TCRecord: Article - The Diigo Meta page

• 23 Sep 09
  

  Kathy Lawrence

  information_literacy laptops 1:1 research

  • This paper analyzes the information literacy and research practice in a purposely stratified selection of 10 one-to-one laptop K–12 schools in California and Maine.
  • The study found that students in all the laptop schools learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate in into their written and multimedia products. However, the focus on evaluating information, understanding the social issues surrounding it, and analyzing it for the purpose of knowledge production varied widely across schools. Some schools succeeded in promoting scholarly approaches to working with information, whereas other schools mostly limited themselves to teaching procedural functions of computer and Internet use.
  • 49 more annotations...
  • • The jobs that drive the new knowledge economy and provide people with power, prestige, and high pay are almost all in what former secretary of labor Robert Reich (1991), called symbolic analyst services and include professions such as research scientists, design engineers, management consultants, strategic planners, marketing strategists, and production designers. Symbolic analysts must be highly analytic in their use of information, persuasive and creative in their communications, and autonomous and flexible in their ability to manage tasks from a number of simultaneous projects.
    • They require a high degree of information literacy, defined as the ability to access needed information effectively and efficiently; evaluate information and its sources critically; incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base; use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose; and understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information (American Library Association, 2000).
    • This article presents findings from a 2-year laptop and literacy study conducted from 2003 to 2005.
    • All the schools were either in Maine (3 schools) or California (7 schools).
    • Students in these schools use laptops in grades ranging from Grade 2 to Grade 12. The schools are located in urban, suburban, and rural settings and are located in wealthy, middle-class, and poor neighborhoods. The ethnic composition of the schools varies widely, with Whites, Latinos, Asians and Asian Americans, and African Americans

    • Our research suggests that students in the laptop schools universally learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate it into their written and multimedia products. On the other hand, the focus on evaluating information, understanding the social issues surrounding it, and analyzing it for the purpose of knowledge production varied greatly across schools.

    • This ongoing access to tools for gathering and analyzing information brought about five important changes in instruction: It facilitated (1) more just-in-time learning; (2) more autonomous, individualized learning; (3) a greater ease of conducting research; (4) more empirical investigation; and (5) more opportunities for in-depth learning.
    • Just-in-time learning occurred with great frequency in the classrooms that we observed. Language arts students went online to find information or images to clarify confusing terms or concepts that they came across in medieval literature. Science students consulted revolving 3-D models of DNA to answer questions that came up in class. And social studies students frequently sought out information regarding current events related to classroom discussion.
    • I really think in laptop class it is going to be student centered because you have a laptop and it can take them anywhere. It’s more teacher as a facilitator. I’m a tool they can use too, but there are so many other tools, and they need to know how to utilize all of the tools. So the curriculum is like a vehicle to teach them how to utilize the resources and utilize them to create products that are useful for their learning.
    • Another potential problem with ease of research is plagiarism. Teachers came up with various strategies for discouraging plagiarism. One science teacher in Maine explained that she likes “taking two events that seem unrelated and having kids try to figure out the commonalities and the differences.” She finds that such a strategy forces students “to do something that you can’t get from anywhere else. It has to come from your head.”
    • We believe that these differences can be explained by an amplification effect (see discussion in Warschauer, 2000). Simply put, those teachers and schools that began with strong instructional programs for critical inquiry and research were able to make use of laptops to magnify the success of such instruction.
    • The distinction between strong and weak schools in this regard tended to correlate with socioeconomic status (SES).
    • At the same time, important exceptions existed, with some of the low-SES neighborhood schools doing an excellent job of promoting information literacy and developing student research skills.
    • To illustrate the wide variation in approaches to information literacy and research, we briefly look at three laptop schools in Maine: Howard Middle, Plum High, and Castle Middle.
    • Howard Middle is known to have one of the more successful laptop programs in the state,
    • Simply put, Howard is a school dedicated to promoting academic expertise and research skills, and the use of laptops is geared toward this end.
    • Howard students’ training in information literacy also begins in the fifth grade even though they don’t enter the laptop program until 2 years later. All fifth graders attend a 45-minute weekly training session led by the librarian, Ms. Gompers, a highly accomplished professional who has two master’s degrees and a quarter-century of educational experience
    • She takes the students through a detailed process of how to search for information, starting with the school’s electronic catalogs and proceeding through other electronic and print resources, such as reference books and periodical indexes.
    • I’m teaching them about keywords and we were using a printed encyclopedia as an example but we also have the online version, so I’m tying in the fact that for the skills that we are learning, it doesn’t matter if it is online or in print, in your hand or on a CD. I’m teaching them that the traditional research skills still have value in this modern world where information comes in many different formats, print and nonprint. And then today, the lesson that we are doing is bringing it right down to their level; we are using phone books and using keywords to search in phone books to find information. I really wanted to emphasize today that it is the process, not the product, that we are concerned with. The process is learning how to access information and all these research tools that we have used right here
    • Next week, we are going to be looking at using keywords on the Internet, in search engines and directories.
    • Ms. Gompers has developed special bibliography forms with places for students to write down the citation for their sources (with an example on the top of the form of a correctly formatted citation), the search keywords that they used, and their notes on the information that they found.
    • Unlike other schools we visited, where students most frequently used general Internet searches for their research (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, or Ask.com), at Howard, students tended to prefer more academic sources for their online information.
    • To further involve parents in supporting their children’s information literacy, Ms. Gompers organizes evening programs for parents, at which she introduces the online materials available through the encyclopedia subscriptions and EBSCO database and encourages parents to make use of them for their own needs—for example, to consult with Consumer Reports magazine before making purchases.
    • By the time students enter the one-to-one laptop program in the seventh grade, they are making use of the computer and the Internet for highly interactive forms of learning as they work individually and in groups to define questions or problems, gather and analyze information and data, and develop high-quality products as a means of presenting their findings. These types of learning experiences took place in each of the main subject areas and also in interdisciplinary projects that were organized across subjects.
    • This activity represents a very different approach to the Constitution than that typically found in schools, in which students focus their effort on memorizing key facts (e.g., content of the Constitution and its amendments, names of signers, historical dates).
    • examining the concept of progress, as it applied in four areas: Western expansion, technological progress, women’s rights, and slavery. Students worked within one of these four areas, developing both an essay and a multimedia presentation on their particular subtopic and how it relates to the overall theme of progress
    • As with all essays at the school, they required a detailed bibliography with citation of scholarly sources. As for the multimedia presentations, they included posters, skits, slide presentations, videos, and games, and were presented to parents and the community at a special evening show.
    • The counselors’ office indicated that it had no formal career counseling program and instead devoted much of its efforts to handling disciplinary problems that, unlike elsewhere, had increased since the launching of the laptop program. Elsewhere on campus, the school’s main librarian only worked part time. Her assistant indicated to us that there was no information literacy program at the library and that few of the students or teachers at the school were even aware of the state-subscribed online databases.
    • Our classroom observations and interviews confirmed a lax approach to online research at Plum. Most students chose Google as the first and last instrument of online research. Whereas teachers at Howard were critical of citations in student papers of miscellaneous Web sites (
    • Most other students paid little attention to the presentations as they either continued working on their own PowerPoints or occupied themselves with surfing the Web or instant messaging their friends.
    • For schools that are already dedicated to promoting critical thinking and inquiry, laptops will prove to be an especially powerful learning tool. Schools without that orientation, though, will not magically transform themselves merely through the use of laptops. We do not believe that these differences in orientation are automatically determined by SES. Differences between Howard and Plum were certainly shaped by the two school’s socioeconomic context but were also affected by the vision and leadership of the administration at the two schools.
    • Castle Middle
    • It serves the most ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse population of any school district in Maine.
    • The principal, Mr. Miller, turned to a national pilot program developed by Outward Bound and in 1992 became one of nine “Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound” schools
    • The Expeditionary Learning program involved a complete remaking of the school and its curriculum.
    • All students were grouped into “houses” of about 60 learners and four main teachers, with the teachers in each house having broad autonomy over class scheduling. Most houses developed highly flexible block scheduling, with classes meeting for different lengths of time on different days and ample time built in for teacher collaboration. Most important, almost all academic work in the houses and school was integrated into 8–12-week interdisciplinary research projects.
    • These projects, called learning expeditions, are designed to break with what Mr. Miller termed “the tyranny of coverage of curriculum” and instead involve students in collaborative inquiry on thematic issues.
    • there are two or more of these projects a year at Castle, and they thus constitute the majority of the school curriculum
    • However, at Castle, students were able to situate their own research within broader and more relevant research questions.
    • Therefore, together with the facts that they gathered about their species (on topics such as habitat, present status, diet and feeding habits, and causes of endangerment), they also had to write an essay relating their own findings to the overall research question of how diversity strengthens an ecosystem. The essays were of mixed quality, reflecting the comparatively limited language and literacy skills of many Castle students; nevertheless, the very act of working on the essays served to distinguish this type of project from a mere collection of facts such as that in the subculture assignments carried out at Plum. Students who completed their species pages more quickly also produced concept pages, allowing more in-depth conceptual work by students who were able to do so. All the students were then required to read each of the 25 concept pages and to insert hyperlinks in their own work to several key concepts from the concept pages.
    • Finally, students at Castle were provided scaffolding for their work through detailed peer editing during a “critique week” and with the assistance of teacher-supplied rubrics
    • Castle students also actively engage in documenting the research process. Each expedition deploys a student production team that videos the learning activities, interviews students and teachers, and produces a documentary CD
    • Also of interest is Castle’s approach to instruction of English language learners.
    • ESL students are at the beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels, computer-based drill programs for learning English are eschewed, and laptops are instead used as a tool of apprenticeship for the kinds of research and writing activities that all students are expected to carry out.
    • provide students a vehicle for drawing on varied strengths and making positive contributions, regardless of whether they are fluent in English.
    • In summary, Castle represents a radical break with traditional curriculum and pedagogy in favor of inquiry-based and project-based learning. In California and elsewhere, many teachers and schools shy away from such approaches, believing that they might negatively affect student test scores. Interestingly, though, Castle’s combined test scores in reading, writing, mathematics, and science have exceeded the state average in Maine in 2004–2005, as
    • Students in laptop classes had more frequent opportunities for just-in-time learning, individualized learning, and empirical investigation. Laptop use made it much more feasible for students to engage in research projects and also created better possibilities for in-depth learning.

    • However, our research in laptop schools suggests that these patterns are not set in stone. Though socioeconomic context is an important variable, vision, values, and beliefs are also crucial factors. Those schools that have a vision for promoting information literacy and research skills with diverse students and that can mobilize their teachers behind that vision are finding that one-to-one laptops are a powerful tool in realizing this goal.

    • In summary, laptops will not make bad schools good, but they will make good schools better.
• 22 Sep 09
  

  Steve Ransom

  The study found that students in all the laptop schools learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate in into their written and multimedia products. However, the focus on evaluating information, understanding the social issues surrounding it, and analyzing it for the purpose of knowledge production varied widely across schools. Some schools succeeded in promoting scholarly approaches to working with information, whereas other schools mostly limited themselves to teaching procedural functions of computer and Internet use. Examples of these differences are given through a comparison of three diverse schools in Maine.

  informationliteracy

• 

  Matt Montagne

  Information Literacy in the Laptop Classroom

  1:1 laptoplearning elearning research informationliteracy

• 

  Lucy Gray

  Information Literacy in the Laptop Classroom
  TCRecord

  tcrecord research 1to1

• 21 Sep 09
  

  Bob Rowan

  shared by Magi Koch, 9/21/2009

  laptop program laptops literacy

  • information literacy
  • information literacy
  • 32 more annotations...
  • • information literacy
    • information literacy
    • information literacy
    • information literacy
    • information literacy
    • numerous schools and districts have piloted one-to-one programs, in which each
      student has access to a laptop computer
    • 10 one-to-one laptop K–12 schools in California and Maine
    • varied widely across schools
    • jobs that drive the new knowledge economy
    • symbolic analyst services
    • information literacy
    • Most symbolic analysts use digital technology
    • research suggests that the computerization of schools has not achieved its goals
    • need to schedule computers in advance
    • research studies
    • lack methodological rigor
    • one or two schools
    • little direct observation
    • METHODOLOGY
    • learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate it into their written and multimedia products
    • evaluating information
    • varied greatly
    • access to a much greater variety of information
    • five important changes in instruction
    • individualized learning
    • not all received the instruction and scaffolding necessary
    • most workers will require some information technology skills
    • knowledge-producing functions
    • administrative functions
    • vision, values, and beliefs are also crucial factors
    • will make good schools better
    • invaluable tool
• 20 Sep 09
  

  scott klepesch

  student productivity with laptops study

  laptops classroom instruction

  • They require a high degree of information literacy, defined as the
    ability to access needed information effectively and efficiently; evaluate
    information and its sources critically; incorporate selected information into
    one’s knowledge base; use information effectively to accomplish a specific
    purpose; and understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the
    use of information
  • By eliminating obstacles of sharing computers, scheduling computer use,
    bringing students back and forth to computer laboratories, and unequal computer
    access, laptop programs seek to achieve a more natural integration of technology
    into instruction
  • 7 more annotations...

  • • Our research suggests that students in the laptop schools
      universally learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate it into
      their written and multimedia products. On the other hand, the focus on
      evaluating information, understanding the social issues surrounding it, and
      analyzing it for the purpose of knowledge production varied greatly across
      schools.

      
      

      
      

    • Cognitive scientists have long known that people learn best when information or
      instruction is provided at the point of need (
    • Perhaps
      the most valuable aspect of information access in the laptop classroom
      
      
      is
      how it facilitates student research. Teachers and students pointed to
      several
      
      factors
      about the Internet in facilitating student research. First, the Internet
      
      
      has
      far more information than most school libraries. Second, the information
      on
      
      the
      Internet is more current, an important factor given the rapidity of
      
      
      scientific
      development and social change
    • Perhaps the most valuable aspect of information access in the laptop classroom
      is how it facilitates student research. Teachers and students pointed to several
      factors about the Internet in facilitating student research. First, the Internet
      has far more information than most school libraries. Second, the information on
      the Internet is more current, an important factor given the rapidity of
      scientific development and social change
    • Of course, the very ease of finding information online creates special
      challenges for learning how to sort through, select, evaluate, and make use of
      such a wealth of content. A number of the schools developed special information
      literacy training modules, sometimes with the assistance of the school library,
      as illustrated later in the discussion of Howard Middle School.
    • amplification effect
    • Simply put, those teachers and schools that began with strong instructional
      programs for critical inquiry and research were able to make use of laptops to
      magnify the success of such instruction. Those schools that began with a weaker
      focus on inquiry and research had less success in even developing the basics of
      information literacy

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