organized versus disorganized environment. The results of the study showed that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, resulting in decreased performance and increased stress.
... Similar to what multitasking does to your brain, physical clutter overloads your senses, making you feel stressed, and impairs your ability to think creatively.
Clutter Isn’t Just Physical
Files on your computer, notifications from your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and anything that goes “ping” in the night competes for your attention. This creates a digital form of clutter that erodes your ability to focus and perform creative tasks. Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy, a New York Times best seller on controlling the flow of information in the digital age, put it best when he said:
"Bits are a new material."
When you have to-do items constantly floating around in your head or you hear a ping or vibrate every few minutes from your phone, your brain doesn’t get a chance to fully enter creative flow or process experiences. When your brain has too much on its plate, it splits its power up. The result? You become awful at:
filtering information
switching quickly between tasks
keeping a strong working memory
The overconsumption of digital stuff has the same effect on your brain as physical clutter.
If you work on a computer, having a cluttered desktop every time you turn on your computer can give you a constant uneasy feeling. At the end of each day, remove every file from your desktop.
Clutter, whether physical or digital, is something you’ll always have to deal with but it can be controlled. Finding ways to steer the streams of consumption in your favour will give you a sense of power and a freed mind…
When your environment is cluttered, the chaos restricts your ability to focus. The clutter also limits your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as well as you do in an uncluttered, organized, and serene environment.
…
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other physiological measurement tools to map the brain’s responses to organized and disorganized stimuli and to monitor task performance. The conclusions were strong — if you want to focus to the best of your ability and process information as effectively as possible, you need to clear the clutter from your home and work environment. This research shows that you will be less irritable, more productive, distracted less often, and able to process information better with an uncluttered and organized home and office.
Overall, subjects were more productive, less irritable and distracted in the clutter-free environment versus the disorganized environment where their stress increased.
The brain has a limited capacity to process information. To filter out extra stimuli and focus on what we are trying to achieve at any given moment, the top-down and bottom-up attention mechanisms compete. By mutually suppressing each other, brain power is exhausted, and ultimately we lose focus.
Humans are bad at multitasking. It’s a hard fact to come to grips with, especially in a society that values professional productivity so highly. We’re encouraged to work on multiple projects at once so that we can get them all done faster, but science has shown us that this actually slows us down — working on a single task is much more efficient than trying to direct our attention in multiple directions.
This is related to why clutter has such a negative effect on our mental capacities. Just seeing a cluttered desk or home adds to the number of things that we have to expend mental resources on to process, both visually and cognitively. This adds to the load placed on your brain. Using more mental power requires more energy, which is why clutter can make you feel more fatigued.
Think about your digital workspace. Decluttering your Windows or Mac desktop, clearing your inbox, and even your declutter browser tabs can make you feel a lot better. It encourages you to back up your old files, and cleans up your workspace. It may even help you find things that you’ve lost — old notes in Evernote or old articles in Pocket that are really useful or more applicable now than when you saved them.
Digital decluttering is a great way to bring new energy to your life.
Digital clutter is a real thing. Keep your digital life organized by using the same principles as you would with physical clutter.
Managing disorderliness is good for health. It reduces your stress, prevents feeling guilty about your cleanliness, and keeps your brain from getting overloaded by unhelpful things.
What should you hope to improve by decluttering in your personal or professional life?
Better focus.
Evidence* suggests that when multiple visual stimuli are competing for your attention, you have a harder time narrowing your focus to only one of them. That means the clutter in your life is making you unfocused. You’ll have a harder time staying on task at work, and you won’t be as “present” in your home life, either. Decluttering brings better focus back to your world.
Academic Note for Boffins
*The study (McMains & Kastner, 2011) referenced by many of these articles is one of the most flagrant examples of academic gibberish I have ever encountered. Here's a taste:
"Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system."
Huh?
I have read the article, it wasn't easy, and it took a lot of determination—but I can confirm that it largely supports the claims made above. In fact I would argue it goes further than they do, in that it finds that stimuli in the environment (bottom-up) compete with whatever we are trying to focus on (top-down), but what is more of concern is that they find the environmental stimuli ‘win’ as these are subconsciously prioritised by our brain, regardless of whatever the work is that we are trying to “spotlight“.
From a bucket of water to a bicycle, any tool can be used maliciously or marvellously, the same is true for screen time as it is for eating potatoes, they are both potentially very good for you, but not if that's all you do.
One big difference being that we don't see articles circulated from time to time on the web fretting about potatoes, framed in the frantic, panicked tones of a 21st Century crisis, which we do about screen time, articles like this*.
In the face of opinions like that, some would ask how on earth we can justify all the iPads we provide for our young learners in the Infant school, 2:1 in K1, and an iPad for every child in K2, Grade 1 to Grade 3, and a laptop for every child in Grades 4 and 5. The problem is these articles that expect us to 'ban' our students from screen use, generally make the mistake of burying alternative perspectives, and are usually founded on a dubious judgement back in the 20th Century (1999), by the American Academy of Pediatrics that discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” They have since (2015) updated their report, acknowledging that things have changed significantly since their original judgement, however they still unfortunately, and impractically uniformly discourage passive media use, on any type of screen, for young children.
What I'd like to do here is just to provide some balance to the argument, sure the AAP have their opinion, but there are plenty of other respected, and I would argue more reasonable and more practical perspectives regarding screen time out there, below I share just a handful. If you know of any others, please feel free to post them in the comments below.
Lumping all screens into one category is not helpful. "Screen time is a really enticing measure because it's simple – it's usually described as the number of hours a day using screen-based technology. But it's completely meaningless," says Pete Etchells at Bath Spa University, UK, who studies the effects of video games on behaviour. "It doesn't say anything about what you're using that time for."
The challenge for parents and teachers, Robb says, “is to select the videos, games, and devices that have a real, positive developmental impact—and use them in ways that promote growth.”
Children benefit from the right sort of screen time.
What is becoming clear is that it's not the technologies themselves we should be worried about, but how they are used and how people interact with them. The advantages seen in the school environment can be translated into the home – if you choose your children's digital distraction wisely.
A lot of it is common sense. Don't unthinkingly hand over your device. There are educational apps whose benefits are backed up by research.
Five hours sitting in front of the TV is not the same as 5 hours of some TV, a couple of hours playing on Dance Dance Revolution or some other kind of active game, followed by a Skype session with a grandparent.
This [The advice from the AAP] hard and fast two-hour policy, beaten into parents’ brains by their pediatricians, troubles me and many others partly because it was last updated in 2011 before the astounding boom of tablets, smartphones and touch screens among both kids and adults. The policy warnings had focused very reasonably on TV and its clear long-term harms to healthy development in kids under two—especially harmful when passively watching non-interactive, non-educational TV. But such traditional passive TV watching, while still the dominant form of media consumption for most children, is rapidly becoming meaningless for many. Clearly, an interactive video game that parents and toddlers are playing together or watching family vacation videos on a smartphone can have huge value compared to zombie-like staring at an episode of Spongebob—these kinds of shows are shown in studies to harm a young child’s executive functioning, a prefrontal brain skill set including memory, attention, and setting goals.
Not all screens are equal, and guidelines need to be updated to reflect these differences. The policy also doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground: a recent survey of parents by Common Sense Media shows that toddlers under two are spending almost one hour a day using screen media anyway.
I still generally agree with most of the AAP’s family media plan advice, especially no TV ever in bedrooms and no screens at certain times of the day, including during meals, and screen time limits depending on age. With children under two, I definitely believe that screen time should never be spent alone: kids always benefit more from any activity when parents are playing along.
The 2011 [AAP] report mentioned “smart cell phone” and “new screen” technologies, but did not address interactive apps. Nor did it broach the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90 percent of American parents, queasy though they might be: that some good might come from those little swiping fingers.
Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them.
April 2010, when the iPad was released. iPhones had already been tempting young children, but the screens were a little small for pudgy toddler hands to navigate with ease and accuracy. Plus, parents tended to be more possessive of their phones, hiding them in pockets or purses. The iPad was big and bright, and a case could be made that it belonged to the family. Researchers who study children’s media immediately recognized it as a game changer.
The 2017 "The State of the World’s Children 2017: Children in a Digital World" report is a comprehensive look from UNICEF at the different ways digital technology is affecting children, identifying dangers as well as opportunities.
Too many news articles share evidence from studies that are methodologically weak or exaggerate or misrepresent the evidence provided.
For most children, underlying issues – such as depression or problems at home – have a greater impact on health and happiness than screen time.
Without consensus on screen time, it is important for parents, policymakers, researchers and the media not to jump to conclusions about what is healthy or unhealthy digital use. Considering the full context of a child's life – together with an emphasis on content and experiences rather than screen time – may prove more useful for understanding the effects of digital connectivity on children's well-being.
Rather than restricting children’s digital media use, more attentive and supportive mediation by parents and educators holds the most promise for enabling children to draw maximum benefit and minimum risk from connectivity. More attention should be given to the content and activities of children’s digital experiences – what they are doing online and why – rather than strictly to how much time they spend in front of screens.
Considering the full context of a child’s life – together with an emphasis on content and experiences rather than screen time – may prove more useful for understanding the effects of digital connectivity on children’s well-being.
In a world where “screen time” is becoming simply “time,” our policies must evolve or become obsolete. The public needs to know that the Academy’s advice is science-driven, not based merely on the precautionary principle.
Media is just another environment. Children do the same things they have always done, only virtually. Like any environment, media can have positive and negative effects. Family participation with media facilitates social interactions and learning.
Content matters. The quality of content is more important than the platform or time spent with media. Prioritize how your child spends his time rather than just setting a timer.
The evidence base for a direct ‘toxic’ effect of screen time is contested, and the evidence of harm is often overstated. The majority of the literature that does exist looks only at television screen time.
Evidence is weak for a threshold to guide children and parents to the appropriate level of screen time, and we are unable to recommend a cut-off for children's screen time overall.
Many of the apparent connections between screen time and adverse effects may be mediated by lost opportunities for positive activities (socialising, exercise, sleep) that are displaced by screen time.
There is a little evidence that any specific intervention can be applied across the population to reduce screen time. We have developed four key questions for families to use as a guide to examine their screen time:
Is screen time in your household controlled?
Does screen use interfere with what your family want to do?
Does screen use interfere with sleep?
Are you able to control snacking during screen time?
If a family can ask themselves (or be asked by others) these questions, and are satisfied with the answers, then they can be reassured that they are likely to be doing as well as they can with this tricky issue.
Touch screens change everything...
Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens. A “rattle on steroids,” is what Buckleitner calls it. “All of a sudden a finger could move a bus or smush an insect or turn into a big wet gloopy paintbrush.” To a toddler, this is less magic than intuition. At a very young age, children become capable of what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “enactive representation”; they classify objects in the world not by using words or symbols but by making gestures—say, holding an imaginary cup to their lips to signify that they want a drink. Their hands are a natural extension of their thoughts.
* If you're going to read that article, make sure you read these two responses to it as well:
Critical literacy will help readers navigate through broad claims that appear to be scientific in nature, but actually misrepresent facts and findings. Outlets such as The Huffington Post can provide important, accessible, and digestible information to parents as they try to navigate this complex world.
The research cited in the Rowan piece and the many other 'clickbait' articles like it is so unsupportive of her claims, it seems possible that the real motive behind these articles is to test the reader gullibility. If readers dig a little deeper, they'll find the truth.
The research focuses mainly on passive television consumption and video games that are either simple or for mature audiences. Much of it also is focused, not on pre-teens, but rather on teens and adults. The research shows a dearth of findings around the type of technology use in which the overwhelming majority of children engage.
Discerning educators and parents: Take a look at the research. Decide for yourself. I've collated over 60 articles here (and counting) which I update regularly, happy reading!
Alternatively the 'Their Own Devices' podcast has a very balanced take on this topic, there's bound to be an episode or two in there that will be of interest.
Not a lot of people know this but if you need to trim a video or an audio file, like an MP4 (video) or an MP3 (audio), it's easier than you think. Just open the file in Quicktime Player, and use the editing features to trim the track.
Audio trimming in Quicktime
Edited audio can be saved it to iTunes as AAC (Apple's version of an MP3) using the Export option, if you really need it to be an MP3, iTunes can convert audio files to MP3 if you need it to.
Now you can do more complex editing, but not as an audio file, so one way round this is to record the audio as a video, then edit as described below, then at the end discard the video and export as audio only. The same works in iMovie.
Edit video
If you're not bothered about transitions, and picture in picture, then the editing option in Quicktime are all you need. You can trim the video just as you a would audio, (which incidentally is exactly the same on any iOS device, same conventions). But where it really rocketh is in it's accuracy with splitting and deleting bits of video, or moving them around.
Just choose View > Show Clips to reveal a simple editing timeline at the bottom, click to select it (it will have a yellow outline) then move to the section of the video you want to split, you can even nudge the split point frame by frame using the arrow keys.
Once you've found the split point just choose Edit > Split Clip (or command Y) and you will see the video split into two (or more, if you split more than once) lozenges. Those bits can be deleted, or even moved about, simple.
You can even view the audio waveform to make editing easier, see where the quiet parts are...
Combine multiple clips
Just drag a video onto a video you have open and see the magic unfold before your very eyes! Now you can trim, move, split and of the clips.
When you're finished Export and choose the kind of video you want.
Convert video/audio file formats
For a final phenomenal feature, got video that is to big? No problem just right/secondary click, choose Encode Selected Video Files. The in the dialog window that pops up choose a size, 480p will create a smaller, web friendly version of your video.*
* You can make video files smaller, but you cannot make them bigger!
If you ever hear 'boolean operators' mentioned in a sentence, you could be forgiven for giving this whole rigamarole an eye roll and moving on—which I must confess I used to do, but DON'T, if you ignore these fabulous little functions you are missing out; you don't need to use all or even most of them, but you won't go wrong with these...
Just remember when using an operator, this is not an essay, so NO SPACE after the colon or it won't work!
Six Scintillating Search Strings
So yes, most 'boolean operators' are extremely geeky and only really relevant to highly specialised search gurus, but there are a handful that are useful to anyone, yes that includes you, if you can use Google you can use these; they are:
define:
Get a dictionary definition not just a webpage with the word in
“search term here”
Use quotes to search for a specific term or phrase with exactly those words in exactly that order eg “halt and catch fire“
site:
eg site:ie to just return websites that are based in Ireland, especially useful for research where you want the perspective of people of a certain nation not just the most popular websites on the Internet.
intitle:
eg intitle:gaming will only give you websites where gaming is in the title of the page not just a possibly fleeting reference within an article that is primarily about something else completely different.
NOT or - to exclude a particular term that keeps messing up your search results, eg maybe you’re searching for Koala, but you keep on getting websites that include the phrase “koala bear“ which you know means that they can’t be particularly authoritative, then you just add the search term -bear now any of the results that included the term “bear” will be excluded, refining your search down to a much better selection of sites.
Search for transparent images for your Google Slides
Search for images with other images…
Mix & Match!
And of course don’t forget your combos, any/all of the above can be combined to extremely powerful effect, eg
intitle:”halt and catch fire” site:ie
This will return websites that are based in Ireland that are all almost certainly about the TV show ‘halt and catch fire’ ...
I am regularly contacted by parents for advice about software they can install on the devices their children use at home that will enable them to filter out or block inappropriate content, usually based on the assumption that we must use some sort of monitoring software on campus. Often these parents are surprised to discover that while we do have filters to block the most egregious of content, it is fair to say that our college filters are not as strict as many might expect. We do use a commercial filter on our internet traffic to block inappropriate sites, however, such filters work on the basis of keywords and blacklists and neither of these methods are foolproof. So why do we take the risk?
Our college policy regarding parental controls goes a long way to explaining this:
In general the College has an ethos of developing personal responsibility in students and ultimately we believe that it is essential for students to develop the skills and attitudes necessary to survive and then thrive in a digitally connected world.
The sentiment behind this policy statement is very similar to the description of 'e-safety' as defined by Becta:
The term e-safety covers a broad range of issues around the need to ensure that children's and young people's experience and engagement with technologies is a safe and positive one. While parents, educators, government and industry all have a role to play in keeping children and young people safe, supporting them to become independent in online environments is critical to nationwide, effective e-safety. ‘Independence' does not mean here that they are expected to deal with every incident themselves: it means that they develop social skills (including resilience); that they know how to identify and manage risk; that they understand their rights and responsibilities and know how to access help and advice if needed. (Becta's Contribution to the Rose Review, 2009)
When we teach our kids how to use the internet, we do so from a position of preparing them for the 'real world' of internet access that most will encounter at home. While there are a minority of families who use some form of filtering software, the reality is that few families have internet filters of any kind on their home connections. This is not a criticism, I have not installed any filtering software at home either. This situation reflects the norm in my experience, a norm that we need to be teaching our students to operate effectively and responsibly within. For example, you cannot guarantee that even walking down Orchard Road you are not going to see images or overhear a conversation that you feel is inappropriate for your children. So in addition to the filters, arguably, more important than filters is the need to teach our children the skills they need to navigate the internet safely, and how to react appropriately if, or should I say, when something occurs.
This policy very much underpins our approach and throughout the Primary School, where, even from K2 (in K1 teachers use Guided Access), all students are effectively 'administrators' of their devices. This applies all the way through the iPad grades (K1-G3), and then on through from Grade 4-5. All students receive their own laptop in G6, where we leave the decision about admin controls up to parents, although we encourage parents to make their child admin if at all possible—or at least to try it. From G7—all the way through to grade 12 we expect all students to have admin rights on their laptop. This means that for most of their school years our students are already accustomed to using and managing their laptops as an 'administrator' whether or not they were even aware of this, which is possible, as we treat this as a 'normal' operating environment. This is an arrangement we encourage all parents to maintain, unless of course a situation arises where you feel that you need to withdraw the privilege of an admin account, in this (hopefully rare) situation, we encourage parents to ensure that this is a temporary arrangement.
"Nearly half of 10 year olds say they have the skills to hide what they're doing online from their parents." (Sky News, Swipe, 2017)
It's worth noting as a practical point, that the process of imposing parental controls is not a simple one, this is mainly because the process of setting the 'tightness' and 'looseness' of controls is a tricky balance to find. If your main concern is distraction rather than access to inappropriate content, there are a range of strategies we encourage at school that you can also model at home, and encourage your children to practise as well. The other critical consideration is that if you are not very careful, you could end up effectively creating an unhelpful dynamic where you effectively teach your child that they are not trusted, at which point you may well be encouraging them to find ways to subvert your attempts at policing their online activity, then when they do encounter problems they are unlikely to come to you for help as they will have to confess their nefarious scheme... For more see this short video on the 'the secret cyber life of young people'...
Road Safe, Web Safe
This is where the analogy of road safety that we use with students comes in. Roads in every country are commonplace, and at some point everyone of our children will need to learn how to navigate them safely and independently. The same can be said of the 'wild wild web'; like roads they are a modern and essential reality, and while they can be dangerous, they shouldn't be treated is if they are inherently dangerous places—although they can be very dangerous places. The solution to both is very similar: education and supervision. Like roads, we expect kids to be able to navigate the web from an early age, but never alone; although any wise parent should be modelling for their kids how they navigate the web, when they are using it together. Just like road safety, there are some basic rules we expect all young children to follow, to make these effective we've kept them simple:
Only search the internet with a responsible adult present.
If you see something that makes you uncomfortable, show the responsible adult.
If you need to search online unsupervised, use a search engine designed for kids like Kiddle or Safe Search Kids.
About point 3, we liken these 'child safe' search engines to playgrounds, spaces that are designed especially for children, this doesn't make them harmless, after all, kids in playgrounds can still get hurt, but it does make the likelihood of this less likely. In the same way we liken searching using Google as tantamount to walking down Orchard Road, not an inherently dangerous space per se, especially in Singapore; but clearly the possibility of encountering something or someone inappropriate is more likely. As children we did not grow up with the dangers of the internet, but we did grow up with dangers, and our parents, in my experience were quite comfortable with allowing us some controlled exposure to risk situations, precisely so we could learn from them. I fell out of several trees, and off several bicycles during my childhood, not to mention the stairs I fell down. Stairs, now those are really dangerous, but I doubt anyone is seriously considering preventing children from using those... So we're not looking to create a zero risk environment for our students, but a managed risk environment, this distinction is essential. This last point is one I've written about before, but a recent article from the Washington Post, entitled, 'Why I don't monitor my kids' texts anymore' does an excellent job of articulating this tension, along with some practical parenting advice.
"As a young and socially inexperienced person, I was sometimes mean, sometimes gross, and sometimes way out of line. Every kid tests his or her own boundaries. That’s how they start to grow up. The queasiness in my stomach or the ache in my heart when I crossed that line is what helped me learn from those mistakes.
When we hover over our kids’ social interactions, on high alert to catch each mistake and steer them back on course, we squelch their internal barometer for embarrassment and guilt. Had my mom listened to all my conversations and called my behavior out into the light, I might not have learned to read my moral compass."
This does beg the question, "at what age is it okay for my child to browse the internet unsupervised?', and the answer is very similar to "at what age is it okay for my child to cross the road unsupervised?", which is, when you have taught them how to navigate it safely, and what to do if things go wrong. In my experience this is unlikely to be until grade 4 or 5, which is, incidentally, when students are allowed to make their own way home (with parental permission, of course).
Not all families or children are the same, and the home environment is not one that is necessarily conducive to ensuring that young children are never able to go online unsupervised. Given that our policy is to teach responsibility, we'd like to think that even if unsupervised, our students would still make the 'right choice' and either stay offline (working within an app for example) or use one of the child safe search engines that they are encouraged to use in school. However there are clearly scenarios where this is not a realistic option, in which case you may want to consider some digital tools that can assist with this, but bear in mind these are unlikely to be free if they're any good, for example a one year family subscription to Azoomee costs £40, " No ads, no in-app purchases. And a PIN lock to keep kids inside the app and take away the worries."
When you open Screen Time for the first time, you can specify if you are a parent setting up an account for a child. Then you set a parent passcode that will be required to alter the Screen Time settings. From your device, you can also select “Set Up Screen Time for Family” to set up Screen Time with Family Sharing. You’ll be able to access your child’s Screen Time reports and set controls from your own device. When a child reaches the end of a time limit on the app, they can request more time; the request pops up as a notification on the parent’s device.
Finally, Screen Time allows parents to set restrictions on downloads, privacy, and other settings. By default, Apple won't set these restrictions, even if it knows it's a kid's phone. Parents will have to manually make these adjustments in Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions. (Wired Magazine)
"While we can certainly recommend a bunch of apps and devices for you, this is more about your approach than the tools you’re going to use. Kids generally don’t like being spied on and dislike being spied on without their knowledge even more. While a number of monitoring tools can run without children knowing about them, we strongly recommend being transparent with your kids about when and how you’re tracking them.
You know your kids better than we do, and we can’t prescribe the right approach for every type of child, but whatever your situation it pays to be open and honest about the dangers out there on the web and in the real world." (David Nield)
Pickering (2007), found that a focus on skills and fixed knowledge to be acquired was criticised by the teachers in his study, although Daly et al (2009), citing his findings, conceded that:
“Clearly, ICT use demands that teachers acquire certain generic skills (p 27).”
Understandably, there is a general hesitancy* by tech integrators to embrace ICT skills teaching, as it tends towards,
“superficial, one-off and ‘box-ticking’ approaches which emphasise the development of functional skills and relegate pedagogical development to teachers’ ‘spare’ time (Daly et al, 2009, p 41).”
Now, somewhat ironically, the situation seems to be becoming reversed – with the emphasis very much upon the development of pedagogical skills and the relegation of ‘functional development’ (skills) to teachers’ ‘spare’ time.
So teachers are now effectively expected to acquire skills,
“by studying manuals, talking to each other, talking to the instructor, and seeking out other locally available experts” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1038).
The problem is this ‘grappling experience’ (ibid) or ‘productive failure’ (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012), while a powerful way to learn, if not managed carefully, can become a tedious, frustrating process. "Good pedagogy should challenge not frustrate" (ibid) but it is difficult to judge when it is better to let people ‘wrestle’ or to mitigate the potential tediousness of a long process of discovery, by providing a ‘short cut’. The challenge of managing this ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1987) is significant, the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by their need to engage in independent problem solving (trouble shooting) and the point at which they know they cannot proceed any further without ‘expert’ guidance, or collaboration with more capable peers, a 'knowledgeable other' (ibid) – or even, or perhaps more likely, students.
Frustration is common with digital technologies,
“any given technology is not necessarily appropriate” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1040).
The plethora of software available to do even the most basic of tasks, means that even choosing an inappropriate tool can turn a task from a challenge to a crisis, like attempting to using Photoshop for image cropping, which is tantamount to using a Ferrari to deliver milk. What is likely to occur, is a situation where,
“teachers were so caught up in learning how to use the tools that they lost sight of the design tasks.” (Angeli and Valanides 2008, p 10).
The “cognitive load” (ibid, p 9) imposed by learning how to use the tools was so high, that teachers were left without enough “cognitive resources” to attend to the actual exercise.
Although skills training is clearly vital to being able to integrate technology into teachers’ practice, more often than not teachers are plagued by an unconscious incompetence - they ‘do not know, what they do not know’. Despite the proliferation of literature expounding the virtues of an integrated model, mention is rarely made of any consideration of a prerequisite skill set, one of these rare examples follows:
“The model assumes the existence of ICT standards [...] At a basic level these would include: basic ICT literacy, such as familiarity with and confidence in using the Windows operating system, basic word processing, PowerPoint and data software such as Excel and SPSS, software installation, and knowledge of the Internet such as how to use the Internet for resource searching, downloading and uploading files, communication via emails, video calls or web cameras.” (Hu & McGrath, 2011, p 54)
Balance is clearly critical here – one where an articulated skill set is defined that can be acquired within an authentic, integrated context. How much teachers know about technology makes a big difference in their uses of technology. Once technology is truly integrated, teachers and beliefs and knowledge are changed as well (Fisher et al, 1996). New pedagogical knowledge and practices emerge from the integration of technology, but only when teachers reach a certain level of technological understanding.
Unfortunately with the pendulum swinging well and truly away from a skills focus, we are in danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with bathwater, an issue alluded to in the recent Nesta report,
“…the lack of emphasis upon [ICT] skills, is a concern (2012, p 55).”
When considering what teachers should know about technology, we must consider how much they need to know to even be able to begin.
Skills mapping and audits
"A potential barrier to ICT CPD is staff not knowing what the gaps are in their own ICT knowledge. Many schools have found an ICT audit mapped to the curriculum a valuable tool in helping staff to gain a clear indication of the ICT skills, competencies and pedagogies they need to have." (Becta, 2009, Point 81)
In order to avoid the skills element having a negative impact on learning, at the end of a unit of study, or even the end of the academic year, the teachers ‘traffic light’ the ICT core skills matrix to identify which skills have, or have not, been acquired, in order to determine which skills may have need to be focused on explicitly in other authentic contexts in the future.
Example of a skills audit - post reflection
This is not a question of skills vs pedagogic integration. Teachers and students need to acquire ICT skills before they can start to harness technological expertise for the purposes of student learning. This re-purposing of the TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) framework, ensures that the focus remains pedagogically centred, but balanced and facilitated by clearly articulated ICT core skills.
The continued reluctance to engage with this issue should be resisted, as Becta's contribution to the Rose Review (2009) emphasised,"[ICT skills] should be regarded as an essential skills for learning and life, alongside literacy and numeracy." (Point 91) With warnings regarding the possibilities of neglecting this vital area:
“… there are two significant dangers: the first is that young people will develop an incomplete and unreflective capability, unsupported by adult guidance, with risks both to their learning progress and their safety. The second is that a digital underclass, lacking opportunities for wide-ranging use of technology, will be permanently excluded from a world mediated by ICT." (Point 94)
NETS - are not enough.
While useful as overarching standards, I do not believe NET Standards are enough on their own - they are too generic to be of practical use in ensuring a broad and balanced curriculum; they are descriptions of (any) curriculum, not applications of digital technologies. Remove the token references to ‘digital’ and ‘technology’ and you're left with a description of curriculum, but nothing which in and of itself actually requires the use of ICTs, or more importantly, that could not be achieved without the use of digital technologies at all. For example,
“Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals...”
(NETS(S) 2016, strikethrough mine).
To use the analogy of literary genres/strands (which I find helpful, but you could use science and mathematics strands just as easily) they need to be specific to the nature of the sphere of experience. Literacy genres are, NETS are not.
They need to be specific not generic. Yes you can argue that English literature is a 'subject' and ICT no longer is; this is just semantics. Who cares what we are defining them as now, we all know that just a few years ago 'IT' was a discrete subject, and it still is based on the definition of 'subject' it's just not 'discrete' anymore…
subject: a branch of (technological) knowledge studied or taught in a school, college, or university.
discrete: individually separate and distinct.
ICT is a 'subject' that is now integrated - and should be subject (see what I did there?) to the same rigorous checks and balances of any other 'subject'. The same argument can easily be made for English language, or Science, or Mathematics - these are core competencies that are applicable and a prerequisite for success in any domain in the 21st century. So call them what you like and distribute them how you will - but a broad and balanced education requires that the essential elements of these subjects are not neglected.
Vitamin D (VITAD)
Five Essential Domains: VITAD: video, image, text, audio, data - 'Vitamin D'
Just like all subject domains, tech has its own overarching domains or strands that are an efficient way to organise the essential skill sets needed for true digital literacy. We should not neglect opportunities to read and write, for example, realistic fiction, or physics or shape and space in Mathematics, I believe the same applies to what could be called the 'digital domains' or literacies of ICTs, such as, text, image, video, audio and data (with coding/control waiting in the wings) - none of which the NETS explicitly describe or mandate, thereby rendering them useless as a means to articulate the effective use of digital technologies.
Digital Illiteracy...
An easy easy way to recall these essential areas is with the acronym 'VITAD', 'vitamin digital', now when you're considering whether not you can consider yourself, your students or any 21st century citizen to be truly digitally literate, how do they measure up to VITAD?
Can they view, edit, create, compose with video?
Can they organise, edit, resize, manipulate, incorporate image?
Can they browse/read/search text? Are they proficient at word processing, commenting, curating texts?
Can the manage audio files, organise, edit, create, compose audio using multiple audio tracks/sound effects?
Do they know their way around a spreadsheet? Can they organise data efficiently, perform basic calculations, use functions and formulae, analyse, synthesise, and model data?
When, and only when you can confidently answer a confident yes to all the above, then, and only then can you call yourself digitally literate!
To put it another way - we're talking about students becoming holistically literate, that literacy has to incorporate 'multiliteracies' including language, scientific/methodological ways of thinking, mathematical literacy and of course digital literacy. ALL of these can be defined as 'subjects', all of these could also be (and arguably should/could be) taught in an integrated way. Just because we've chosen to integrate a subject, does not mean it should be treated less rigorously - integration should not mean invisibility - at least not for teachers. (I'd argue invisibility would be great from a student's perspective, but so would it be for maths and science et al - they don't see it as a 'subject' it's just another natural (for them) way of thinking and working)
What gets monitored gets done
An article published in the ASCD makes this point quite powerfully,
What do we monitor?
In most organisations, what gets monitored gets done. When a school devotes considerable time and effort to the continual assessment of a particular condition or outcome, it notifies all members that the condition or outcome is considered important. Conversely, inattention to monitoring a particular factor in a school indicates that it is less than essential, regardless of how often its importance is verbalised.
"In Sweden, young adults ages 16–24 topped the charts in an assessment of technology skills that was administered in 19 countries. Participants were asked to perform tasks at three levels of difficulty: to sort e-mails into folders, organize data into a spreadsheet, and manage reservations for a virtual meeting room. Fewer than one-third of U.S. young adults could complete tasks more complicated than sorting e-mails, a performance that put them at the bottom of the list of performers from the 19 countries. The study underscored the need for equality of access to technology because major discrepancies were noted among the results for young adults from varying socioeconomic backgrounds.”
The use is not equity or access, it is ignorance. With the current neglect of skills teaching in schools, despite the proliferation of screens, less and less people are actually taught skills with any rigour or balance, a generation of students could find themselves proficient with Social media, web browsing, poster making and maybe image manipulation, and that will be it!
We have these mandatory strands in each of most (of not all) subject literacies that are carefully monitored because we expect all students to have multiple experiences with these domains during their time in school, ideally in each grade, scoped and sequenced properly. I can't see how a student could be considered to be mathematically literate if, say, they had never been taught how to multiply, or in science, never experimented with forces, or in literacy, never read or written poetry, or in terms of digital literacy, never learned how to edit or use video. None of the strands in these subjects are left to chance, or to ad hoc integration. We carefully design authentic ways to ensure they are all experienced, all I'm arguing for is that we do not allow exceptions, especially not for one of the core competencies of the 21st century.
Put simply, if we believe that articulating a coherent scope and sequence of essential skills in the domains of language and mathematics are necessary, then how much more so in what is arguably THE prerequisite skill set of the 21st Century?
For a Google Doc version of our Primary School ICT skills scope and sequence matrix that you can copy, click here, but please include acknowledgement of UWCSEA as the original owner if you do :)
An example of a section of our skills matrix
Here are some other great examples of ICT skills matrices that run K-12:
*Another reason for a 'general hesitancy' is the acceptance of the myth that technology skills are changing to quickly to bother with, fueled in large part by fundamentally flawed quotes like this:
...the rapid rate of technological change ensures any knowledge gained about specific technologies or software programs would quite quickly become out of date. (Mishra et al, 2009, p 151).
[Originally posted in 2013, updated in 2018. Changes to the matrix in the interim? Very few, which just goes to show, skills don't change that much or that quickly, people do.]
