SAS Curriculum Pathways are available for teachers and students
November 9, 2009
T. DeLene Beeland
Last April at the N.C. Science Summit conference in Cary, a single buzzword linked many sessions: “technology in the classroom.” In today’s digitized world, bringing new technology in to classrooms and integrating it into core curriculum is more important than ever. But what technologies are teachers using, and how is it transforming student learning?
Simply placing a computer in a classroom does not cut it, says Bruce Friend who works in SAS Institute, Inc.’s division of education in Research Triangle Park. He says the trick is for teachers to adopt technology in a way that fosters higher-order cognitive skills and keeps kids engaged. One growing tech trend is the use of digital curricula to deliver core content repackaged in forms that today’s children are accustomed to using.
“Kids are already using technology in their daily lives, getting them to use it in school is not the challenge,” Friend says. “The bigger challenge is changing the instructional practices of teachers.”
Friend directs Curriculum Pathways, a digital curricula program that SAS — a global business analytics and software company — has invested $74 million over 12 years into developing and producing with the goal of making it easier to integrate technology into curriculum. SAS gives their product free of charge to any U.S. teacher. SAS was last year’s recipient of the SMT Center Business Award.
Digital curricula like SAS’s push well beyond converting textbooks to e-books; it fundamentally revamps the way content is delivered and the modes through which the student can access and manipulate it.
“Simply digitizing content misses the point,” Friend says. “The point is to create multi-media content that is sensory enriching and interactive, that keeps kids engaged in the learning process.”
For example, envision a computer graphic that is an animated cross-section through our planet which reveals the earth’s core, mantle and lithosphere. Moving magma pushes upward to demonstrate how volcanoes are made, and chunks of lithosphere drift and collide to demonstrate plate tectonics.
Digital curricula enable students to learn almost cinematically — by providing lessons that include not just written content but also videos, images and audio that can be accessed on demand. The best digital learning materials allow students to discover content, visualize processes and even pace themselves independently.
“This is how kids want to learn,” Friend says. “The focus is on the end user’s experience; getting kids to be interactive in the learning process through technology, and keeping them engaged.”
In this vein, some tech-savvy schools and teachers are also embracing digitally interactive white boards in lieu of chalk boards or dry erase boards. These “smart boards” are digital screens that display prepared content but also let users manipulate and move content based on touch. A teacher or student can move documents around with their fingertips, hop online, pull up digital files and even write notes by hand – all on the same screen. Friend calls this “kinesthetic learning” and emphasizes the interactive aspects.
Going a step further, other technologies such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts. allow students and teachers to create their own content. All of the online courses at the N.C. Virtual Public Schools employ these tools, says Chief Academic Officer Dr. Tracy Weeks. “Teachers are using wikis and blogs to a tremendous degree in our courses,” she says.
Teachers may ask students to use wikis to aggregate online information — reference websites, news articles, images or podcasts — about a specific topic or research question. Wikis enable content-clustered information to be aggregated in one place as a common resource or instructional pool for the whole class to collaborate in building and then using.
“I’ve seen teachers have students use wikis to generate a study guide for a test, for example,” Dr. Weeks says. “It’s one way for students to re-create or process information in a quick, collaborative fashion.”
Students in virtual science classes may use wikis to create science logs or science notebooks as they observe phenomenon or do experiments. But blogs are used differently, often as a reflective writing tool, or a medium through which to synthesize or analyze information.
“Blogs typically ask the students to deal with some higher-order, bigger level questions,” Dr. Weeks says. “They are different from a discussion board where there is a feedback going back and forth, they are usually more big-picture in nature.”
Building wikis and blogging may sound more like playing than learning, but these tools not only spur students to gather and mold content in new ways, they also teach students how to work collaboratively, from a distance and over the internet. This is a crucial skill for the modern workplace, where many jobs require online collaboration in one form or another.
But of all the new technologies, perhaps the one that has changed the classroom the most is online learning.
Virtual courses are breaking the mold of the traditional school day and schoolhouse. The NCVPS offers more than 150 different courses, taught by 345 teachers that reach every county in the state. And the number of enrollments in the virtual school jumped from 5,000 last fall to about 14,000 this fall. This enrollment jump may be a convergence of both the state budget cuts — more schools are looking to the NCVPS to supplement their course catalogs — and the Virtual School’s coming of age
“We’re not the new kids on the block anymore,” Dr. Weeks says. “Educators know more about us now and are enrolling more and more students with us.”
Online learning allows students something the traditional school day and class does not — flexibility in pacing, timing and motivation. Schedule flexibility is the number one reason cited by students for choosing online learning. And students in rural parts of the state can take courses they may not other wise have access to, like A.P. Physics or Small Business Entrepreneurship. But while most students adapt to online learning with ease, the transition may differ for teachers.
When a classroom teacher makes the jump to online teaching, it’s a big adjustment. Professional development courses are available to train teachers in online teaching, but often teachers pursue this training on their own time.
Justin Tillet, a science teacher with the NCVPS, says that he took two online courses over two weeks to learn online pedagogy and the technical interface, a platform called Blackboard. He says teachers will know most of what they need from face-to-face teaching, and that the online aspect simply has to be added in.
“Truthfully, there were no challenges or barriers,” he says, referring to his technical transition. “The only difference is that now I work two jobs full time: one in the face-to-face environment and then also teaching two sections online. You learn good time management.”
The greater challenge lay with overcoming communication barriers with students, whom he says he stays in touch with through the phone, instant messaging and texting. The depth of the relationship depends upon how much the student opens up to their teacher, he says.
“I would say you get more personal with the students online than you do with face-to-face teaching,” Tillet says. “They have to be more aware of your personal schedule. Like when my wife had a baby, I gave nightly updates when I was available in the hospital for help.”
Carrie Jones, also a science teacher with NCCVPS says that her biggest challenge was lessening her dependence on the auditory learning style and honing her written communication skills.
“There are other ways to deliver online instruction such as voice boards, videos, podcasts, et cetera, but there is definitely more written communication necessary with online teaching than in the face-to-face classroom teaching,” Jones says.
She says it also helps if teachers also take courses online, such as professional development courses, so that teachers will “experience what the student’s experience, and learn from those positives and negatives of how a particular instructor teaches his or her classes or treats their students.”
The future will likely include a mix of face-to-face teaching with some online teaching, and some courses may mix the two methods according to Dr. Weeks, the NCVPS Chief Academic Officer.
“From the trending that we see, online teaching is only going to continue to grow,” she says.
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ONLINE EXTRAS: Teacher resources for learning how to use and integrate tech
SAS Curriculum Pathways: (Digital curricula) SAS, the world’s largest privately-held software company, applies their trade knowledge to create technologies that enhance learning
Apex Learning: (Digital curricula) leading provider of digital curriculum for secondary education to the nation’s school districts
Teacher Tube: (Digital curricula)A YouTube based multi-media site for teachers. Upload and download videos, podcasts, audio, photos and blogs; search for content by grade level, content area or career.
Podcasting 101 for K-12 Librarians: explains the relevancy of podcasting for learning, applicable to all teachers; includes additional podcast resource links
