Barriers to the effective use of technology in education.

Whilst on my teaching placement I have used technology as I am pretty technology reliant in my every day life any way, my iPhone is my alarm clock in the morning, my calendar, my diary/planner, my to do list, my music player on the walk to placement, my device for checking Moodle and emails as well as my phone and probably a myriad of other things that I have forgotten (unfortunately my iPhone cannot think for me and write this blog post for me, yet!). Besides all of these things I have also used my iPhone whilst on placement to create a quick Pinterest board for students to accompany my first workshop/lesson which I had to plan in 5 minutes as it was my first day of placement. The ability to do this on my phone and then to give the students the link to the board made the seemingly impossible task of teaching with no resources become possible.
 There are barriers to the effective use of technology at my placement and these include:

• lack of available technology; the technology available where I have been teaching consists of 3 iMac desktop computers and a photocopier/printer (which are available for students to use), a projector, mobile phones and other devices brought in from home by tutors/students.
• lack of understanding of technology
• lack of knowledge of new technology
• lack of funding
• relevance

Also, where students are asked to go away and research for themselves they inevitably come back with either reams and reams of irrelevant or incorrect information or nothing at all, attention needs to be paid to their "information skills", there is an abundance of information available but  much of it is not quality information and so students need guidance processing, evaluating and selecting the quality rich content. (Crawley, 2005)


References

Jim Crawley In At The Deep End (David Fulton Publishers Ltd., London: 2005) pg 55 - 59

How technology has changed the way we learn.

Technology has certainly changed the way my children learn, and also the way I learn, compared to the way I was taught when at their ages; I had the choice of being taught at school, private instruction (something unaffordable to my family), learning through books or peer to peer learning, whereas, my children have access to all of these things and also the wealth of instruction provided by the internet and current technologies.  As an example, when I was eager to learn taxidermy I found that there were no courses or people giving private instruction in Wales and so I bought myself several books on taxidermy. These books were all very outdated, referencing the use of chemicals that are now unobtainable and I found it nigh on impossible to find any up to date material to learn from. Technology came to my rescue; the internet provided me with websites where I could find online tutorials, I could Google modern day equivalents to the dangerous chemicals used in the past, I could use YouTube to watch tutorials and see taxidermy techniques carried out before my eyes and I could do all of this on my mobile phone at any time.
 In Reflective Teaching In Further And Adult Education Yvonne Hiller discusses computer assisted learning and the potential that technology and the internet has for self-directed learning, it is also noted that consideration should be given to any information found using this resource. (Hillier, 2005)
The main benefit I find to using the internet as a learning aid is the amount of information that you can find on any subject, the down side to this is that you have to cross reference any information that isn't from an academic source as it may be incorrect or unreliable content. However, this cross referencing can help you to find an alternative explanation that you can understand more easily, for example I am learning to play ukulele and I have come across several people offering ukulele tutorial lessons on YouTube and I have the luxury of being able to select the tutor I find easiest to understand. If I were in a classroom learning environment and I struggled to understand a teacher's explanation then I may have a problem. If this happens with a YouTube tutorial video then I just find another video from another person. I am concerned that I have no one to check I am learning correctly though, it is easy to misunderstand instructions and I could be getting it wrong so although I have all of this information at my finger tips do I have the quality of learning that I would have if I was trying to learn the ukulele without the use of technology?



References

Hillier, Yvonne Reflective Teaching In Further And Adult Education pg. 116 - 118

Tedtalk (I have finally found/unpacked my computer after moving)....

JR's Ted Prize Wish
This Tedtalk should be inspiring to everyone, not just to me. I watched a few Tedtalks and was underwhelmed if I'm honest, I struggled to find anything that I found interesting, let alone inspiring until I came across this one.
 This is an art project that I had heard and read a little about but until watching the Tedtalk I had no idea of the scale, impact or ambition of the Inside Out Project. There is a website for the project which has further information than the Tedtalk and from the website there is information on participation which is something that I would be interested in pursuing with students. Something that I have always believed is that art can change the World and this Tedtalk inspires a feeling of empowerment and motivation within me.

I would prefer to be typing on paper, using a typewriter. This idea of a blog does not appeal to me at all. I'm sure that I will get used to it, I don't really have much choice.
 I would much rather be sending someone a banana postcard.....