Literature shows that learners are quick to embrace and are making more and more use of available tools and technologies in their learning and everyday activities (Engelhard & Kyeong-Ju Seo, 2012). This matches with the observations from the BYOD classrooms where young learners are very creative in terms of using one-to-one devices in different activities and they can learn new things very quickly. With the carefully designed lesson plans and learning activities by few teachers, students had to be given very little input and support to carry out the learning activities. For example, students were eager to go and find relevant information from the carefully selected internet sources provided by the teacher, then combine all that information in a coherent form and prepare various presentation modes via blog posts. Some classes where teachers were more technology savvy were raising the bar of technology integration into the curriculum and learning activities. However, the digital skills and readiness of the students played an important part in making this happen. The data in figure 4.4 shows that learners’ usage of one-to-one devices includes more and more use of online social media and web 2.0 tools for the everyday as well as learning
130 activities. By using these applications and tools, they get opportunities to create, collaborate, share, and publish the contents in a matter of minutes, leaving them feeling accomplished and empowered. Therefore it is an important question though that, if schools and teachers are keeping up with the usage of digital technologies (Collis & Moonen, 2008; Engelhard & Kyeong-Ju Seo, 2012) to match that of the students. Use of convergent digital media and web 2.0 tools are growing exponentially in the everyday life of the young learners, but whenever they come to the classroom, the possibility of being able to use those skills into their learning activities are slim. This shows that, teaching methodologies practiced in schools and educational institutions are lagging behind in embracing the opportunities offered by those technologies.
Applying parameter C: Institutional emphasis on expertise in the BYOD classroom, there is a scope for school in recognizing personal expertise of learners’ and including those into the school curricular practices. One of the ways to do that is to include a teaching and learning platform into the curricular practices that can enhance the educational experience of the learners and empower teachers to facilitate technology- mediated learning practices in their everyday teaching. Specifically, a learning management system that allows teachers and students to communicate, collaborate, create, share and publish their learning activities in a real time would contribute a lot to the objectives of the BYOD classrooms initiative.
The school in the context of BYOD classroom is using an online learning platform called Ultranet4, which provides a wide range of features and functionality, which is
helpful for teachers, students and for parents. Broadly, Ultranet’s functionality can be
131 described as covering three distinct areas, or what they like to call the ‘three spaces’ (Ultranet, 2012):
• ClassSpace: This is essentially the heart of the system, providing individual
virtual classroom spaces for students and teachers to interact - like the physical classroom, but made available online. Here is where anyone can find collaborative learning, resource sharing, online task and activity management.
• uSpace: This is the personal learning area of Ultranet, where students will find
the social learning network with ePortfolios integrated. They can also share any media and create their blog.
• WebSpace: This is the public aspect of Ultranet, and schools set up their main
website pages to publish information about themselves and news to the public.
During their implementation of the Ultranet’s learning platform, the school decided to disable some of its features and functionality. While these policy decisions have been made for good reason, they nevertheless pose a limitation for students and teachers on collaboration and communication on the learning platform.
One of the major parts of Ultranet’s - uSpace - has been purposefully built to improve and encourage the students’ participation in learning activities by providing tools and applications to collaborate and communicate. The uSpace provides a personal learning area for every student that contains safe social networking, blogs, media sharing and ePortfolios. This can enable every student to collaborate with teachers and peers, since it has been designed in such a way that this could utilize practices of digital technologies from students’ everyday life for learning. Unfortunately, this module has been made unavailable in the school’s implementation of Ultranet.
132 Although, the teachers who are innovative in learning design are making use of the external tools and media like Facebook and Google to accomplish the task. However, it is very important to acknowledge here that those capabilities could have been accomplished by uSpace in Ultranet. Some of the other features have also been disabled from Ultranet including features like online homework submission, causing majority (in fact all) of the teachers to use either email or some third party cloud-based services (e.g. drop box) for the purpose. Only very basic features like resource sharing and media publishing are currently included in the online learning platform and that too from only from the teachers’ perspective.
Given the school’s decision to integrate one-to-one devices into learning process, earlier policies about the implementation of Ultranet may need to be reappraised. On one hand, the school is adopting technology-mediated learning to promote collaborative and active learning, whereas on the other hand, the reduced features in Ultranet might be limiting the learning opportunities of the students. By bringing the functionality of different digital media applications and web 2.0 tools within the realm of the school curriculum and instructional practices, digital media expertise of the learners may be better utilised into formal learning activities.
4.5
Conclusion
When digital technologies and tools are integrated into the teaching and learning practices, various factors dependent on learners like adequate level of access to technologies, motivation and attitude towards learning activities, nature of their technology usage for learning and learners’ capability of meaning making could affect learning activities of learners in both formal and informal learning spaces. At this stage, only the findings of the baseline data have been presented. Studies on how
133 learners use digital learning technologies in different learning spaces and what could affect their learning activities in formal as well as informal learning spaces in the context of technology-mediated teaching and learning are very limited. However, the BYOD classroom initiative and the theoretical framework adopted for the study helped to generate a comprehensive research agenda for further investigation by following additional lines of enquiry of digital divides in the learning environment for the next stage of the study.
The next focus of the investigation moves to curricular practices adopted and how these practices can help in addressing the issues identified during the analysis of the baseline data.
NOTE: Chapter 4 is a partial re-print of two articles:
• Adhikari, J. & Parsons, D. (2012). Bridging digital divides in the learning process: Challenges of integrating ICTs in learning. In M. Brown, M. Hartnett & T. Stewart (Eds.), Future challenges, sustainable futures. Proceedings ascilite Wellington 2012. (pp. 2-4).
• Adhikari, J., Parsons, D., & Mathrani, A. (2012) Bridging digital divides in the learning process: Challenges and implications of integrating ICTs. In M. Specht, M. Sharples & J. Multisilta (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning 2012 (pp. 224-227).
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