Establishing a Continuous Professional Learning Culture

Technology is what attracts teenagers today. Any learner in a class will adapt to a tablet, cell phone or any smart device at a swift pace. This interest in technology must be exploited in pedagogics of Mathematics. The focus must be on accelerating learning where learners can practice and learn at their own pace. This learning environment can be created by establishing a interactive environment using videos, software such as CAMI Math, Math Open Reference, Geogebra, etc. A system of using tablets appear to solve many of the problematic characteristics needed to change and streamline shared learning (or professional development) among school students and staff. Although personal computers (PC) have been in the realm of education for no more than three decades, the transformation they have brought about in curriculum, instruction, and assessment is immense. With the advancement of the mobile technologies into the classrooms, the same questions have been researched, findings debated, articles published, conferences held, and, eventually, more reform movements have been cycled and recycled. Yet, students are still failing and dropping out of schools at alarming rates, and the U.S. public education, especially for the disadvantaged poor, is continuously slipping to a seemingly bottomless pit.The move from print to digital and from static text to fully interactive content and multimedia is revolutionary. The resistance to digitization is not expected to subside anytime soon, though its death is inevitable, just like the resistance to all past transformative technologies. Nowhere this transformation may be as revolutionary as in education; and nowhere the resistance to it may be as fierce. And while the vast majority of students enthusiastically welcomed and quickly adopted the use of mobile devices for communication, entertainment, and educational purposes, only a minority of educators, mostly young ones, is keen about transforming classrooms into the digital age. Apparently, the technology gap between young and older generations is as old as human innovations.

Throughout the U.S. and around the world, there are numerous technology-based strategies being used in the classrooms today. Most of the teachers in this domain are ‘blending’ traditional curricula and instructional practices with web-based materials (e.g., videos, educational games, web libraries and encyclopedias, imaging and graphics, presentations, educational worksheets and interactive assessments and practices, etc.) A few, yet quickly growing number, of young and technologically-savvy educators are completely transforming classrooms, departments, and even schools, by adopting open curriculum and open classroom (e.g., blended learning and flipped classrooms). Open and flipped classroom provides a platform for group instruction that is the most analogous to one-to-one tutoring. Avant-garde educators are creating classroom environment that allows students to learn at their own pace and provides them with mastery-based, game like and individualized instruction. This kind of environment increases learning through enhanced motivation by making the learning experience much more joyful, intriguing, relevant, and rewarding.

Whether the ultimate educational goal is an evolutionary change or a revolutionary transformation, one of the most important variables in the process is still the individual technological device, which easily and quickly connects the student to the web and provides powerful and rich computing capabilities to collect, organize, and synthesize knowledge and to generate and disseminate new ideas. Internet-ready PCs, through the revolutionary lens, were viewed as ‘the knowledge machines’. They indeed tore down the wall disconnecting the classroom and the outside world by bringing instant and continuous connectivity to the education environment. However, their price, size, and, most significantly, their immobility quickly erected new obstacles in the overall transformational process.

The rise and proliferation of smart mobile phones, with full online capabilities, into the hands of teachers and students created another wave of hope for those seeking the ultimate change in education. Nevertheless, their limited size and computing capabilities (e.g., data entry, synthesis and generation) significantly reduce their applicability as the ultimate knowledge machine. Even as e-readers, as per the cited Pew report findings, smart phones are only utilized as supplemental mobile devices used for quick and simple reading, and not for complex and authentic reading. However, extremely useful single-task educational apps that utilize the power of connectivity and mobility of smart phones (e.g., mapping and navigation, calculating and graphing, translating and interpreting, note-taking, task-managing, audio-books listening devices, etc.) cannot be underestimated and will continue to evolve and slowly change the education landscape.

Tablet PCs, on the other hand, seem to marshal many of the characteristics needed to streamline the sought transformation. They are supreme in terms of connectivity and mobility and their computing power is more than adequate to sustain any and all school tasks. There is an abundance in educational apps that customize the process of developing learners’ speaking, listening, reading and writing skills for early literacy development as well as for advanced linguistic development skills. Similarly, there are many apps with math, science, and social studies content that are developed in game-like platforms and/or virtual three-dimensional format rendering learning of the most complex school content intriguing, challenging, and much less boring and intimidating. Additionally, the majority of these apps intelligibly automate the differentiation of instruction and assessment according to students’ performance. Thus, students are never bored attending to materials they already know or ever lost grappling with content beyond their level.

The most applicable school use of tablets, however, is as e-readers. For the new generation, as well as for many older technology users, e-books are quickly becoming their first choice. There are many advantages of this development, especially in education. Textbooks are static and, no matter how graphically enhanced, cannot stand the competition against fully interactive and multimedia rich e-books. The life-shelve of high school textbooks is about five years and they are a major budget item for schools and districts. Tablets are much lighter than textbooks, especially high school books, and one device replaces all the textbooks that a student will ever need!

The biggest obstacles to adopting and using tablets in education are (a) the initial cost of the devices, and (b) teachers’ technological skills and their attitude toward the introduction of any new technology. Taking into account the cost of adopting and using new textbooks, the initial cost of tablets would be largely eliminated. Many teachers are now tablet users and there are numerous professional development opportunities to train teachers on how to fully integrate the tablets into the learning-teaching process.

Adopting and using tablets instead of textbooks and traditional curricular and instructional materials in an open curriculum and open classroom environment radically changes students’ learning environment by providing them with a myriad of advantages. To summarize some of these advantages, this transformative development (a) enhances students’ motivation and their engagement throughout the learning process via the use of an individualized, light- weight, multitasking, and game-like device that encompasses all their school activities; (b) improves their individual creativity and provides the tool for highly interactive group work projects; (c) enables individualized and differentiated curriculum and instruction that meets students’ needs and abilities, thus makes them more interested and less bored; (d) dramatically improves student-student and teacher-student academic interaction, allowing students to seek help from their peers and/or teacher in a less intimidating environment; (e) provides the tool for online courses for all students, especially when certain classes are not available at their school; (f) Improves students’ connectivity and interaction with students outside their classroom/school/district/country (e.g., join science and other content area group projects), which widens their perspective of the world; (g) provides them with powerful and highly interactive tool for note-taking, text highlighting, underlining and annotating, which cannot be done with school-issued textbooks; (h) improves their ability to complete homework and assignments, submit them, receive understandable and itemized feedback from the teacher, edit and correct, and resubmit when applicable; (i) eliminates the time spent looking for, storing and retrieving textbooks from lockers as well as the possibility of losing or misplacing these textbooks and having to pay for them; and (j) reduces health risks associated with heavy textbooks, especially for freshmen.

On the other hand, and despite the great challenges associated with the adoption and use of tablets in an open classroom, teachers are not any less advantageous than students. This development (a) improves the attitude and behavior of the students, hence, classroom management; (b) streamlines the development and continuous update, improvement, and sharing of lesson plans; (c) provides teachers the ability to monitor the work and progress of each student and to extend immediate one-to-one direct or virtual assistance and intervention; (d) simplifies students and group paperless assessments, thus dramatically reduces the time spent on correcting and returning tests, quizzes, homework and assignments; and (e) eliminates the time and effort allotted for handling, storing, singing in and out, and accounting for textbooks and other instructional materials (e.g., graphing organizers, clickers, etc.).

These are but few examples of what makes tablets perfect tools with unlimited potential functionalities, especially for education. Their applicable use in the classrooms has already been established and many districts throughout the U.S. as well as around the world have been using them, though mainly as e-readers. However, due to their price, they are still beyond the economic means of individual students as well school districts in low-income urban communities.

Technology has become an important instrument in education. Computer-based technologies hold great promise both for increasing access to knowledge and as a means of promoting learning. What has not yet been fully understood is that computer-based technologies can be powerful pedagogical tools not just rich sources of information, but also extensions of human capabilities and contexts for social interactions supporting learning. The process of using technology to improve learning is never solely a technical matter, concerned only with properties of educational hardware and software. Like a textbook or any other cultural object, technology resources for education whether a software science simulation or an interactive reading exercise function in a social environment, mediated by learning conversations with peers and teachers.

Conclusion

Just as important as questions about learning and the developmental appropriateness of the products for children are issues that affect those who will use them as tools to promote learning; namely, teachers. In thinking about technology, the framework of creating learning environments that are learner, knowledge, assessment, and community centered is also useful. There are many ways that technology can be used to help create such environments, both for teachers and for the students whom they teach. Many issues arise in considering how to educate teachers to use new technologies effectively. What do they need to know about learning processes and the technology? What kinds of training are most effective for helping teachers use high-quality instructional programs? What is the best way to use technology to facilitate teacher learning?

Good educational software and teacher-support tools, developed with a full understanding of principles of learning, have not yet become the norm. Software developers are generally driven more by the game and play market than by the learning potential of their products. The software publishing industry, learning experts, and education policy planners, in partnership, need to take on the challenge of exploiting the promise of computer-based technologies for improving learning. Much remains to be learned about using technology’s potential: to make this happen, learning research will need to become the constant companion of software development.

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