Week 3 Application: Suggestions for using learning technologies

Example 2: Interactive Tours

A high school history teacher, located on the West Coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the artwork on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?


1) The first thing I would do is check and see if the museum web site offers virtual tours that would allow students to view the exhibits on their own either before or after the discussion with the museum curators. This way they can spend as much time as needed going back and looking at the artwork to absorb what the curators explained, while the teacher does not have to “reinvent the wheel.”

2) Next, I believe, since the instructor is new to distance learning tools, I would try to keep the approach simple and focus on something the instructor and/or the students already know how to use. Therefore, I would suggest the use of two-way audio/video conferencing for a virtual fieldtrip, in this case, through Skype. Through Skype it would be very easy, for example, to connect multiple museum curators in different exhibits at one time with the class . All it would require is having each curator logged on to his/her own lap top with an eyeball camera who walks students through the exhibit, showing the pieces, adding comments, and answering live questions from the students as they went. This portability is exactly one of the benefits of this type of technology (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009)! The teacher could connect her one computer to an LCD projector so the entire class could participate at one time. The curators would see the students, and the students would see the curator. As our text points out, the use of this kind of application that focuses on “live, synchronous” distance education is growing rapidly (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009).

3) My second suggestion to the instructor then would be to set students up with gmail accounts so they may access Google Docs. I would then have the teacher post to Google Docs a Word document containing the images of the artwork she wants students to discuss, and I would have her share that document with the groups of students she establishes. They may post their comments in the Google Doc the instructor shared in a conversation format, all working simultaneously, avoiding the problems that wikis have in that only one person can have open and comment on the wiki page at a time. On the other hand, students could also use the chat feature in Google Docs to share their ideas before posting their final conclusions to the Google Doc. The instructor could look in on any group to see how progress is coming, to offer insights, to check chats, and to facilitate the discussion, as needed.

4) Both of these options would address some of the barriers facing schools. There is no extra money needed to utilize the technology for this experience, assuming that a classroom has at least one computer with a camera built into it and an LCD projector. There would be no accessibility problems since the material is not stored on a school server. All students would be able to access and write in the Google Doc from any computer with Internet access, no matter what word processing program might be used on the computer. Compatibility issues disappear. In addition, the instructor needs minimal training to be able to use Skype and Google Docs and may even already have had personal experience with those tools. On the other side, students would be able to have pleasant personal interaction with the museum curators. The ability to have a conversation and get immediate feedback to their questions would enhance the learning experience and remove the passivity factor (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009) that would occur if students merely watched a video about the exhibits. The use of Google Docs would allow participation by all group members, even those who tend to be quiet. It would give students a “sense of community” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009). All of these factors should add up to an easy, effective learning opportunity.

References

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.