Putting digital tools to work in Numeracy

I am currently privileged to be working with a fabulous bunch of student teachers in the third year ICT and Numeracy topic at Flinders University. We have explored the Victorian Researching Numeracy Project Team’s 2004 report that includes 12 scaffolding practices and the 2005 Western Australian Primary School Numeracy Research Project that identifies 8 numeracy teaching strategies.

Regular readers on the Teacher Solutions blog know that our primary focus is bringing together effective pedagogy with technology.

If you are here in Australia, you would know that the Australian Curriculum, ICT General Capability says: ‘To participate in a knowledge-based economy and to be empowered within a technologically sophisticated society now and into the future, students need the knowledge, skills and confidence to make ICT work for them at school, at home, at work and in their communities.’

The ICT General Capability also says: Digital technologies ‘transform the ways that students think and learn and give them greater control over how, where and when they learn’.

The best way for educators to facilitate ICT’s capacity to transform the ways students think, is to integrate digital technologies. We must embed tools, apps and programs as part of students daily learning, so that they can fluently use them to Curate, Create and Communicate, solve problems and provide evidence of their learning.

So, while we were looking at the 2 numeracy research project outputs, I found myself saying … “Well, that’s investigation or curation, you might use Padlet to … or a Google doc to …” And it just dawned on me that this might be useful information for all teachers thinking about integrating ICT across the curriculum and in Numeracy in particular.

I agree with Ann Baker who says that we are aiming to develop a community of learners where thinking is visible and the teacher is a co-learner. What I hope this blog post does is show where there are logical links to digital tools that support engagement, differentiation and challenge. I have written about having a kitbag of tools at your finger tips in my recent post: 15 Digital Tools for Documentation of and Reflection on Learning. The idea is that you and students can access these tools to support learning at any time.

To support your numeracy practices, I had a go at linking the 2 sets of numeracy scaffolds and teaching strategies to the main ICT functions

Let’s explore the numeracy scaffolds, and look at the possible technology link/s:

• Excavating — Hooking in to find what students already know and to uncover any misconceptions or gaps in understanding could be done with INVESTIGATION tools to make the process, the learning intention, the goals, the required vocabulary …. explicit.
• Modelling — Intentional teaching, just in time demonstrations and point of need instruction where the teachers shows, models or tells have their place in the teaching and learning process. Many COMMUNICATION tools are useful for capturing this instruction point so that students can replay at need and access again and again for reminders.
• Collaborating — Open ended tasks are used so that students, with other students and/or with their teacher, act as accomplices, collaborators, co-learners and shared problem solvers. A key technology application here is also COMMUNICATING.
• Guiding — Coaching, cuing, prompting roles undertaken by the teacher (and other students) to help students see the connections and generalisations. Tech can help with recording conversations for review, feedback and INVESTIGATION.
• Convince Me — One of my favourite strategies, the teacher abdicates the ‘knower’ role and invites students to provide EVIDENCE and COMMUNICATE and explain how their thinking and understanding are working. We know how powerful it is for the teacher to ask questions rather than to tell — and this is a great way to adopt the inquiry disposition.
• Noticing — We all have a reticular activating system (RAS), a noticing mechanism, in our brains. Sometimes more cuing is needed to help us see what is relevant or how to determine what we should attend to. INVESTIGATION tools can be used to help cue the RAS to notice important features of algorithms, language, problem solving stages etc.
• Focusing — Maintaining a joint, collective focus on a process, and unpacking it is INVESTIGATING and EVIDENCING. Almost all tech applications can fit here though. You might for example be identifying ways to fix an error and have students COMMUNICATE their processes, especially as a key aspect of this strategy is students finding possible ways to undertake the process (rather than telling them how to do it). My blog post on effective feedback strategies will be helpful here too.
• Probing — Evaluating strategies, clarification and monitoring are all aspects of PROBLEM SOLVING and require COMMUNICATION. Having students select from “Questions in a Jar” can be done digitally and enables students to add to the question bank as they find new probes.
• Orienting — The teacher provides support at the beginning or during tasks to establish context, provide a rationale, or set the scene and support INVESTIGATION. Cues to step back and notice what has been missed are important, we can all find ourselves running down a rabbit hole without the big picture orientation.
• Reflecting/Reviewing — We call the reflection process: EVIDENCING and have written about it extensively in our courses and on our blog. This self and peer assessment introduction provides ideas for getting students started as reflective learners and this one offers specific digital tools for evidencing learning.
• Extending — SOLVING open-ended PROBLEMS, and looking to generalise learning across broader contexts can involve many of the formative assessment tools and ideas mentioned, as we support students to ‘springboard’ to new learning.
• Apprenticing — Perhaps the most important function of all, moving beyond metacognition and reflection on thinking processes to positioning students-as-teachers, what we call: metacognitive teaching, requires CREATION and most other functions too!

And the numeracy teaching strategies to do the same:

• Capturing numeracy in the moment and Being aware of possible numeracy demands when planning are both linked to CURATING and INVESTIGATING — as the learning opportunity arises and as it is planned.
• Allowing students to work it out and Giving time — Individual and collaborative INVESTIGATION and PROBLEM SOLVING encourages students to engage with the numeracy demands, consider their tools, ideas and options and build confidence and skill.
• Questioning — similar to many of the strategies above — especially Excavating, Guiding and Focusing.
• Motivating — In my blog post on deep learning we explore the idea that learning can be so engaging that the conversation spills over beyond the lesson — to the yard, to home — as students grapple with important ideas and meaningful causes. COMMUNICATING is a key function in creating depth and engagement.
• Listen purposefully — also similar to many of the strategies above — especially Convince Me, Noticing and Apprenticing.
• Debriefing the numeracy — Like reflection and reviewing above, this is about exploring the numeracy content, as well as the processes used to engage in numeracy INVESTIGATION and EVIDENCING the role that numeracy played in the learning, understanding and problem solving.

Finally, lets explore some tools that might be useful for each digital function:

CREATION

• Audio creation tools such as: in built device tools, like Voice Memos on iPhones and iPads; Clyp.it; or Vocaroo
• Video creation tools such as: in-built device tools, like iMovie on iPhones and iPads; but you may also use YouTube editor; WeEditor ($); Magisto, Animoto or Powtoon.
• Visual creation tools such as: Piktochart; Google Draw; Google Docs; Glogster; Thinglink or for older students, Canva.
• Animation and Cartooning tools like: Scratch Junior and Scratch; Write Comics; Comic Master; Make Believe Comix or PixtonYou could also try storyboarding with a tool like Storyboard That.

COMMUNICATION

• Many of the audio, video, and graphic creation tools can be used as communication tools too.
• You may set up a learning network or backchannel with: Twitter (a class account for younger students); Facebook (also a class account for younger students); EDMODO; Google Plus; or Google Classroom.
• You may use a brainstorming tool like: Padlet — for investigation and problem solving too.
• Presentation tools could include: Google Slides; Powerpoint; Keynote; Prezi; Haiku Deck, Zoho Presentation and Blendspace.

CURATION/INVESTIGATION

• Social media bookmarking is a skill that will benefit students of all ages, as a class for younger students and individually for those older. Collect, save and tag online resources to share in collaborative environments such as: Diigo; Pinterest; and Delicious
• Clipping from the internet can happen with: Educlipper; Symbaloo; and Scoop.it.

EVIDENCING

• All those digital products need a home, and we strongly recommend blogging — for you as an educator and with your class.
• Useful tools to consider are: Blogger and Easy Blogger Jr.; Edublogs; Kidblog and for older students: Wordpress or Weebly. Wikis can be used as curation and/or evidencing spaces: we like Wikispaces.
• Digital Portfolios are also an option, such as: Google sites; SeaSaw, Silk and Pathbrite for older students.
• Book creation is another way for students to provide evidence of their learning. Creating ‘How-To’ manuals and explanations with tools such as: Book Creator; 30Hands StoryTeller; Creative Book Builder and of course iBooks.

SOLVING PROBLEMS/NUMERACY

• Open ended applications are very flexible, and are tools our students should learn to manage: Excel; Numbers and Tinkerplots (for dynamic data manipulation) are three examples of the many available.

The use of digital tools, in numeracy (and of course across the curriculum) is a deliberate pedagogic choice. We want to engage, support, challenge and stretch learners and to support their metacognitive processing and thinking.

We should constantly ask ourselves:

• Who is doing the thinking?
• Who is working hardest in the classroom?
• How does this tool help us do it better?

Back to the curriculum for a final thought: Students develop knowledge, skills and dispositions around ICT and its use, and the ability to transfer these across environments and applications. They learn to use ICT with confidence, care and consideration, understanding its possibilities, limitations and impact on individuals, groups and communities.