Showing posts with label engagement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label engagement. Show all posts

Monday, May 13, 2013

E Readers and Young Students

At AERA I went to a superb session about the impact of e readers on young students engagement, vocabulary and reading success. The results were very positive. They are even more encouraging since tablets and other mobile devices have been making their way into a majority of homes.
Unique among all of it was the leadership of Kathy Roskos.
In her presentation she concluded:
Results show the impact of device on key multisensory behaviors of children’s engagement with ebooks. In general, mobiles appear to afford more looking and touching but less moving and gesturing than the desktop; none of the devices favored listening. Given the increasing role of haptic perception in digital reading, access to mobile devices may favor behaviors that nurture literacy motivation and participation, especially for less attentive children, and support ongoing engagement with ebooks for all children.

Here is the section description:
The surge in ebooks on a wide range of e-devices (whiteboards; touchscreens; mobiles) has dramatically increased their appeal as an option for shared reading with young children, although research evidence as to their impact on early literacy experience remains slim. This symposium contributes to the knowledge base on ebook reading in early childhood and lays the groundwork for further research that examines ebooks in the learn-to-read process in informal and classroom settings. Papers examine book vs ebook differences in parent-child reading, highlighting benefits and drawbacks; describe the technical adequacy/usability of an ebook quality rating tool; examine differences in device on engagement with ebooks; and report effects of temporal contiguity of picture/print in digital reading on vocabulary learning.
Research is emerging and soon we will be able to add to it. The greta thing is that the research produced is nuanced finding that some e books are better than others. We can actually identify the elements of good ebooks for young children including:

1. Limited interactivity (to not distract from the text too much)

2. Interactivity that is there should focus on main story features and relevant vocabulary

3. Device matters with increased engagement with truly mobile devices

4. E books can change the interaction between adult and child in dialogic reading and so requires a somewhat different training for adults.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Technology, Attending, and the Arts

I have three iPads, a laptop (or two) a smart phone and an e-reader. When I work at home I have 2-4 devices open. The evidence has been in for a while we cannot truly attend to more than one thing at a time. In fact, trying to attend to multiple things at once results in n effective execution of both in most cases.

Why am I bringing this up (again)?

One, I left my phone behind when I snuck away to write at my favorite spot, the Village Inn around the corner. I had my laptop only. I ate lunch and got the two most productive focus time hours. I was online but I resisted answering emails.

Two, my undergraduate student all have devices of some sort that I encourage them to use. This, however, sometimes have negative consequences when they are unsuccessfully trying to multi-task listening to class discussion or lecture (they asked for it) while on Pintrest, Facebook, registering for classes, or one of the thousand other things they can do online.

Three, I am reading Getting Things Done, and am surprised to find interesting parallels from the beginning of the mobile era.

So... Technology has its down side. I love it, I use it every day, but it has a dark side. We have to teach ourselves to attend to the world around us. After we find ways to do it ourselves, we must find ways to teach it to our students.

I think one tool to teach students to attend, is through genuine engagement with art. It can be visual art, plastic art, movement or music. In all of these activities success can be found when you are fully attending. The lure for students (and adults) is the unique feeling that feel when you reach Flow. If someone asks why the arts, one possible answer can be that art creation can teach students to experience focus attending fully to a task. These moments of creative joy can serve as an idea of what we can achieve when we are fully present.

Now I will leave the computer and go attend to my children.


Saturday, June 25, 2011

Engagement in Teaching

It is a rainy morning punctuating a beautiful but extremely busy week. In a short conversation with Monique who is doing some thinking and writing about what is left from arts integration projects after the project is over.
Our conversation turned to thinking about different responses by different teachers and the conditions under which these responses emerge.

One factor that we did not explicitly discuss was teacher engagement. For me we, as teachers, are not fully accepting a practice until we let that practice "fill" us. That is we enact it with students fully embracing and participating in the practice. This is even more important when integrating the arts, since the arts are meant to be displayed, shared, and audienced (not sure this is a word...).

If we stay reserved while playing a song, drawing, dancing, making a movie- our students will feel our reservation and will limit their own participation, viewing full engagement as "childish". Maybe the term I am looking for is JOY (parallels the notion of ">FLOW). If you find joy in integrating the arts and your students can feel your joy, they will buy into it, fully particpate, and learn what it means to really enjoy what you do.

Now I do not mean that finding JOY in a practice shold stop you in any way from being critical after the fact, evaluating what worked and what didn't and improving a practice. This JOY/FLOW is ot always there because to reach it we must have expertise, practice and confidence. But when we reach it the results and the JOY can fill us with a strong sense of efficacy and empowerment.


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