Variable Appropriation of an Online Resource Discovery and Sharing Tool

Even when following best practices for participatory design, the appropriation of tools in formal education settings can be hampered by a number of factors. Drawing from a case of a web tool built to help teachers in five school districts find and share free resources in an educational digital library, we describe patterns of tool use and provide some explanations for variability in tool appropriation. We also suggest that future research consider school districts as complex systems of professionals whose interactions and inter-relationships may yield unexpected technology adoption behaviors

Teaching Use of Digital Primary Sources for K-12 Settings

This paper describes learning outcomes of a three-day workshop on integrating primary sources into K-12 teaching. The short curriculum — intended for teams of teachers and school librarians — combined visits to a museum and a library\u27s special collections with an introduction to significant national and local digital collections of primary sources. The paper draws on focus group data, reflection papers, and a conference presentation by the workshop participants as well as curricular artifacts presented to the workshop instructors. Using their workshop experience, teachers integrated digitized primary sources into their curricula thereby creating quality instructional content that engaged students\u27 interest. School librarians and teachers worked together during the workshop, establishing a model for future collaboration. They were exposed to readily accessible digital sources they can draw upon for scholastic projects and lifelong learning. Primary source sets created by workshop participants were added to local and national educational websites for others to use

Dissemination Matters: Influences of Dissemination Activities on User Types in an Online Educational Community

Emerging online educational communities provide spaces for teachers to find resources, create instructional activities, and share these activities with others. Within these online communities, individual users’ activities may vary widely, and thus different user types can be identified. In addition, users’ patterns of activities in online communities are dynamic, and further can be affected by dissemination activities. Through analyzing usage analytics in an online teacher community called the Instructional Architect, this study explores the influences of dissemination activities on the usage patterns of different user types. Results show that dissemination activities can play an important role in encouraging users’ active participation, while the absence of dissemination activities can further increase participation inequality

Teachers, Tasks, and Tensions: Lessons From a Research-Practice Partnership

How teachers make sense of new academic standards significantly shapes the implementation of those standards. Professional development organized around the analysis of mathematical tasks has potential to prepare teachers for standards implementation by helping them develop common understandings of standards and how to help students meet ambitious new learning goals. In practice, however, designers and participants bring different goals to the professional development context, which becomes evident when teachers engage in task analysis. In this article, we use the design tensions framework (Tatar, 2007) to analyze these tensions within a research-practice partnership comprised of five university researchers, three district curriculum leaders from a large urban school district, 12 high school Algebra 1 teachers from nine schools in the district, and a small team of Web engineers. Primary data for the study consist of participant observation and field notes of meetings in which project stakeholders negotiated the design of the professional development, as well as interview and survey data. An analysis based on the design tensions framework helped our partnership surface, both in the moment and retrospectively, the need for designers of professional development focused on standards implementation to be adaptive and willing to evolve activities to satisfy multiple stakeholders\u27 goals for participation

Integrating Technology, Curriculum, and Online Resources: A Multilevel Model Study of Impacts on Science Teachers and Students

This scale-up study investigated the impact of a teacher technology tool (Curriculum Customization Service, CCS), curriculum, and online resources on earth science teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and practices and on students’ achievement and engagement with science learning. Participants included 73 teachers and over 2,000 ninth-grade students within five public school districts in the western U.S. To assess the impact on teachers, changes between pre- and postsurveys were examined. Results suggest that the CCS tool appeared to significantly increase both teachers’ awareness of other earth science teachers’ practices and teachers’ frequency of using interactive resources in their lesson planning and classroom teaching. A standard multiple regression model was developed. In addition to “District,” “Training condition”(whether or not teachers received CCS training) appeared to predict teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and practices. Teachers who received CCS training tended to have lower postsurvey scores than their peers who had no CCS training. Overall, usage of the CCS tool tended to be low, and there were differences among school districts. To assess the impact on students, changes were examined between pre- and postsurveys of (1) knowledge assessment and (2) students’ engagement with science learning. Students showed pre- to postsurvey improvements in knowledge assessment, with small to medium effect sizes. A nesting effect (students clustered within teachers) in the Earth’s Dynamic Geosphere (EDG) knowledge assessment was identified and addressed by fitting a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM). In addition, significant school district differences existed for student post-knowledge assessment scores. On the student engagement questionnaire, students tended to be neutral or to slightly disagree that science learning was important in terms of using science in daily life, stimulating their thinking, discovering science concepts, and satisfying their own curiosity. Students did not appear to change their self-reported engagement level after the intervention. Additionally, three multiple regression models were developed. Factors from the district, teacher, and student levels were identified to predict student post-knowledge assessments and their engagement with science learning. The results provide information to both the research community and practitioners

Visualizing The Flow And Usage Of Curricular Components In An Online Curriculum Planning And Teaching Tool

The Internet can be useful in supporting teacher planning and instruction. However, there is no way for teachers to know if they are progressing through the curriculum at an appropriate pace. The focus of this thesis is exploring the use of visualizations in aiding teacher planning and instruction. Visualizations were created using Processing, an open source programming language and environment. Data from the Curriculum Customization Service was used to display curricular flow. The visualization contains three layers representing the group's flow, the ideal flow, and an individual user's flow. These layers show the flow through the units of the curriculum. Another graph can be displayed by hovering over lines in the layered graph, which shows the most popular concepts among users. The visualizations were tested by asking five users to complete three tasks using the visualizations. All five users were able to complete the tasks though some had more difficulty than others, showing that while many improvements are needed, the visualizations do allow users to see their curricular flow and make comparisons

Expanding evidence approaches for learning in a digital world

Executive Summary: Relatively low-cost digital technology is ubiquitous in daily life and work. The Web is a vast source of information, communication, and connection opportunities available to anyone with Internet access. Most professionals and many students have a mobile device in their pocket with more computing power than early supercomputers. These technological advances hold great potential for improving educational outcomes, but by themselves hardware and networks will not improve learning. Decades of research show that high-quality learning resources and sound implementations are needed as well.The learning sciences have found that today’s technologies offer powerful capabilities for creating high-quality learning resources, such as capabilities for visualization, simulation, games, interactivity, intelligent tutoring, collaboration, assessment, and feedback. Further, digital learning resources enable rapid cycles of iterative improvement, and improvements to resources can be instantly distributed over the Internet. In addition, digital technologies are attracting exciting new talent, both from other industries and from the teacher workforce itself, into the production of digital learning resources. Yet even with so many reasons to expect dramatic progress, something more—better use of evidence— is needed to support the creation, implementation, and continuous enhancement of high-quality learning resources in ways that improve student outcomes

A collaborative design process for educational digital resources in African higher education

Within Africa, access to digital library systems is critical in supporting higher level teaching, learning and research. Currently there is a high demand with inadequate resources which often produces poorly supported learning outcomes. The effectiveness of current resources is further limited by poor design processes, which is worsened by stakeholders (academics, e-learning technologists and digital librarians and designers) often working in isolation. Ultimately, designed resources become less user-centred and sustainable. This thesis sought to provide empirically developed collaborative design process guidance for design stakeholders developing educational digital resources within African higher education. Following a Human Computer Interaction research approach, eleven best practice digital library projects identified from three case studies of African universities (in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa) were investigated. Data was drawn from interviews, observations and an examination of documents. This investigation identified three interrelated factors that impacted on the design process (i. e. human relationships, innovative technologies and policies). The human relationships factor comprised multidisciplinary design stakeholders and included a subset i. e. design champions (multidisciplinary and domain champions) whose role changed the facilitation and eventual output of the other stakeholders in the design process. The multidisciplinary champions took on a participatory approach to engagement while the domain champions assumed an approach that was less engaging. The innovative technologies factor comprised universal technologies and `flexible' technologies (i. e. Web 2.0 applications and the Open Source Software) which supported the design process and enhanced user-centeredness and sustainability of the projects. Existing institutional and national policies supported stakeholder collaboration and application of the innovative technologies. The absence of any of these factors in the digital library projects weakened the design process and reduced effectiveness of digital resources. These three factors have been used to develop the Collaborative Educational Resources Design (CERD) process model as a guidance tool to support multidisciplinary design stakeholders indesigning effective digital resources