Beginning the day with the IWB in an early childhood classroom

There is a substantial demand in New Zealand for professional learning opportunities to help early years’ teachers to make use of ICT for teaching and learning (Harlow, Cowie and Jones, 2008), and where interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are increasingly being purchased by schools as instructional technologies. This paper reports on the findings of a researcher who was invited by a teacher in a small rural school in New Zealand to describe and understand the use of an IWB with young children aged five to six years. In this paper, the role of the IWB to enhance learning particularly in the use of language, symbols and texts is examined. The research involved collecting data from intensive classroom observation over a week using video and audio recordings as well as student and teacher interviews. Data were analysed using a framework developed by Kennewell and Beauchamp (2007), who identified how teachers used features of ICT/IWBs to enhance learning. The findings indicate that it was the way the teacher integrated the IWB into her pedagogy to improve the learning activities that made the IWB such an effective tool in this classroom

Online surveys-possibilities, pitfalls and practicalities: the experience of the TELA evaluation.

Surveys are a commonly used strategy for gaining insights into teacher perspectives. They are often seen as cost effective in terms of time and resources required, but the challenges involved in conducting and processing paper-based surveys can be considerable. Online surveys offer an alternative, particularly now that people have better access to computers and the Internet, and also since the available software has recently become more user-friendly and in some cases, free to the user. In this paper, the research process used in a large longitudinal evaluation study is discussed, where teachers increasingly opted to participate in an online survey in preference to a paper survey. The possibilities of choosing to use an online survey were attractive but they came with pitfalls. The practical strategies that proved effective in engaging teachers in an online survey process and in managing online responses are discussed and considered in the light of current research literature

Identification of threshold concepts involved in early electronics: Some new methods and results

This manuscript reports the threshold concepts identified over a two-year study in early circuits and electronics courses. Some novel methods have been used to improve confidence in the identification process. We also identify some concepts, potentially threshold, that ought to have been mastered in high-school physics courses but that are often absent from student repertoires. Weak understanding of these underlying concepts may be a confusing factor for researchers in their search for threshold concepts as well as an additional source of trouble for students of electronics

A junior school science unit on the solar system: Learning to think like a scientist

This article highlights the ways in which a Year 1‒3 teacher in a decile 8 rural primary school used the Science Learning Hub website (www.sciencelearn.org.nz) to develop her own science knowledge and to introduce her 20 five- and six-year-olds to the planets, and to the research that scientists undertake to extend their knowledge. The research was undertaken as part of the Science Learning Hub’s (Hub) ongoing research in evaluating its usefulness for practitioners. Hub researchers observed the class over three days during the second week of the unit, and interviewed the teacher about her approaches to the unit. The research explored how a new entrant teacher might make use of the Hub resources in conjunction with other materials to help children begin to think like scientists. Detail of the materials and two of the activities that were used is given and there is a discussion around how these activities encouraged the children to articulate their ideas and listen to the views of others, including those of ‘expert’ scientists. Implications for teaching are highlighted to show how teachers of very young children can stimulate children’s interest and curiosity in science, and help children to start a journey towards ‘thinking like a scientist’

Using an interactive whiteboard and a computer-programming tool to support the development of the key competencies in the New Zealand curriculum

Does children’s use of the software Scratch provide potential for the enhancement of key competencies as they work in pairs at the interactive whiteboard (IWB)? This article looks at how children using Scratch collaborated and managed their projects as they set about designing, constructing, testing and evaluating a game for others to play, a task that provided a sustained challenge over six weeks and beyond. The findings showed that the key competencies of participating, contributing, and relating to others were enhanced by the collaborative use of Scratch at the IWB, and that creative and conceptual thinking processes were sustained. Children became increasingly adept at using Scratch, and some children, previously thought to have poor social skills, began to articulate their understandings to others. While a guiding and scaffolding role was evident in teachers’ actions, close monitoring of group progress and direct input from teachers is required to keep the challenge high but achievable, and to extend children’s knowledge and thinking as they use Scratch at the IWB

Will the teacher's laptop transform learning?

This article explores how Year to 3 teachers have made use of laptops for teaching and learning in their classroom, examining how they fit with current recommendations for effective teaching, and whether teachers' use of a laptop has lead to a transformation in teaching and learning. Findings show that there was an increasing degree of laptop integration into all areas of the curriculum over the three-year evaluation period. It appears that teachers are providing their students with the opportunity to experience transformative learning

How are science teachers using their TELA laptop?

The Digital Horizons: Laptops for teachers scheme provides teachers whose schools opt into the TELA scheme access to a laptop for their exclusive use. This paper reports on a three-year evaluation of the impact of the TELA laptops on teachers’ work. The findings of the evaluation suggest teachers are making substantial use of the laptop for tasks such as lesson planning and preparation, reporting to parents and communication with colleagues. Teachers are making some use of the laptop in the classroom for teaching and learning. Science teachers are amongst the most active users of the laptops and the paper details how ongoing access to a laptop changed the way a third year science teacher planned for teaching and subsequently his interactions with students during lessons. Colleagues and the science head of department noted that the teacher provided a role model for what was possible. This case study highlights the importance of leadership and collaboration in supporting the integration of ICT into science teaching and learning

An electronics Threshold-Concept Inventory: Assessment in the face of the dependency of concepts

The Theory of Threshold Concepts (TCs), first articulated by Land and Meyer in 2003, provides educators in many disciplines with a tool to identify those special ideas that both define the characteristic ways of thinking of expert practitioners, and cause the greatest learning difficulties for students. Concept inventories are popular assessment tools, epitomized by the widely-accepted Force Concept Inventory of Hestenes et al., introduced circa 1992. It is a natural marriage to bring these two thrusts together to produce “Threshold-Concept Inventories”. We report ongoing work to develop and verify such a TC-inspired inventory assessment tool in the field of electronics and simple circuit theory. We identify the difficulty in the development of questions targeted at assessing understanding of single threshold concepts and present results in support of a strategy to deal with this

Threshold concept knowledge in analogue electronics: Support and assessment

In electrical engineering, as in other academic disciplines, there exist special, threshold concepts, where students often get stuck but which once grasped reveal new ways of thinking about a subject. Two surveys, student interviews and focus group discussions, and students’ assessment were directed at learning of threshold concepts and their pre-cursors. Results suggest that one of the precursor concepts, current flow, may be a threshold concept in itself. A model of precursor and threshold concepts assessment and additional student-support for learning threshold concepts is suggested

Impact of running first year and final year electronics laboratory classes in parallel

First electronics courses are considered difficult by students because of the circuit theory content, and retention of students in electronics is a problem worldwide. Retention is especially problematic at universities that offer a common first-year program since the students can change streams, for example from Electrical to Mechanical. At our university we ran the laboratory classes for a challenging first-year electronics course in the same room at the same time as a popular final-year mechatronics class that involved visible use of Lego Mindstorms, a model elevator, digital model trains and slot cars, etc. We report the outcomes of a quantitative and qualitative study of the impact of this organisation. One lab stream did not see the parallel classes and thus acted as a control group