Hypermedia@heckenberg

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Is it the media that makes them hyper? A review of literature at the intersection of student hypermedia and engagement

The theoretical framework for this review has two strands. These are the use of hypermedia authoring within learning and student engagement within school contexts. The review will consider the relationships between the different factors of school engagement (behavioural, emotional and cognitive) and the processes used by students when designing and constructing hypermedia texts for an audience of their peers. The work of Mayer (2005) on cognitive theory within multimedia learning, of Jonassen, (2006) on Information Technology mediated cognitive tools and of Durant and Green (2000) on students as Hypermedia authors will be discussed. The review of the students’ learning contexts will draw on the notion of productive pedagogies in the development of the NSW Quality Teaching project. The examination of the school engagement will draw on the meta analysis of school engagement by Fredricks, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) and on the MeE framework as described by Munns & Martin (2005)

Exploring student engagement through classroom use of hypermedia authoring

This paper describes research within the “Fair Go” project, a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney and the Priority Schools Funding Program, a NSW government equity initiative. In this project teachers and teacher educators work as co-researchers with students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds exploring ways to increase the students’ substantive engagement in classroom learning. The collaboration described in this paper is focused on the task engagement created as primary student’s author interactive hypermedia texts for an intended audience. Also discussed are the linkages between the school based work and the program the teacher educators provide for their university students. The central proposition of this investigation is that student’s construction of hypermedia texts deepens their engagement in learning tasks and their understanding of the content knowledge they are representing in that text. The students’ attempts to meet the needs of their imagined audience and the interactivities they build into their texts are seen as measures of their ability to represent what it is they know. Data collected thus far supports the following propositions. First, that students can be assisted to construct hypermedia texts that will engage their intended audience through teacher scaffolding of the variations in the structure, content and interactivities within the authored texts. Further, students use of information and communication technologies within appropriate learning sequences will increase their engagement in learning tasks in ways that go beyond the teacher, time and place of classroom learning. Finally that student collaboration, learning initiative, higher order problem solving and use of metalanguage increased in ways not previously reported by the teachers working with these students

Student voice(s)

The chapter comprises two sections. The first section explores the significance of student voices in the learning space and, in particular, how students are encouraged by their teachers to talk in order to learn, talk about their own learning, share learning and help others to learn, and participate in the shaping and organization of learning. The second section of the chapter represents the students’ voices in the study

From Bankstown to Jigalong and Yirrkala : supporting pre-service teachers in the deployment of XO laptops

The paper outlines the learning experienced by educators from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) as they worked with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Australia charity to deploy purpose designed XO laptops in remote communities across Northern Australia. The focus of this paper is the three different deployments of XO laptops in: Jigalong Remote Community School, Western Australia; Yirrkala School, Northern Territory; and Yirrkala Homeland School, which comprises a number of small, homeland schools near Yirrkala, Northern Territory. The XO laptop is a simple, cheap and rugged laptop built to work in remote areas of the globe. It runs on the Linux operating system and comes with open-source applications geared towards educational use and collaboration. The main purpose of the XO laptops is to enable children living in remote areas access to modern forms of education. The teacher educators from UWS in collaboration with OLPC Australia applied their learning from previous experiences in ICT and professional experience and prepared UWS pre-service teachers to undertake a service learning activity with OLPC Australia. The first deployment involved educators participating in a deployment and gain first-hand experience to help plan future deployments that involved pre-service teachers; in the second deployment the plan developed from the Jigalong experience was executed with the support of two Indigenous preservice teachers from UWS; then it was refined for the third deployment involving 12 pre-service teachers from UWS in the homeland schools surrounding Yirrkala. This third deployment was a combination of group training with classroom teachers, and on-site implementation of the uses of XO laptops to achieve learning outcomes

Assessing Professional Teaching Standards in Practicum Using Digital Technologies with Aboriginal and Other Pre-service Teachers

The extent to which pre-service teachers undertaking practicum in remote/regional locations are able to share knowledge about teaching practice, standards and quality relies on overcoming challenges of inexperience, distance, technology and culture. This report details how three universities supported Aboriginal and other cohorts of pre-service teachers (PSTs) to evidence and self-assess their professional teaching standards during their practicums in schools with substantial Aboriginal populations. The students used digital technologies to enhance and document their achievement of standards and to develop a professional learning community of PSTs willing to develop inter-cultural relationships and share knowledge about teacher practice. Key issues addressed in this report include ways PSTs made judgments about their own practices while undertaking practicum, how they selected evidence to demonstrate professional standards and how they represented their professional self in the public arena. The dispersed cohorts, institutions and practicum communities involved in the project benefited from using digital technologies to promote collegial collaboration, bridge geographical distances and facilitate developing meaningful feedback, self-reflection and self-assessment practices in relation to attaining professional teaching standards

A new Monday morning and beyond

In this concluding chapter of our book we begin by reflecting on Willis’s (1977) seminal work about how kids from low SES communities come to believe that school is not for them. Willis had talked about Monday morning in his final chapter as a metaphor for the limited possibilities that classrooms offer for many poor communities. We are hoping that the same metaphor can reflect a sense of optimism for a ‘new Monday morning’ as captured in the classroom stories of this book. The teachers you have met offer their students a genuine hope that getting up and going to school can be both challenging and engaging in the here and now, as well as giving them a chance for a more successful educational future. We finish this book by suggesting that this chance is manifest through three key themes: measure of a teacher; the call to engage; intellectual challenge. The themes are presented here both as a summary and as a set of provocations for educators to take forward as they open up an educational fair go for students living in poverty