When I started to think about the question what kind of project I would love to run at school which includes the use of the New Media, I realized that this issue cannot easily be answered. But then I thought about one project I am really keen on trying out. Here are the basic facts:

The project is designed for 9^th grade students of a secondary school and is based on the curriculum of Hessen.

Aim of this so called “Skype – Project” is that students, on the basis of dealing with authentic language material, improve their listening and comprehension competence when communicating with native speakers via Skype. The Skype partners will be students from a twinned school in England, USA or Australia.

Topic of the project is “The modern Media and society” which is also a topic given in the curriculum of Hessen for the 9^th grade.

In a first step the students learn basic facts about the New Media (what is the New Media, what role does it play in our lives etc.) which provide the basis for the second step, where they prepare questions they would like to ask their exchange student such as “Which role the New Media plays in your life?”

During the actual interview with their Skype partner the students need to make notes so that they are able to present their findings afterwards. With all the information the students got from their Skype partners the class can now create up their own statistics about the influence of the New Media on young children, and maybe compare it with some statistics they find on the internet concerning the same topic.

I think including the New Media, in this case the use of Skype, offers a great advantage compared to traditional teaching. The conversation with a native speaker offers students the opportunity to improve their fluency and vocabulary within the English language and actively practice it, which is a very important aspect in regard to language acquisition.

In my opinion active practice of the English language, however, is often disregarded in Germany.

]]> http://lisaschader.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/my-dream-project/feed/ 0 lisaschader http://lisaschader.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/our-trip-to-the-landschulheim-steinmuhle-part-2/ http://lisaschader.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/our-trip-to-the-landschulheim-steinmuhle-part-2/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:35:58 +0000 lisaschader http://lisaschader.wordpress.com/?p=25 ]]> Our trip to the Landschulheim Steinmühle was extremely interesting and I learned a lot about how the New Media can effectively be integrated into a lesson plan.

Beginning with 6^th grade the students of the Steinmühle have to take a § year obligatory informatics course. During these years the students learn how to deal with the WORD programme, do text processing and are being taught the use of the Internet as well as the dangerous aspects that come along with it.

After the required introduction on the use of computers, the students can decide whether they want to continue with this course as a compulsory optional subject or not. Based on the skills the students had acquired beforehand, they now learn the proficient use of the OFFFICE programme, how to create their own homepage and the efficient use of the Internet and its downsides.

Students that are tremendously interested in this subject are able to continue the course until their graduation. Starting with 11^th grade, the informatics course at the Steinmühle is based on the curriculum of Hessen and focuses on the use of the JAVA programme in particular.

To be able to offer the students sufficient technical devices the school has a PC room equipped with 24 laptops. Furthermore, all teachers have the possibility to sign up for the use of a so called `PC cart` which provides another 24 laptops that can be brought into the classrooms.

After we have learned about the school´ s concept of adapting the New Media and how it is integrated into the curriculum we had the opportunity to ask. Concerning my question about the student` s motivation when it comes to the use of the New Media I was told that all together there has been an extremely positive feedback so far. Regarding to what Mrs. Sperl (who teaches at the Steinmühle) told us, it is important to give students some variety concerning the way of teaching. The moment where the New Media is used way too often it looses its palls on students and they get bored. More precisely, variety adds zest to regular school lessons, even when it comes to the use of the New Media.

Regarding the question how the New Media is adopted in English classes we were told that teachers at the Steinmühle work with online-dictionaries and create several projects where students have to do some Internet research. Lower grade students also work with an e-workbook every week in which , on the basis of their informatics knowledge, students have to deal with numerous exercises that are especially aimed at the use of computers.

Students of higher levels also learn how to prepare well structured Power Point presentations and how to present them in an adequate way.

Altogether, the use of the New Media at the Steinmühle to me seems very well integrated and moreover received a positive feedback, not just by students but also by teachers as well as parents.

Tomorrow, our class will visit the Landschulheim Steinmühle in order to observe how the New Media is adopted in this school. Concerning this special trip there are some questions I am particularly interested in:

1. How is the New Media integrated into the curriculum?
2. Is there a special concept for the use of the New Media?
3. Are students more motivated when it comes to learning including the use of the New Media?

I am looking forward to our trip and hope that afterwards I am able to answer my questions in adequately.

The first thing which caught my attention when collecting information was the headline of an internet source which said ´ Dilthey school Wiesbaden, Media School of November 2008` (“Dilthey Schule Wiesbaden, Medienschule des Monats November 2008 ”). Thus, I looked at the homepage of the school to gather some material in order to find out how the use of media is implemented in the curriculum etc.

As a result I learned that the procurement of methods competence as well as the education concerning the use of New Media is an essential part of the curriculum. After the restoration of the school in 2004 all classrooms are equipped with Internet access and the use of PCs and the New Media is more and more applied. Furthermore, all students have to acquire a so called “computer and Internet licence” which proves that the student possesses the basic knowledge concerning word processing and diagram calculation. Additionally, all students are introduced to the efficient use of the Internet. The following chart shows how different subjects integrate the use of PCs and the Internet.

Content of `computer and Internet licence`

In middle school the students are able to take the computer science as elective compulsory subjects in which the use of the Office program is deepened and the creation of web pages is being discussed. In senior high the basic course “computer science” is constantly so that everyone gets the chance to include this subject into the leaving examination.

Overall, I was extremely stunned that my old school offers such an enormous bandwidth concerning the use and integration of the Media. I would have never thought that the school is so “up-to-date” and hope that all students are aware of the possibilities they are offered.

The curriculum of Baden-Württemberg makes it mandatory for teachers to cover “immigration” as a topic within their school lessons; therefore Klaus-Dieter Grüninger (teachers of the classes) had the idea to cover the topic form a different perspective using other teaching methods as usual. Thus his students had to observe the immigration rate of English speaking countries such as Great Britain, the USA, Australia, Canada and Germany (as comparison).

The whole project was divided into three parts: In a first step the students had to find information about the immigration rate concerning their country by primarily using the Internet as source of information. Their attention should focus on several main aspects such as statistics (information about the immigration rate), motivation (information about why people immigrate into the country) and encouragement/determent (information about requirements for immigration etc.).

In a second step, which turned out to be the most challenging part for some students, they had to focus on the important facts they found out and create a presentation by using their own words. Furthermore, the most important results were supposed to be written down and be published on the Internet.

The project was mainly based on the use of the Internet where students had to find useful information. Consequently, they learned how to search for useful information efficiently and how to evaluate their achievements. Concerning the Internet research the teacher decided to use of free search as he did not give the students any hints where to find useful material.

Besides the bare content the students were able to acquire improved media competence as they had to give a presentation on their findings by using Power Point. In addition, they had to create their own Internet page which illustrates the results of all effort they put into to project (http://www.schule-bw.de/unterricht/faecher/englisch/projekte/internet/immigration).

In my opinion New Media in this context had a great advantage compared to traditional teaching. First of all, the Internet provides far more information about immigration into English speaking countries than school books do. Hence, this gave the students the possibility not just to focus on one or two countries but to be able to get an overall picture of immigration into all important English speaking countries at the end of the project.

Furthermore, they learned how to extract key fact out of a huge amount of material and present their results in their own words. The use of Power Point for the actual presentation advanced the student´ s technical knowledge while the set up for the Internet page improved their media competence. Here especially the exposure to copyright was challenging for the classes as diagrams and statistics could not just be copied and therefore had to be overhauled with the EXEL program.

All together, the whole project required about 10 lessons á 90 min.

As far as I can extract from the information that is given in the Internet the project was extremely motivating for the students and advanced their level of media competence. Consequently I can imagine conducting a similar project with my students because I think the Internet offers a diversified spectrum of information therefore and can be used extremely

As nowadays everything needs to be done as fast as possible, especially when working with the Internet, there are a lot of abbreviations that are commonly used when writing E-mails, shorts messages etc. Consequently, young children that are getting used to this style of writing run the risk of not being able to distinguish anymore between different communication levels, e.g. colloquial style and elaborate writing. Many young people tend to drift towards low level communication and transport abbreviations and telegram style to academic writing. Therefore, teachers should analyze different styles of writing with their students and function as a role model for appropriate expression.

As another fact to mention is that young people that are growing up with this kind of communication often know a lot more about such elements as abbreviations, emoticons etc. than their teachers do. For that reason I very much appreciate the section which gives the reader a very good overview of all the important items that are commonly used.

Furthermore, teachers should point out the advantages as well as the disadvantages of Internet communication to make them more transparent. Although, Internet communications allows people a rapid exchange of information, offers special and temporal flexibility as well as the combination of different communication elements, it also need to be kept in mind that there is always a dark side to it which should be discussed in class. Mainly young students that are not so much experienced with the use of Internet communication have to be informed about special risks. The anonymity of the web, for example, is one aspect that students must be aware off. When using Internet chat rooms or different platforms, the user can never be sure about who is hiding behind an individual nickname. Consequently, there are a few rules that need be observed such as not publishing private information.

As there are various possibilities to use asynchronous communication tools in-class I consider the selected methods to be very interesting. Although the use of such tools can be extremely

time consuming it is definitely beneficial to know about different ways to work with such tools like E-mail friendship, E-mail projects, Internet forums or any kind of chat.

I am not sure whether it is that important to have a detailed knowledge about how search engines work. However,being a teacher who works with the Internet it definitely matters if one knows about the advantages and disadvantages of search engines as well as how to use them effectively .

Therefore I like the section about methodology. When having students search the Internet for specific information it is useful to teach them how to evaluate and rate different sources. Consequently, before doing complex research on their own they should be guided and instructed in the use of different research tools. Therefore the teacher needs to be aware of different methodology such as guided-, half-guided and free search depending on the students´ level. If they have just little experiences of using search engines and do not know how to evaluate the sources they find it would not make any sense to let them search for sources in catalogues etc. This would just lead to dissatisfaction as the students feel overstrained and not prepared enough to cope with this task.

As a vast database the Internet offers students and teachers the possibility to access almost all topics. But to make Internet research a successful and effective tool students also need to be aware of the fact that working with the Internet does not only have positive aspects. Thus, teachers have to advise their students of some disadvantages such as questionable and outdated information, the risk of an information overflow etc. Furthermore they need to show them which research tools exist and how to use them effectively. The information is of such importance as a lot of students might be familiar with different research tools but still do not know how to evaluate sources in order to find out whether they found trustable sources or not. For that reason students need to be taught some questions they need to consider some questions, such as who is the author? - all important questions regarding the relevance and reliance of the searching result.

Regarding the provocative content of this statement it is extremely striking that no further points of reference are given, such as statistics proving this conclusion or any other evidence. In my mind it might have been interesting to learn more about the main backgrounds that caused the teachers to publish such an opinion.

Moreover, it has to be emphasized that the statement was published in 1997 – 11 years ago. Thus the importance of computer skills and media technology is not to be compared with the need of being able to work with computers and media today. Keeping this aspect in mind the question arises in how far computers were used and being integrated in schools in America at the time the survey was conducted. If the “rise of the computer” had taken place ten years ago in the USA, this would explain the teacher´ s attitude towards the necessity of being able to work with computers. Being able to handle a computer without any problems enables everybody to access a complete new world – a world which seems to offer unlimited possibilities!

Throughout the integration of computers as well as the constantly changing and improving media technology our classrooms could not be untroubled by this – teachers stay in contact with their students via e-mail, material for presentations is being searched online and digital dictionaries are constantly accessed. Consequently the idea of a “virtual classroom” is not that far-out as virtual learning platforms like the VCT prove.

But what would be the consequences if computer skills and media technology were the most important things to learn? Traditional lessons would change into virtual sessions, teachers would loose their function as role model and pedagogical tutor and social contacts would become less. Seen from a logistic perspective there might be some advantages arguing for the concept of a “virtual classroom”. But it also needs to be kept in mind that social aspects in particular which are conveyed at school cannot be taught via internet. New media as well as increasing technology might simplify our lives in some way but cannot replace social contacts. Especially young kinds do not only need to learn pure facts about certain subjects but also require social environment which help them to build up social competence. Thus, the replacement of classroom sessions would take away the most significant aspect of school – social interaction.

In this respect the integration of new learning strategies might amplify modern learning but cannot replace school.

What makes this session extremely appealing to me is its structure as all three theories are explained in an adequate way by defining their most important facts and goals without presenting too much detail. I can tell from my own experiences that reading a complex text about learning theories that is based on a tremendous amount of theoretical aspects can easily debar the reader from leaching the important information he/she needs to know. Therefore I really like the short but precise theoretical introduction of each theory and the way it is connected to its preferred methods. The use of the hypertext function allows the reader to understand the logic operation between the theory itself and their basic application in class.

The session enables someone, who has never dealt with theories of learning before to firstly acquaint with the topic by reading the short introductory definition and then deepen his/her knowledge when dealing with the methods each theory provides and getting an overall picture.

Dealing with learning theories and their principles does not belong to the most favoured activities university students can think of. However, the consolidated knowledge of the most significant learning theories as well the basic teaching skills enables us as prospective teachers to offer our future students the best strategies of learning.

Moreover, the session depicts the most significant milestones of the historic development of education as well as containing a database for approximately 40 major theories of learning and instruction.

The role of teachers has tremendously changed in the last few years as the given historical outline of education indicates. Nowadays, being a teacher does not only imply to impart knowledge just by teaching facts but also requires methodically variety.

To conclude the overview of all three basic learning theories which are provided in form of a scheme that sums up all major differences that have become apparent seems to me as a future teacher to be very efficient and useful.

As a result of the high priority that social networks take up in young people’s lives, experiences like the visit of a museum or a library have tremendously gone down. On the one hand students complain about not having time for anything because they are so busy while on the other hand they are still able to watch more than 2 hours of TV a day (latest ratings), check their facebook profiles and call friends.

So the question arises if the author is right about his thesis that young people are that much affected by multi media today or if he is exaggerating the situation?

There is no doubt that today multi media such as the internet plays a significant role in our society and therefore influences our lives every day. Especially young people that have grown up with the possibility of using the internet where- and whenever they need to might not be able to understand that someone like Bauerlein raises the fear that the overuse of new media might have a bad influence on them.

But would we understand his point? Although Bauerlein definitely has a point here it seems to me that he extremely generalizes young people´ s exposure to the new media. When talking about young children that are not interested anymore in reading a book or visiting an exhibition, we need to consider that they have grown up in a completely different world than our parents or even our grandparents did. Even when we were younger the use of the internet did not play such an important role like it does today.

It may be doubted that, had the internet being used 50 years ago that young people at that time would have used it in a more responsible way. It is not really useful to adhere rigidly to the “old times” where young kids were playing outside all the time, climbing on trees and getting tanned by the sun. Our society has changed we cannot deny that!

What we as former teachers need to do is being a role model for our students helping them to find new form of literacy. Bauerlein is right when saying that mentors are extremely important in young people´ s lives as they need someone to tell them about the great big world out there. But everybody needs to be mentor…parents, teachers, grandparents etc.

What young children really need to learn is how to use the internet and new media effectively as it seems to me that a lot of them are just overstrained. Especially young kids have to be lead to a responsible handling with the use of internet, TV and co.

I hope that our course “Neue Medien im FU” will deliver us a detailed insight into the effective exposure to the internet. As a former teacher it is necessary to teach students how important and powerful the use of the internet can be referring to the literal infinity of subjects.