Sheila MacLeod Potter

Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology

Acadia University

Canada

The Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology (AITT) was established five years ago, as a center for the development of learning applications to support the Acadia Advantage (AA) program, which has since put a laptop into the hands of every faculty member and undergraduate student on campus. Quickly, the AITT became recognized as a center of excellence for the effective integration of technologies into learning, and was funded provincially to train Nova Scotia’s K-12 teachers, training over 950 as of fall 2001. The AITT maintains its dual teaching and development roles by employing a large number of students throughout the year. These students are chosen mainly for their people-skills and teaching ability, and are trained in basic applications before being partnered with faculty to support the development of new learning materials, or teacher-training programs. This past summer, the AITT embarked on two new training programs, each of which built on an aspect of our provincial experience. Over 3 years, the Clarica Scholars program will bring up to 60 teams to spend a week developing a technology solution to a learning challenge in their school. The GE Leaders program will fund 14 teams over two years. As in the Clarica program, GE teams consist of two teachers and two students, but with the addition of an administrator. The GE Leaders week is designed to facilitate the creation by each team of a school-wide technology implementation plan. To date, we have hosted twenty Clarica Scholars teams, and seven GE Leaders Teams.

This premise, more than anything else, has made AA a success. Each year, as the story of the program is told over and over again, visitors to Acadia find it hard to believe that students could be relied upon to the extent that they are: as software developers, instructional designers and teachers. Not until some of the student-developed applications have been demonstrated, and the students themselves have described their involvement, is everyone convinced: with guidance, student energy and ingenuity can result in products that not only meet the expectation of their faculty partners, but far exceed it.

The success of technology implementation at any level of education depends on the teacher finding uses for the technology, beyond the obvious PowerPoint delivery of lectures. At Acadia, students not only provide busy faculty with much needed development support but gaining some experience, they also consult with faculty to explore what technology can do for their teaching.

High schools all over North America currently face the same challenge: busy teachers have no time to create innovative applications for their classrooms. In our two summer programs, we met administrators who have already recognised that trying to find time for teachers to first learn the technology and then to work with it, only offers a partial solution at best. Instead, these schools rely on their teachers to be content and pedagogy experts, and to a varying extent, on their students for support and development. For example, at Jakeman All-Grade, in Newfoundland, students worked with their teachers, developing support materials for the classroom. Out of the success of this experience, has come a more ambitious project: a CD-ROM based tour of their town. In order to create this CD, students and teachers have to learn a considerable amount of technology, however, in researching and writing the content, the students are also learning local history, geography and sociology, inspired by the knowledge that their work will benefit a much wider audience.

In another example, at Bonny Eagle Middle School in West Buxton, Maine, ‘student assistants’ act as teaching and trouble-shooting support to computer lab users.

At a training workshop for high schools with laptop programs, the question arose: how does a teacher manage both her students’ learning, as well as the challenges posed by fickle technology? In response, one teacher described how, while preparing her lessons for the following day, she had tried to incorporate a Microsoft Excel function into a class demonstration. After she had spent some time trying to figure-out the software without success, she decided to put the problem in her students’ hands. The next day, she offered bonus points to the first student who could solve the problem, and within five minutes, had given the points away. She had also created a learning environment in which students and teachers are equal contributors.

Similar stories arose, particularly in our GE Leaders Program, where discussions of technology implementation issues included students, teachers and administrators. Clearly, many teachers allow technology to create a collaborative, problem-solving environment in their classrooms. However, students quickly pointed out that although some teachers may not see it, many students expend considerable time, helping themselves, each other, and even their teachers, to overcome challenges posed by technology. As two students put it, "I end up spending all of my time helping other people [with the computer] and don’t get to work on my own projects." and, "sometimes, I know a lot more than my teachers do."

Believing that students can be formally assigned technology-support roles at their schools, we set-out, in our GE Leaders program, to model how this might be done. We set a few of our programming experts the task of creating situations in which support technologies, such as digital projectors and laptop docking stations, would not function. Our "Student Troubleshooting" workshop, however, was a failure. After having spent less than an hour learning how to confront these situations, the students resolved them too easily and became bored.

As a follow-up to that week, teams (and in many cases, the student members) have agreed to find ways to recognise and reward students’ contributions to technical support. When we conduct our 6-month post-survey, we look forward to hearing how each team has accomplished that goal.

The greatest obstacle to successful implementation of technologies into the classroom is time. Teachers are pressed to learn new technologies as well as to use them in developing solutions to teaching and learning challenges. We have seen that by partnering with students, teachers at all levels of education can not only harness the power of technology to enhance their teaching, but also create a more productive and healthier environment for learning.