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We Need More Teacher-Centered Solutions in ICT for Literacy

wayan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:10:20 +0000

I’m not convinced that the challenge of promoting literacy ICT is a market failure, a human constraint, or a technological constraint. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. The tech capabilities are there, teachers will use good literacy tools, and the market exists. But what is lacking is the connection between all three of these things.

What I’ve observed during my short time in this whole ICT realm is that people who design ICT tools for literacy have never really gotten into the brain of a child learning to read and have probably never taught a child to read. I think what we need are more teacher-centered solutions in ICT. We need to mimic what REAL human beings already do well while teaching our children. And we need to make it as simple and as useful as possible.

Teaching a child to read is no easy task.

What continually amazes me is that the more years I spend teaching, the more styles of reading acquisition I see with children. One of the main reasons it is difficult to utilize ICT to teach children to read is because most ICT tools do not often differentiate between a child’s fluency and comprehension needs.

These two facets of reading adoption intertwine and are relevant the moment a child first opens a book, or is read a book. Some children are quick decoders, with the ability to grasp phonemic awareness and phonics almost instantly. In other words, they can sound things out, they can recognize sound patterns, and they can orally read what’s on the page. But that doesn’t mean a kid knows how to read.

The second part of reading gets even more complicated – comprehension. The way that I see basic comprehension is that a student can understand the essentials of what s/he’s reading, retelling the main parts with some important details. But…

Can the student differentiate between what is relevant and irrelevant in a text?
Can a student understand the use of different language tools an author uses in a specific type of text?
Can a student grasp and utilize complex vocabulary words?
Can a student identify a theme and analyze how an author utilizes that theme in a text?
Can a student truly evaluate a text?

It’s hard for any type of tech tool to capture a student’s comprehension in these ways. Dang – it’s hard for a reading teacher to do that well!

My mythical ICT tool for literacy

Trying to think of a tool that would really and truly help with literacy, I concocted a mystical tool that mixes a bit of artificial intelligence, a computer adaptive-type learning system to do what reading intervention teachers do – figure out a student’s fluency level and comprehension level and adapt learning exercises based on this. (Great reading intervention tools like Reading Recovery do this. See Fountas and Pinnell also.)

A student would begin an initial fluency assessment based on phonemic awareness and phonics. It would detect the student’s ability to decode both simple letter sounds and complex letter combinations. (Found this and thought it was funny. Word to the wise, a kid learning CVC words can’t read the stuff on the left!)

This fluency assessment would also need to incorporate both voice and text. Questions would adapt according to the level of the student. At around the 10-15 question level, this adaptive test would determine a fluency level.

After this, the student receives a fluency score and is encouraged to continually practice to increase their level.

On the comprehension side, students would take a similar adaptive test that utilizes the most basic comprehension skills first (such as retelling), and then, it would gradually get more difficult or easier, depending on the student’s comprehension level. After about 10-15 questions, the student would get a comprehension score, like the fluency assessment. The student would then be encouraged to increase their mark.

The student would need to read short comprehension passages on a device, but if the comprehension level of the student is low enough, the system would adapt by voicing short reading passages and then asking questions via voice.

Next, the student encounters a series of practice exercises mixed with both fluency and comprehension, using reading passages of high interest. If a student’s decoding ability is very low, then most tasks are fluency work. However, they will also listen to stories and answer comprehension questions to those stories based on voiced questions.

For both fluency and comprehension, each time they answer a series of 5 questions correctly, their score goes up. (For the sake of student confidence, their scores can never go down from the initial score given.)

Ideally, this whole system would be utilized on existing class computers or at home. I think it would be really effective on the phone as well.

Let us not forget differences in language

One of the comments earlier brought up a good point about language. Any literacy tool should also incorporate other languages besides English, which I haven’t completely thought through yet. What I know from teaching ESL and managing ESL teachers through Teach For America is that the best ESL teachers just use really good reading tactics – phonemic awareness, sound patters, listening to others speak, hearing yourself speak, and comprehension strategies.

With a mixture of fluency, comprehension, and some simple artificial intelligence, students could learn to read much easier on their own and teachers would be happy to encourage students with a tech tool for something they already do. I’m no longer a teacher, but if I still were, I would definitely use this in my classroom.

Hardware Costs are not a Barrier for ICT Use in Literacy and Reading

wayan — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:10:02 +0000

If you looked at the buzz in ICT for education, you would think the solutions to problems of teaching literacy and reading are mainly around hardware price points. You have everyone talking endlessly about $100 laptops, $30 tablets, $15 teacher laptops and projectors, and $10 talking books. But all this is fluff. The sideshow to what is the real cost issue: how much everything else costs, how to raise funds for it all, and how to show the impact of the investments.

The Hardware Issue

In struggling to understand why there are so few literacy and reading interventions that use ICT, I thought long and hard around the hardware angle. Is there some inherent missing gadget that could increase the ability of educators to teach reading skills? Is there a gadget that can help a child write or a learner combine both reading and writing for true literacy in their native language?

Yes, it would be nice to have more interactive e-book readers or more intuitive electronic writing tablets, but that didn’t seem to be the real issue. We have an entire quiver of education tablets to choose from. What seems to be missing is not hardware, but a specific focus on literacy in education that incorporates information and communication technology. I posit there are three overarching reasons for this lack of ICT in literacy across the educational systems of the developing world:

How much everything else costs

In Vital Wave Consulting’s landmark study on the costs of ICT in education, they found that in ICT4E, its not the cost of the gadget that matters that much:

The quest for a $100 laptop and the subsequent development of low-cost and ultra low-cost computer categories have focused the discussion about computers in the education environment on the initial hardware cost. This focus is misplaced, as the initial hardware investment represents less than 28% of the total cost of ownership over a five-year period. In the case of ultra low-cost computers, the initial hardware investment is only 13% of the five-year TCO.

Where are the majority of ICT4E costs? In the technical support, training, connectivity, and electricity required to maintain the chosen solution over time. Oh, and the specific solution didn’t matter that much either – costs among different devices is about the same. Yet, VWC’s study didn’t even get tot the other two legs of the three-legged stool of educational technology: teacher professional development and content development.

I have yet to come across a comprehensive study of how much it costs a Ministry of Education to fully deploy and ICT4E intervention, especially one on a national scale. The best I’ve heard is this small mention in Miguel Brechner’sTEDxBuenosAires talk about Plan CEIBAL‘s XO laptop costs, but these seem like awfully low numbers:

How much did it cost us? We invested around one hundred million dollars. So that we do not delve too much into figures, each computer cost us around $188. Sixty dollars was the rest of the cost: servers, networks, antennas, tech support, parts, logistics, delivery… everything else. This was all accomplished with public funds, both domestic and foreign.

If we calculate four years of effective life per machine, it will cost us about $75 per year, of which $48 is the computer and $27 the rest of the servicing a project of this magnitude requires. To give you an idea: in the deployment phase that’s less than 5% of the educational budget, and less than one two-thousandth of the gross domestic product.

So if a country or a company wanted to invest in an ICT solution that could impact the literacy rates in a country, their first challenge would be to figure out how much such an investment would cost. I stand ready to help if needed – it’s a calculation that would be educational for everyone involved.

How to raise funds for it all

Getting people and donors excited for a new gadget is easy. Just show off a prototype, and even if it doesn’t work, or is just plain vaporware, you’ll have multiple press stories championing your achievement. From there, it’s slightly harder to get the money rolling in to fund a working prototype and pilot deployment.

What is hard is getting the funding to work on something as basic and un-sexy as teacher professional development or digital curriculums.

The net result is that we have great projects like Worldreader and CyberSmart Africa, which are at their heart about changing the way teachers educate to improve student literacy, but everyone else refers to them as the Kindle project or interactive whiteboard project.

Now there is hope. USAID and World Vision have a forthcoming All Children Reading Grand Challenge for Development that invites organizations to submit innovative ideas, practices, products, or programs for improving student reading in primary grades. Winning submissions will be provided seed funding from combined resources of USAID and World Vision. I have heard there will be an ICT component to the grand challenge as well but we’ll see if it also focuses on the learning ecosystem to make that ICT successful.

How to show the impact of the investments

What is “success” in reading, writing, and literacy? We have the Early Grade Reading Assessment which can be given and measured electronically, but even if a stated ICT intervention happens between two EGRA assessments, and there is a positive change over the assessment period, how can we know it was the iCT intervention that caused the change?

In other words, how do we prove causation not just correlation?

I believe this is the largest challenge in ICT interventions that propose to improve literacy in any educational system, not just those in the developing world. With ICT, it is easy to show a great excitement about school – everyone loves a new gadget – or even a greater usage of ICT via server logs and the like, but its much harder to show that excitement translating into greater scholastic achievement.

In fact, I challenge you dear reader, to find an ICT intervention in any aspect of the learning process, that can show that the ICT intervention itself is the primary cause for an increased learning outcome.

It is that fuzziness in impact that makes it so hard to raise funds for an ICT intervention in literacy. And without the money to get investors and school systems excited in the teacher professional development and the content creation required to augment a gadget purchase, we are stuck in a vicious cycle.

Cheaper and cheaper gadgets are showcased as the solutions to the woes of educational systems, while more and more of us come to the conclusion that technology should not be the focus of educational strategies. And the smart people who could be working on ICT for literacy choose to expend their efforts elsewhere.

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Worldreader is leading a reading revolution in the developing world

wayan — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:30:00 +0000

In April of this year, I wrote the following in the Educational technology Debate post eReaders will transform the developing world – in and outside the classroom:

“If Worldreader’s experience so far is any guide, e-readers are set to transform the developing world, both in – and outside the classroom. But this change won’t be driven by e-readers by themselves – it will be driven by human curiosity, ever-increasing connectivity, enlightened self-interest, and a gentle push from organizations like ours.”

Having just returned from visiting Worldreader’s program in Ghana, as well as looking at the recent trends in e-reader pricing, I believe this more strongly than I did six months ago. The planets are coming into alignment for a true revolution in the way the developing world reads, and consequently for the way students learn.

Worldreader’s impact

First, a bit of background. Worldreader is working to put books into the hands of one million children in the develop world by 2015. Working with USAID and a private aid agency in Ghana, we’ve put e-readers into the hands of hundreds of children, and then loaded them with local text- and story-books, as well as international fiction.

In total, we have distributed over 80,000 e-books in the past nine months. It’s worth thinking about that number for a second, because it’s staggering: it’s the equivalent of two-and-a-half shipping containers. In our case, they were all delivered wirelessly, using the same cell-phone infrastructure that is becoming more ubiquitous every day. (Ghana’s Daily Graphic reports that mobile phone penetration stands at 81%.)

What’s even more interesting is that number doesn’t count the thousands of books that the children and teachers have downloaded themselves over the same period. Just looking at the four-month period from May-August (much of which was over vacation), we logged downloads of 1,301 free book downloads and samples (one popular book: No Good Deed), 1,036 educational game downloads (including Thread Words— I played it with a few students while I was there), and 92 subscription downloads for free trials of newspapers and magazines.

Remember that all of this is against a context of a severe lack of books. According to SACMEQ, half of the classrooms across six countries studied in Sub-Saharan African have no textbooks at all, because of cost and logistical issues. And as Michael Trucano notes in his World Bank blog, ”Only 1 out of 19 countries studied (Botswana) ha[s] adequate textbook provision at close to a 1:1 ratio for all subjects and all grades.” Books just aren’t getting to Sub Saharan Africa.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that when we put books into students’ and teachers’ hands, they read them. Two weeks ago I met a girl named Patience who had read 90 books in the past six months, and she wasn’t alone: children across the classroom had devoured 50, 60, or 70 books. In fact, on average children are now spending 50% more time reading than those in control schools, and primary students’ test scores have increased some eight points more than those of students in comparable schools.

While everyone knows that test scores fluctuate wildly over the short-run, it’s clear that these children are reading more than ever before, and the effect is almost palpable. (The USAID observer who dropped in on our program admitted he’d never seen young children so engaged in reading… and he’d been a teacher for 10 years before joining USAID.)

Interestingly, the “reading effect” wasn’t limited to students. The English teacher at Adeiso Presbyterian Junior High School teaches one class with e-readers and one without. He admitted to me that he felt a bit lazy (his words) in the e-reader class, because the students had already competed all the reading. Cynthia, a primary-school teacher, proudly showed her collection of religious and inspirational book samples that she had collected. And parents we surveyed reported that their children were reading to their siblings after school.

Local publishers embrace e-readers

Equally interesting is how publishers are responding. Local publishes see this as an opportunity to expand their market dramatically, both within the developing world and outside. As Elliot Agyare of Ghana’s SMartlin Publishing has said, “I’d be more than happy to drop my prices to [50 cents] if I could sell on hundreds of thousands of e-readers.”

Meanwhile, international publishers have taken note: Worldreader has obtained the rights to use books from Random House (including the Magic Tree House series), Penguin (including four of Roald Dahl’s books), and more in our program for free. For international publishers, it’s an inexpensive way to help the developing world become active readers.

A selection of the 230 books in Worldreader’s program.

Overcoming issues – real and perceived

The other interesting news is what’s not happening: theft hasn’t been a problem. Of the 500+ e-readers in circulation in Ghana, we’ve lost a grand total of three over the past six months. And a boy came up to me while I was there and reported he thought he’d seen one of the missing units in town— we’re tracking it down. The communities have been magnificently unified in working with us to see our work together succeed.

Of course, there’s less-good news too: e-readers still break too often (though Amazon has done good analysis on why, and is helping with solutions, plus we’re now using different cases and rolling out an incentive program to keep the Kindles unbroken). It’s not always easy to keep up with the kids’ appetite for new local books: it takes a fair amount of effort to maintain momentum with local publishers who have lots of issues to juggle. But these issues get easier with scale, as we build demand for more hardware and books.

At this point, most observers will be thinking two things: the program, though early, seems to have some traction, but the cost must be high. And there’s no doubt that e-readers are still too expensive to catch on widely in the developing world. But recent evidence suggests convincingly that prices are coming down fast: Amazon’s least-expensive Kindle is now $79, as compared to $399 three years ago. Of course, that’s for an advertising-supported, WiFi only model.

Still, if you assume the existence of a $50 e-reader, and spread that cost over 5 years, you’re approaching costs that many parents and governments can bear. In fact, the enclosed picture of a receipt is for the purchase of a single math textbook that a headmaster purchased on behalf of one of his teachers. The cost of the book is 12 Ghanaian Cedis (about $8.00) for only one of about eight required textbooks across the curriculum.

Expanding past Ghana

But perhaps the success we have seen so far is specific to conditions in Ghana, or to the people involved in this pilot. Well, early indications from our work in East Africa suggest otherwise. This past weekend, Al Jazeera aired a piece on our work in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and the results are largely consistent with what we’ve seen in Ghana.

What’s remarkable is that after the initial set-up, content load, and training, much of the on-going work has been in the hands of local teachers. We believe this is a fundamental ingredient to the success of any ICT program: teachers have to embrace the program, and for that to happen, implementation needs to be easy. In the case of e-readers, this is the case: the technology is simple to use, and in the end, incorporating it into the classroom feels familiar. After all, they’re really just books.

Worldreader is just getting started. The technology we’re using is still early in its development, and prices are still high. But the trends are all headed in the right direction to allow us to achieve something unimaginable before, potentiall allowing entire countries to skip the paper stage of books in favor of e-books. If that happens, we’ll unleash a wave of creativity that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.

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The Bottom of the Pyramid needs Reading ICT Solutions too

wayan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:31:29 +0000

While you stand there smugly surveying your sea of shiny computers in your state-of-the-art school computer centre, please spare a thought for the billion or so people who never made it to school, or who dropped out after a year or two or three, and never even learned to read and write.

Most of them are forever doomed to a subsistence existence below the poverty line in agricultural communities, or to eke out an existence in the mega-slums of our mega-cities. These people have been written off by some observers as a lost generation for whom there’s no hope. It’s only a billion people. Better luck next lifetime. But we believe there is a way to change this through literacy.

History

Seven years ago I stood in a field in Punjab, India, listening to the District Health Officer tell me that my Health Education program to reduce child morbidity was doomed to failure because my target audience would never be able to read my leaflets and brochures. “But the literacy rate here is 64%”, I protested. He fell about laughing at my naïve faith in government statistics.

Success!

So I packed my bags and moved to Delhi and built a computerised literacy program called Tara Akshar. We used a technique nobody had used before. The outcome was that 60,000 completely illiterate women, aged 8 to 80, were taught to read and write in a 55 hour course. The combined drop-out and failure rate was less than 5%. I believe these kinds of numbers are unheard of in any voluntary Indian education program.

Why it works

The secret of our success was animated Laubach memory hooks embedded in a cartoon serial. Let me explain. Laubach was a chap in the 1930s who said you should teach letter recognition by drawing pictures in which two things happen:

The picture is of an object that begins with the letter you are trying to teach; for example, if you are trying to teach the letter S, then you could show a picture of a snake.
The picture looks like the letter. So make sure the snake is in an S shape:

The purpose of this is to give a great big clue to the reader as to what sound the letter represents so he/she does not have to remember it.

It’s an obvious, really. So we have Ws that look like waves, and Bs that look like bats, and so on. We cannot understand why all early learning systems don’t work like this. We teach completely illiterate tribal women in remote parts of India to recognize all 30+ consonants of the Hindi alphabet in only 10 hours using this method.

So we designed a picture using Laubach principles for each letter of the alphabet (all the consonants, plus both cases for the vowels). Then we went one stage further and animated the letter morphing into the object and back again. In other words, the letter S turns into a snake, and then back into an S. Then we show the animation on a laptop. We ended up with about 50 animations of the Hindi alphabet, and make each one a character in a multi-episode story.

Every day, our students come to class, and watch the latest episode of the story. Then we test them using video-game style quizzes on the laptop, and then they do 20 minutes writing practice while the computer shows an animation of how to write the letter. Then we show the episode again, and test again, and writing practice again – no activity takes more than 20 minutes. And we use flash cards, and we use posters, and we use special playing cards, as well as writing books and reading books.

After each 100 minute lesson, we send them home. They all turn up the next day because

It’s easy, they don’t have to try to remember anything
It’s fun
It’s a social event

The Indian Government has now run very successful pilots of the program and recognized it as “best practice.”

Of course, letter recognition is only one of several facets of teaching reading and writing. After letters, we go onto syllables, then words, then sentences, then onto our reading books. Our English language version has a full-blown phonics section of course.

After Literacy

Literacy by itself makes a huge difference to self-esteem, the balance of power in the family, the length of time children stay in school, and almost certainly the birth-rate. (And that’s why it’s probably an excellent way of reducing carbon emissions.) But to be really successful, all the follow-on courses to bring people back into the learning mainstream are required. We have now built courses for numeracy, ethics, how to eradicate shyness, how to participate in an organization, how to follow instructions, how to study, how to improve memory and many more besides.

English and other languages

The efficiency of this program is so high that it easily offsets the cost of the technology. My ambition is to get it used in every country with a literacy problem. Which is probably everywhere but about 3 countries, I believe.

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ABCs and ICTs: Delivering Scale and Value with a Whole Class Learning Solution

wayan — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:19:24 +0000

D is for desktop. L is for laptop. M is for mobile. E is for expensive!

For the time being, traditional technologies are too expensive and complicated to implement in scale, while also allowing sufficient funding for teacher training and learning materials development.

Desktops in school computer rooms require a dedicated, secure classroom that would otherwise serve as an instructional space in an often-overcrowded school. The opportunity cost associated with losing an instructional space alone, is incalculable. Some initiatives adopt a “mobile lab” approach, where they introduce laptops – or increasingly, tablets – to provide students with 1:1 instruction, without losing instructional space.

Another approach is mobile phone technology. Nokia recently announced a Linux-based smartphone for $100, and there have been announcements about Google-powered Android smartphones, also priced in the $100 range.

Yet, the challenges with all three approaches remain more or less the same. First, there may never been enough computers and smartphones available (at least not in the foreseeable future) to adequately serve every student. Second, assuring the necessary maintenance of equipment, networks, and access to reliable electricity is a particularly expensive proposition when a nation considers equipping the majority of its schools.

And finally, the responsibility placed on the individual teacher to effectively integrate technology into instruction is immense. He must be trained to facilitate use of high-quality software, facilitate student use, troubleshoot technical issues during facilitation, and monitor individual and collective student progress in order to achieve measurable goals – in addition to his regular teaching responsibilities!

For technology that relies on the delivery of web-based content, there are even greater risks for abandoning use of computers altogether if the network is not fast or reliable enough, or if the cost is prohibitive over a longer period.

Providing a whole-class learning solution to reach more schools

In partnership with USAID/Senegal and Columbia University’s Earth Institute, CyberSmart Africa has introduced a whole-class learning solution that integrates the use of a specially adapted interactive whiteboard directly into classroom instruction. We started the program in 2010 and now operate in three primary schools and six middle schools. The objective is to focus on learning, as teachers facilitate an active, student-centered classroom that integrates the use of digital resources in support of all core academic subjects.

The whole class learns together as an interactive whiteboard moves between classrooms, impacting hundreds of students during a single school day. More than a dozen students will actually use the interactive whiteboard during a single class session, while all students become active learners as they benefit from the experience of observing and influencing their peers’ work at the board.

Implementation is simplified and the Total Cost of Ownership is low compared to laptop and school computer room initiatives because there is less equipment to be maintained and managed; and there are minimal installation costs because all of the equipment is portable. Resources are primarily directed toward ongoing teacher training, the single investment in education that is most closely associated with student success.

Many of the classrooms in our partner schools have rusted ceilings, and some lack electricity. Power is supplied with a solar-charged battery that moves between classrooms along with the equipment. The technology consists primarily of a lightweight screen manufactured in-country, a netbook, a low-power video projector, and an interactive “controller” that enables the touch-screen capability. Users interact with the computer – opening files, playing games, searching for content – by touching the screen with a special infrared pen that acts like a mouse.

All the necessary software to run the applications resides in the stand-alone netbook, and Internet connectivity is optional. The equipment is easily moved between classrooms, over sand and sometimes even through the village to an off-site space, and can be completely set up in under ten minutes.

In contrast to using a regular video projector, the teacher and students are not glued to a computer keyboard – which will most likely be controlled by the teacher – in order to manipulate desktop content on an interactive whiteboard. Lessons are purposely designed to be participatory, and viewable by the whole class so that students are more engaged in the learning process. Interactive whiteboard software also makes use of a suite of “blackboard-like” annotation tools – underlining, circling, coloring – among other capabilities.

Success requires a “toolbox” consisting of ongoing training, content, and support

As ICT has become central to the USAID Education Strategy (February 2011), it is essential to keep in mind that ICT use in schools will accomplish very little if not integrated within a toolbox full of supporting educational content, ongoing teacher training and support, and a context that nurtures evolving teaching and learning styles.

Our work at CyberSmart Africa has been motivated by the unfortunate reality of too many education initiatives who introduce ICT simply for ICT’s sake, and whose budget and program activities go to supporting only the use of the provided equipment. Our approach extends directly into the pedagogical implications of ICT; the bulk of our activities support the ongoing teacher training necessary to successfully integrate ICT to improve the quality of instruction, and thus impact student learning.

A Focus on Professional Development including use of SMS

Through our ongoing professional development activities, we support the teachers in a shift toward learner-centered strategies. The teachers gradually move away from the traditional lecture-style approach and become facilitators of the learning process.

As part of our teacher professional development activities, we nurture professional learning communities where teachers support one another and create their own technology-integrated lessons. With ongoing teacher-to-teacher support, the content shared in the classroom is guaranteed to align with the Senegalese national curriculum, as well as the teacher’s personal instructional objectives.

Relying again on simple, available, and affordable technology, CyberSmart Africa uses SMS to extend our professional development. Every Monday, teachers receive by SMS a “Weekly Challenge” exercise, a follow-up on themes introduced during face-to-face meetings and classroom observations.

The challenge may simply require a response to a question, such as “What software did you use the previous week?”. Other challenges may be task-oriented, such as “Co-facilitate a technology-integrated lesson with a colleague this week.” The challenges are designed to both provide direction, and encourage teachers to put their learning into practice. We have found that the challenges are motivating and fun, while also providing CyberSmart Africa with valuable feedback concerning the level of teacher participation.

Teaching reading in support of the USAID Education Strategy

The USAID Education Strategy (2011) intends to leverage ICT to improve reading in primary grades; and we observe that the possibilities to use the interactive whiteboard for reading instruction are seemingly endless. It provides a way to accommodate for different learning styles, as students not only write on the interactive whiteboard, but also read, speak, listen, and even manipulate otherwise static content.

As part of CyberSmart Africa’s Senegal implementation, for example, we have created the framework for a word magnet exercise, where students form sentences by dragging disassociated words, and sometimes images, from one part of the screen to the other. This creative learning exercise sharpens students’ ability to think critically, as they learn sentence construction and vocabulary.

With an interactive whiteboard in their classrooms, teachers and their students are not limited to the static content of their textbooks – often in short supply – nor are they obligated to search very far for content presented in different formats – audio, visual, and text. In an effort to produce appropriate localized reading materials, CyberSmart Africa has collaborated with teachers to create various talking books that integrate different learning modalities.

With each talking book, students are able to listen to the story, read the text themselves, participate in discussions based on the pictures, annotate the story directly on the interactive whiteboard screen, and more. These stories can be shared among teachers, and enriched and shared again. They present a unique learning opportunity for students who otherwise have little, if any regular exposure to a variety of reading materials.

Learning to read does, of course, require practice and ongoing support beyond the classroom. Still, the classroom is, and will be for the foreseeable future, the place where students learn to read. When teachers facilitate technology-integrated lessons directly in the classroom, they can draw from engaging content originating from teachers, the community, packaged software, and other sources globally.

Conclusion

Although use of an interactive whiteboard by no means represents a complete solution for reading improvement, our experience in Senegal indicates that teachers and students enthusiastically embrace use of the interactive whiteboard for active, whole class learning. The approach impacts large numbers of students with minimal equipment, and has the potential to scale because the Total Cost of Ownership is low. Still, it is important to emphasize that teachers need ongoing professional development in order to prepare high quality technology-integrated lessons, and to facilitate an active, learner-centered classroom. With the appropriate support, use of an interactive whiteboard holds tremendous potential to shape the classroom learning environment in Sub Saharan Africa, and globally.

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ICT and the Early Grade Reading Assessment: From Testing to Teaching

wayan — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:45:09 +0000

The science of early literacy acquisition and proven techniques for teaching reading are both backed by years of experimental research, as well as practical experience implementing programs to improve reading.

EGRA testing in Ethiopia

Experts agree that measuring reading progress early offers the benefits of informing remediation, taking a snapshot in time or showing progress over time of children’s reading abilities and informing stakeholders and policy makers about what programs or methods work.

Frequent diagnostic testing at national or classroom levels can serve to establish benchmarks; and monitoring progress against these benchmarks can be a key factor in motivating schools, teachers, students, and families (Davidson, Korda, & Collins, 2011).

The Education for All Fast Track Initiative recently set two indicators related to reading skills:

Proportion of students who, after two years of schooling, demonstrate sufficient reading fluency and comprehension to “read to learn”
Proportion of students who are able to read with comprehension, according to their countries’ curricular goals, by the end of primary school

These indicators are considered an effective measure of a school system’s overall health as well as a specific diagnosis of reading performance that can inform policy and implementation of curriculum and teacher training, among other things. According to Gove and Wetterberg (2011),

“The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is one tool used to measure students’ progress toward learning to read. It is a test that is administered orally, one student at a time. In about 15 minutes, it examines a student’s ability to perform fundamental prereading and reading skills” (p. 2).

Over the past five years, we at RTI International, various donors, and experts in the field of early reading have worked to “develop, pilot, and implement EGRA in more than 50 countries and 70 languages” (p. 2). Assessments like EGRA help teachers focus on results, by describing what children know or do not know, and where instruction must focus in order to change that. For example, in Egypt, the first Arabic EGRA survey showed very clearly that children who knew letter sounds performed better on reading a short passage than children who only knew letter names; yet 50% of children tested could not identify a single letter sound. These findings signaled that a fundamental shift in instructional methods was required, and after schools adopted a phonics-based approach using letter sounds, performance increased nearly 200% over baseline one year later (Cvelich, 2011).

That said, to measure for results, teachers and their supervisors must find the tools accessible and easy to use to inform their own instruction. It also helps if the results underpin communication with parents and communities, as well as national politicians. (Crouch, 2011). Too often, results from national standardized tests remain at the national level, with teachers rarely getting feedback on performance, much less feedback that is more specific than classroom averages. Furthermore, it can sometimes be months, if not years, before the results of large national assessments are made available, at which time it is too late to change instructional practices – at least for that set of children.

How can ICT play a role?

Systematic use of mobile devices to assess early literacy and numeracy, especially in developing countries, remains limited to date. Reasons include:

Initial procurement cost of the devices and the necessity for specific training in their use;
Lack of robust cost-benefit analyses to inform sustainability of this type of approach; and
Limitations in local capacity to develop or manipulate the necessary data collection software.

As we state elsewhere (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011), there are several ways in which information and communication technologies (ICT) may be applied to the assessment process to make implementation and use of the results more accessible:

Creating or tailoring tests
Training data collectors
Collecting actual field data
Manipulating and managing the data to extract and present the most significant findings.

Among these, the greatest added value is in using electronic devices for data collection and rapid analysis in place of paper-based assessments.

Electronic devices can reduce the amount of paper needed, as well as the associated costs. Expenses dispensed with include the actual purchase of paper, clipboards, pencils, timers and so on, as well as the labor involved in the lengthy processes of checking student sheets for copy quality, stapling individual packets, counting instruments out by team and school in advance of data collection in the field, and distributing the packets. Paper-related costs such as printing, supplies, data entry, and data cleaning can make up 5%–15% of the entire budget of an EGRA implementation, according to an RTI internal review.
Collecting data digitally means that it can move directly from a device into a database for analysis. This has several benefits in terms of efficiency: less time for data entry, lower data-entry costs, and less time to report out results. Quicker access can encourage stakeholders to do such assessments even when they need data rapidly to make important decisions based on results.
Electronic means have the potential to reduce the number of points for human error in moving from paper to database to analysis software. As with most sophisticated survey software, programmers can build in checks or stops to help assessors recognize data-entry errors immediately, at the time of administration.
Electronic media can be less physically challenging than dealing with paper-related administration: “An electronic solution may also reduce measurement errors arising from problems in handling the timers and other testing materials. Difficulties include forgetting to start the timer, setting the wrong amount of time on the timer, or leaving student prompt sheets with the student when they should have been taken away” (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011, p. 188).

What solutions are available?

In theory, there are many potential ways to transform paper assessments into an electronic equivalent, but a custom solution is required because of differences between oral reading assessments like EGRA and other standard surveys. For example, data have to be entered at the child’s pace on the subtasks, not that of the assessor. Therefore, survey data collection applications on the market for phones, PDAs, or portable computers typically are not appropriate.

After investigating a wide range of potential hardware and software platforms, we developed Tangerine™, a digital assessment interface for touch-screen tablet computers running the Android operating system (see photographs). It can be used for the standard EGRA approach, or customized for other types of surveys such as early math diagnostics or school information surveys.

Other organizations are also exploring a variety of solutions. Prodigy Systems, an organization that has partnered with RTI in Yemen, successfully developed iProSurveyor for use with Arabic assessments on the iPad. Its first large-scale implementation in Yemen in early 2011 confirmed many of the benefits of the digital approach.

The database output was easily readable by any data analysis program, avoiding time-consuming manual data transcription and recoding before statistical analysis.
Administration errors, such as forgetting to start the timer or enter a response, were minimized through built-in error control.
Significantly fewer materials had to be transported in challenging terrain and an environment unfavorable to printed materials.
No issues arose linked to poor printing quality or stapling.
Total administration time was quicker relative to paper assessment (comparison conducted over one assessment administrator).

Cost-Benefit Analysis

At RTI we recently conducted a preliminary cost-benefit analysis using approximate costs from recent EGRA implementations in four different African countries. The analysis aimed to identify the point of cost recovery at which the digital approach would actually yield cost savings. We modeled not one, but three data collection rounds for each country, because it is common to repeat assessments - e.g., for program baseline, midterm, and post-intervention evaluation, or annual monitoring of student outcomes.

In our cost calculation for the digital approach, we assumed hardware costs of USD300/enumerator plus a 10% contingency for spares and accessories, such as a wireless access point for field-based data back-up for the first data collection (e.g., baseline). For the cost of a second digital data collection, we assumed re-use of the tablets from the first data collection, but factored in a 15% contingency just in case replacements are needed.

To calculate the cost of a second paper-based data collection we multiplied the paper-related costs by two, as the same costs for printing, data entry, and data cleaning would incur again. We followed the same process for adding a third data collection to the calculation (assuming baseline, mid-term, and post-intervention assessments).

As shown in Exhibit 1, for most small-sample data collections or one-time assessments, the cost of the hardware may not be offset by the eliminated paper-related costs. The return on investment in repeated implementations, however, is clear in terms of cumulative costs.

Exhibit 1: Cost of EGRA implementation, paper vs. electronic, for three administrations

In addition to making large national assessments more efficient, the same devices can be adapted for use as classroom-based continuous assessment tools, or as data entry interfaces for situations that still require paper-based tests. With such devices in their hands, teachers or school supervisors can do regular mastery checks more frequently, and capture the results at student and classroom levels.

The resulting data set is a rich one, and if it is supported by built-in computer-based analytics, it can be analyzed in multiple ways to indicate not only whether the methods in place are improving reading ability, but also what areas of the curriculum need more attention, and which children or groups of children are falling behind. For example, detailed item analysis at the classroom or individual level might show a recurring problem with vowel sounds, or decoding. This subsequently provides clear instructional recommendations to focus on.

Limitations and pitfalls

However, electronic administration is not necessarily a cure-all:

Obviously, using electronic data collection at either national or classroom levels does not solve all the limitations of print-based testing; indeed, doing so might introduce new challenges. For example, although a digital solution would eliminate the risk of environmental damage to paper forms during difficult transport situations, it might pose a great risk that all assessment data could be lost at once through loss, damage, or theft of a single device, if proper backup procedures were not in place. Likewise, handling of the new device might prove to be more challenging than handling the timer and all associated materials. […] Thus, strong electronic quality control and supportive supervision during data collection would be crucial. (Pouezevara & Strigel, 2011, p. 188)

Furthermore, the EGRA approach is intended to be a simple solution that can be adopted by countries with minimum technical assistance. An electronic solution should be flexible enough that it does not create dependency of users on software programmers or hardware technicians to change test items and configuration as needed.

In terms of costs, clearly, initial investment costs for specialized hardware may be prohibitive in some situations, but our preliminary cost-benefit analysis indicated that over time the investment will pay off if used for multiple large-scale implementations. Additionally, implementers can leverage the initial investment by choosing tools that can be used for other purposes when not in use for assessment—for example, by loading tablet computers with other instructional materials, training resources, or literacy materials.

We can also foresee assessment software being linked not only to automatically generated analysis of results, but also to suggested instructional resources tailored to those results and a record of day-to-day time on task. It is also possible, using the same technologies that power Tangerine™, to adapt the assessment methodology to more common and less expensive handheld devices, such as mobile phones. These smaller devices might be particularly useful for the most rapid types of literacy assessments, such as Pratham’s yearly literacy and numeracy surveys, which involve fewer subtasks than EGRA and fewer items per test.

Another potential pitfall related to making national or continuous assessments more readily accessible is that they could be used for excessive assessment, and focus on “teaching to the test” at the expense of other higher order or student-centered activities. Too much focus on averages or aggregated results can draw attention away from the achievement of specific subgroups. Additionally, care must be taken that classroom-level results are not misused by aggregating small samples and reporting them up to the national level or attempting to generalize them.

This is a rapidly evolving field, with new technologies arriving on the market almost daily, and prices falling significantly, so it is expected that it will become increasingly feasible to implement electronic methods for literacy assessments in developing countries. Meanwhile, we are piloting various solutions and collaborating with other institutions that have similar goals. Further interest and ideas from the international development community are welcome.

References

Crouch, L. (2011). Motivating early grade instruction and learning: Institutional issues. Ch. 7 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 227–250). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Cvelich, P. (2011, September/October). Egypt shakes up the classroom. Frontlines. Washington, DC: United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Available from http://www.usaid.gov/press/frontlines/fl_sep11/FL_sep11_EDU_EGYPT.html

Davidson, M., Korda, M., & White Collins, O. (2011). Teachers’ use of EGRA for continuous assessment: The case of EGRA Plus: Liberia. Ch. 4 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 113–138). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Gove, A., & Wetterberg, A. (2011). The Early Grade Reading Assessment: An introduction. Ch. 1 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 1–38). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

Pouezevara, S., & Strigel, C. (2011). Using information and communication technologies to support EGRA. Ch. 6 in A. Gove & A. Wetterberg, The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and interventions to improve basic literacy (pp. 183–226). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. Available from http://www.rti.org/pubs/bk-0007-1109-wetterberg.pdf

The eWaste of Development: What are the consequences of new technologies on the environment, and how can we act responsibly, starting now?

wayan — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:22:06 +0000

Over the past few years of activity on the ETD forum, we’ve read many examples of how ICT in education projects have improved and innovated practice, making access to education more modern and accessable. At the same time much criticism has been focused on projects that, despite best intentions, focus first on hardware provision without sufficient consideration of how it will be used to improve learning, effectively wasting the investment.

Many of us have witnessed firsthand this kind of wasted investment—i.e., underutilization of equipment—but how many of us are still around to see the long-term consequences of high-input ICT projects, such as those designed to give every child access to computers, either through large computing labs, mobile laptop stations, or one to one computing?

What happens when those computers reach the end of their lifecycle?
Who is responsible for disposing of them when the project that purchased them is no longer active?
How many projects today are integrating this type of foresight into their design and costs?
What donors are requiring that type of planning from their implementing partners?
Which client governments are requiring such action as part of international aid programs?

For the past three years, the ICT for Education and Training group at RTI International has been looking at these questions, and developing strategies and protocols for approaching ICT in education interventions with a focus on realistic, effective inputs for the present, while planning for the effects of those interventions in the future.

Why? Because although some may argue that informal electronics recycling—i.e., picking and sorting through piles of electronics at the dump—provides a reasonable income for some people (for example, a Kenyan can earn up to $3/day; in Guiyu China, about $8/day—much more than farming), the question is whether or not it is safe and adequate. In most cases, it is not. When we don’t properly recycle, there is human and environmental damage from direct contact with toxic substances, inappropriate methods for extracting raw materials, hazardous working conditions, etc. Additionally, we are ignoring the market potential for additional sources of sustainable and safe livelihoods, while losing raw materials that will have to be re-extracted (with all of the associated environmental problems that come with that.) Thus, the idea of e-waste for us is more than just a by-product of development projects; instead, it can become “the development project”, led by countries in an effort to spark new, safe, and sustainable economies. It is a human as well as environmental concern, both of which have long-term impact on development and improving the human condition, our key mission.

What can be done?

Recycling is just one possible approach to e-waste management, and a broad one at that. The least desirable approach to e-waste management is no management at all, but rather the direct disposal of unwanted equipment and materials using environmentally unsound practices, such as dumping and incineration, and bypassing all efforts to reuse or recycle. We talk a lot about how to use ICT in education, for good reasons. But we don’t talk enough about how the principles of “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” should be integrated into ICT in education projects.

Reduce
Purchase smaller devices—tablet computers and mobile devices, for example; purchase more energy efficient devices; purchase fewer but sufficiently powerful devices (i.e., Thin Clients); extend the lifecycle of the equipment that you have through effective preventive maintenance, proper handling by users, and repairs–this also provides an opportunity for vocational and technical training within the school, organization, or community.

Reuse
In addition to the preventive maintenance described above, when equipment can truly no longer function as its original purpose, it can still be reused or repurposed. For example: refurbish one new device out of parts from other non-functional devices; use non-working devices in vocational and technical training courses to understand parts and how, for example, a computer is put together; repurpose devices into totally different objects, for example computer chips and circuit boards have been “upcycled” into luggage tags , jewelry or art.

Recycle
Despite best efforts, there will always be parts of equipment that cannot be reused or repurposed. The key is to ensure that prior to disposal one considers all responsible recycling options: plastics can be ground or shredded and sold back to plastics manufacturers; parts can be sorted and resold for refurbishing purposes; metals, primarily gold and silver, are recovered by commercial recyclers. The recycling option should aim to create new, viable and safe sources of livelihoods in the community, such as sourcing, separating and sorting parts and then reselling them to appropriate manufacturers.

Examples of Success

In Egypt’s Manshiyat Naser district, also known as “Garbage City”, girls come one day per week to learn how to turn trash into income. With the help of a trained teacher, the girls break down non-working computers collected by the Zabaleen (garbage collectors) or donated to the association, and rebuild them into working computers. Each working computer can be sold for approximately $300 on the local market, with half of the proceeds going directly to the girls, and half funding the warehouse facilities and trainer. The parts that can’t be repurposed into a new computer are sorted for recycling, including the valuable gold and silver of microprocessors, motherboards and circuit boards.

Kenya is emerging as one of the leaders in e-waste management, having convened The National Stakeholders Workshop on Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (e-waste) Nairobi 2010. They are also one of the first African nations to have a comprehensive-government-led e-waste policy and strategy and there are recycling facilities set up to handle it. Computers for Schools Kenya (CFSK) a non-governmental organization, dismantles computers into metals, wires, plastic, aluminum, copper, monitors and electronic boards which are then sold separately. CFSK also converts the monitors into television sets by replacing its boards with those of televisions.

An eWaste “code of conduct” for development partners?

When engaging in development activities, particularly ICT in Education projects that aim to introduce considerable amounts of technology infrastructure, we must act responsibly with regards to e-waste. There are many opportunities, or “entry points” to integrate responsible e-waste management into our projects.

At the proposal stage:

Build e-waste considerations into the proposal, with budget (for example, budget for responsible export of e-waste, local recycling if possible, for training and advocacy events, etc.)
Integrate partnerships with IT companies, private sector partners, community-based organizations, and waste management facilities
Budget for a rapid situation analysis of government policies and procedures surrounding e-waste management.

During project implementation:

Require eco-friendly materials, or manufacturer take-back agreements (‘producer pays principle’) as part of hardware specifications and evaluation criteria for large procurement contracts.
Include in training programs strategies to help extend the lifecycle of computers, and clear instructions for what to do with non-functional equipment.
Conduct advocacy and policy support by work with government counterparts to advise them on long-term considerations and collaborate on developing appropriate actions and solutions

At project exit stage:

Ensure proper handover of used equipment–including project office equipment–to local organizations that have the capacity to restore, refurbish and recycle it.
Insist on transparency in reporting to project donors, stakeholders, clients, etc. on both successful and challenging aspects of electronics recycling and ensure that they have a road-map for the future based on project experience.

However, e-Waste management cannot be externally driven in the long term. Therefore, our most critical responsibility is to support national governments to address this issue and to increase their own capacity for end-of-life processing of e-waste. We can:

promote and support the establishment of recycling facilities as part of economic growth and workforce development projects.
participate in and foster effective environmental lobbies in countries where we work so that citizens also put pressure on governments to create such facilities and enforce appropriate legislation.
encourage governments to develop appropriate legislation to protect themselves and promote development; for example, by outlawing the importation and dumping of foreign e-waste.
encourage the re-use of electronics through social programs that donate equipment to schools or hospitals, and subsidize recycling of e-waste when reuse is not possible.

Further research needed

As a community, we can make a larger impact faster by working together. First, we need more information on who is doing what, which donors and which governments have policies and procedures related to e-waste, and where we can find common ground. Some important questions remain from an institutional perspective:

What is our e-waste “tolerance”?
At what point does this become a clear “hazard” that cannot be ignored?
What constitutes a “significant” amount of technology input in a project?
Is this only relevant to ICT in Education projects?
What about our project offices?
Do we practice what we preach in our institutions both at home and abroad?
Do smaller devices necessarily contain less e-waste per unit?
Are donors likely to view e-waste considerations as a positive or a negative contribution to projects where it is not expressly requested?
What about the health and environmental effects of the use of electronic devices even before reaching the disposal phase (i.e., increased electricity consumption and hazards related to long-term exposure to cell phones, wireless internet, etc.).

We welcome your contribution to this ongoing research, by sharing your experiences, activities and opinions.

A version of this piece was previously presented to the 54th annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in Chicago, March 3, 2010. Background research was commissioned by RTI and carried out by Amos Cruz, and submitted to RTI International as an unpublished research paper entitled “Electronic Waste: Considerations and Solutions for Integration of Information and Communications Technologies in the Developing World”, August 29, 2009. A multimedia version of the presentation is also available

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Village Teacher Training via Video Conferencing

wayan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:15:48 +0000

This year I had the privilege of working with an LLC, a partnering local NGO, and a non-profit that trains undereducated teachers on a project designed to bring Internet access to rural villages in Mexico. Local schoolteachers, many of whom had not received any training beyond a standard high school diploma, were to be trained by experts via WebEx videoconferencing. The project was promising, but ran into financial troubles, and currently the project is at a standstill. I, however, am still optimistic that the project can be a positive educational tool.

I will explain the project design and implementation below. First, however, I want to pose three questions to readers:

What funding mechanisms are most secure for telecenter sustainability?
Are videoconferencing training programs effective when trainees have no prior experience with these technologies?
What pedagogical assumptions are instilled into videoconferencing trainings and what repercussions do these assumptions cause?

THE NEED

For the first time, local schoolteachers in rural Mexico could receive teacher training, many of whom had never received formal teacher training. The non-profit planned to put these teachers through a 50-hour training course via videoconferencing tools and a satellite broadband Internet connection.

In a Mexican government program, and with assistance from the IDB, villagers from underserved areas in Mexico can receive a financial scholarship for college and a modest stipend in exchange for teaching elementary or middle school for two years in other rural communities. The program, CONAFE (which stands for National Council for to Promote Education), is a great asset to these communities who are otherwise without teachers.

The problem, however, is that the CONAFE teachers have not gone to college or received much formal training. Though the teachers are required to attend monthly seminars and receive a few weeks of training before entering the classroom, they are otherwise without preparation and come with no more than a high school education.

THE PROJECT

To solve this problem, a technology-focused LLC who provides Internet connectivity via satellite to rural villages worldwide partnered with a local NGO to open an Internet café in the largest village (about 80 families) in the area. A local social entrepreneur was selected, who bought the technological equipment from the local NGO at low interest rates, and the Internet café quickly opened. Then, the local NGO partnered with the non-profit who trains undereducated teachers to put the CONAFE teachers through a 50-hour training course via videoconferencing tools.

Considering the unfamiliarity with computers that the CONAFE teachers have, it was apparent that they would have to rely heavily on the local Internet café owner to help them connect to a videoconferencing platform and to use the computers. Some of the teachers had never used a computer before, and even the most advanced had only used them a dozen times. The idea was that through this training, the CONAFE schoolteachers would not only become better teachers, but they would learn the basics of computer and Internet usage, invaluable skills without which they would be lost once entering college.

DIFFICULTIES AND QUESTIONS

Unfortunately, however, the Internet service was cut after just three months of service to the café. The cost of the service increased ten-fold in the contract with the satellite service provider after three months, a key detail in the contract that the local NGO had overlooked. Now, it has been over one hundred days that the Internet café has been without service. The social entrepreneur feels disgruntled and embarrassed in front of the other villagers, and wants nothing to do with the local NGOs efforts to reconnect the café with new service providers.

Without this connection, the videoconferencing training obviously stopped. Consequently, it is unclear whether the training would have been effective. The first training took place just one week before the Internet was cut off. I was at the training and afterwards I had a series of question regarding the program. How would the mentor relationship between the teacher trainer from the non-profit and the recipient CONAFE teachers affect their self-confidence and later self-development efforts? How would the training affect the teachers’ actual actions in the classroom? How much freedom would the CONAFE teachers have to modify the national curriculums that they were mandated to teach? Was a certification from the non-profit organization enough to motivate the CONAFE teachers to participate in the program? Would the certificate actually prove to be helpful in securing future employment?

It is impossible to find these answers from the short-lived project in Mexico. What experiences have you, reader, had that could shed light on the effectiveness of videoconferencing training over international boundaries? And can telecenters be financially sustainable in rural villages as they are in urban cities in developing countries? What increases the probability of financial success? If not funded through user fees, what are implications of government sponsorship or subsidies in telecenter projects?

I’d appreciate your comments and feedback from your own experiences.

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Experiment on Classroom Internet Usage by Secondary School Students

wayan — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:24:10 +0000

I am Martin Mungai, a secondary school teacher in Kenya, but currently on study leave undertaking my studies at Hokkaido University of Education in Japan. I am keen on researching children and information media. I wish to share my experiment that i carried a year ago on the use of Internet in classrooms in Kenya. I am aware that not much educational research in Kenya has been done in this area.

In my school we had new software installed in the computer lab. The software allowed the teacher to control the students PCs from one location, which we would call the “teacher control centre” (TCC). The TCC allowed the teacher to view all the students’ workstations and even take over the control of the students PC without the teacher having to physically move to the particular student. The students were not informed of the features of the newly installed software.

I sampled a group of students from form 3, they fell in the age bracket of (15-16) years. They were allowed an uninterrupted 1-hour session to browse the Internet; all the while I kept an eye on the TCC, monitoring what each group was doing.

Observation

I did not give them any prior information on what websites to visit, within 5 minutes, of the twenty 21 computers that we had in the room (see figure 1), 11 had already logged in to a social website; facebook, 4 were on youtube, 3 were on popular European soccer clubs 1 was on an entertainment site 1 was on adult site and 1 was still googling. The computers were shared between 2 students and about 4 were shared by 3 students.

After 1 hour, I blocked the popular social networking sites and none of the computers could access it. I noted that a group of students affected were getting irritated and they tried logging into other sites, next I blocked youtube, the irritation now became more evident as the noise levels in the lab was raised. I next moved to block the sites of popular European teams, and the reaction was almost instantaneous, some students clicked and others started peeping at others screens, one student was even courageous to come forward and tell me that the Internet was not working. I feigned ignorance and told him to try other sites, I even suggested in passing, “try educational sites”.

The students who had initially taken over the control of the computer in their workstation gave up the mice and the keyboard and they became passive participants. For the next 1 hour I observed that students were keen to search on educational materials in science, history, computing, career opportunities and institutions of higher learning. See the table below

It was very evident that social networking services (SNS) such as facebook is very popular with students. It was not possible to establish the number of students who had registered on facebook. Of particular concern were the students who visited the adult sites. In spite of several posters displayed on the wall, and verbal instruction given to the students, some still went ahead and browsed the adult sites. I sought to know where they had got information about those sites, and the response was almost instantaneous; “From friends”. Interestingly almost all the students knew the code name of the adult sites “gwati”. This is a clearer indicator that peer influence plays a big role in motivating the students on visiting the adult sites.

Conclusion

The above case study should however not be used to make a generalized conclusion that the same effect would be observed in a different set –up say for example a girl school, or a rural school. A more comprehensive study would probably yield different results although it’s only a slight deviation that would be expected.

This clearly demonstrated that, students when left on their own to use the Internet will only engage in areas that seem to entertain and socialize. Proper supervision, control and guidance will help the students unlock their potential in looking for information that will have direct impact on their academic life. Further when 2 or more students share a computer, they are more creative in terms of the information that they look search for in the net.

As pointed out, Internet appears to have some educational effects on children’s attitude towards learning. For example, Clifford Stoll (2000) argues that multimedia systems such as computers or Internet may lower or decrease children’s problem-solving ability, intellectual curiosity and motivation for learning.

However, this can be overturned by offering guided supervision to the students on the use of the Internet. Further, implementation of “Information Moral education” is as important as using an interactive hands-on approach to moral learning. Teachers and educators should emphasize the need to balance both the positive and negative aspects of ICT.

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Educational Technology Debate » Search Results » Computers

Top World Bank EduTech Blog Posts of 2011

We Need More Teacher-Centered Solutions in ICT for Literacy

Hardware Costs are not a Barrier for ICT Use in Literacy and Reading

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Worldreader is leading a reading revolution in the developing world

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The Bottom of the Pyramid needs Reading ICT Solutions too

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ABCs and ICTs: Delivering Scale and Value with a Whole Class Learning Solution

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ICT and the Early Grade Reading Assessment: From Testing to Teaching

The eWaste of Development: What are the consequences of new technologies on the environment, and how can we act responsibly, starting now?

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Village Teacher Training via Video Conferencing

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Experiment on Classroom Internet Usage by Secondary School Students

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