Dig into Early Science Instruction with Dinosaur Train

By attending one of the many webinars available on LearnCentral, I had the opportunity to discover a very cute and extremely well-designed preschool/early elementary school series called Dinosaur Train. 

Although I was skeptical about the relevance of teaching paleontology to young children, Halle Stanford (one of the chief executors of this series, http://henson.com/aboutus_content.php?content=halle) Jordan D. Brown (Educational consultant and author of books and resources for teachers, http://www.jordandbrown.com/bio.php) and Scott Sampson (paleontologist, http://www.scottsampson.net/ ) made me change my mind. 

 

The two main characters of the series are Buddy, a curious T-Rex, and his best friend Tiny, a female pteranodon. These two young dinosaurs and their friends are eager to explore the world and socialize with other creatures; with them, preschoolers and early elementary students will learn to discover, compare, analyze and make hypotheses.

Short movies, animations, games, lesson plans for teachers, online activities that children can do on their own... the creators of Dinosaur Train invested their time and efforts into a really well-designed software. 

Their educative mission ? To have children interested in the natural world and model what scientists do, by allowing them to travel through time with their virtual dinosaur friends. Three to six year-old students have huge interest in dinosaurs, and Dinosaur Train uses it to encourage them to “think, talk and act like scientists” (Jordan D. Brown). Young children are naturally curious about the world: they make observations and notice tiny details, collect data, ask a lot of questions... Dinosaur Train teaches them how to form hypotheses and draw connections between the things they see, hear or read; it allows them to test their hypotheses in a non-threatening environment (Buddy can make a guess, and if his guess is wrong, he goes on; children learn that they may be wrong, and it is not a problem; they should go find another hypothesis). Dinosaur Train provides them general inquiry skills, giving them the knowledge so they can explore the world as scientists. 

In Dinosaur Train, children are asked questions that help them learn more. They can use such questions to discover more about other animals: what does it look like? What does it eat (diet)? Where does it live (habitat)? How does it move ? How is it similar to other animals? How does it interacts with other animals? Dinosaur Train is designed in a way they can easily transfer their knowledge/strategies and apply them to daily life situations.  

The forty episodes and many online activities of this series are definitely worthy of trying out; it is an original and useful way to have children use information and communication technologies at an early age. 

For those of you who are interested in the webinar, it is recorded on: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/webinar/archive.html 

The sound is clear enough, though not of great quality; an interesting powerpoint goes with the presentation of each speaker. Some of the videos on the webinar are unfortunately not accessible from Quebec, but you can look them up on YouTube.

Connecting rural areas to the virtual world

Viki Davis, a teacher in rural Georgia, "uses every kind of technology to connect her students to the world".

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-teachers-vicki-davis-video

According to Ms. Davis, every child can learn, and computer-based projects have the advantage that they enable all students to succeed, unlike pen and paper based education. The variety of activities on the web allows for customization: students can share their interests, create wikis, blogs, participate in diverse online collaborating projects, write something that will be read by many people and therefore learn to be active members of an online community.

The use of digital media help students to learn, in the way that the internet provides them most of the tools they will need for their instruction. Whenever they do not understand a word, they can look it up; they have the responsibility to understand what the teacher says, and they have to participate in different projects, for which they need to do research.

Students are therefore "empowered"; the teacher is just here to guide them and facilitate their learning, and they can explore, go further; they can even discover new tools and show their teachers what they have learnt. The fact that they can actually know more than the teacher himself on some topics empowers them. 

I think that collaboration amongst students from different cultures is beneficial. It does not necessarily need to be with students from all around the world; some projects might only involve schools from the same country (schools from poor areas and regular public schools, for example) and yet be as beneficial as international exchanges. The most important thing is that students learn to communicate and cooperate with other young people from different backgrounds. In an ESL context, I think that it is a necessity to have our students exchange with native speakers; it could be with other Canadians, British or US citizens, the most important thing is to have them discover their target language and culture.

As an ESL teacher, I will probably use the Tandem Agency service; I also like the idea of having students create their own blogs and wikis, maybe by dividing the class into groups of common interests and having them share their thoughts about a specific topic.

Learning and Teaching with New Media

Henry Jenkins raises many issues regarding the use of information technology in schools. Amongst them, restricting access to information and regarding online experiences as non-valid are one of the most problematic, as they consist in denying young people's reality and preventing them from acquiring new knowledge.

Teachers are conscious of the fact that they cannot ignore ICTs and have to integrate them. Although not every school has a computer lab, students can use computers at their school library. However, such access is limited. I agree on restricting this access, mostly for legal issues; if one allows teenagers and children to watch material that is not appropriate for their age (or get in touch with people they should not), he/she might be held responsible for their acts. We can give up control to kids, to some extent, but we still have to remember that they are not of age; we therefore need to limit their access and know where they are going on the internet, the same way that a parent has the right to know where his child is when he is outside of school.Of course, restricting the access might mean that students will not all be equal on a cultural perspective, but anyway, they are not. Students from wealthy families will always have easier access to technology, culture and extra-curricular activities, which usually results in better academic results and integration in higher social circles. It is important that school invest money and efforts in ICTs, but it will not change social injustice; injustice just changes along with progress.

It is a great thing that both students be given equal chances, but it is not always doable. At the University of Québec in Trois-Rivières, all students are given the chance to use computers and software they could not necessarily afford buying on their own. This is a good example of a successful ICT integration. Teachers usually integrate ICTs to their syllabi; we are also given free computer technology classes.
However, we still have to work on the online collaborative environment; for the moment, it just presents too many challenges, copyright and ethical issues to have all students and teachers provide free access to resources they have designed, no matter how useful it would be to the whole community.

Creating shared learning communities across the world involves providing free access to our own work, which on the one hand would benefit everybody but, on the other hand, would encourage plagiarism as some people will rely on their peer's creations instead of spending time and money on their own. For this reasons, we are not ready to give up control to learning communities, until clear policies are designed.

Authorship is somewhat vague in the digital age, as many creations involve taking some ideas and retouring them for a different audience. According to Mr. Jenkins, teachers should "map kids in terms of social norms and legal standards" to make them aware of what is plagiarism, and what could be an issue.  

Edutopia project in Vail School District

     Teachers from Vail School District have found a way to create a wealth of resources they can share, comment and modify. The story first started in their own school; they collaborated, discussed things and recreated what was traditionally found on textbooks. By using an open-source product, called Mindtouch, they created a collaborative wiki, on which they posted their creations. This wiki is accessible in their district, in other districts, across the different states, and hopefully beyond.

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-differentiated-instruction-budget-resource-collaboration-video

     Both teachers and students can benefit from this wiki; every school, every student may access this online material; collaboration is encouraged amongst the different teaching teams, children seem to enjoy the online material and feel proud that their own teachers participate in such a project.

     Using wikis as a collaborative seems interesting to me; they are "an innovative way of enriching the learning environment of students with adequate ICT skills and access to the Internet" (Kovacic, 2007). Through wikis, teachers are able to access a great variety of material, designed by teachers and "tested" in a real classroom context; they may also discuss the pedagogical values of such wikis and add their own contribution. This can result in increasing connectivity between teachers and students, but also between schools. However, if wikis are a great tool for the whole community, it might be a threat to intellectual property: most teacher creations would fall into a somewhat "public domain", easily reproducible.

    Regarding the use of wikis in the ESL classroom, I would see no objection in using online wikis designed by teachers; yet, I still doubt of the relevance of wiki collaborative writing at the secondary level. Although Sze (2008) recorded positive results in his wiki collaborative classes experiment, I think that creating a wiki requires a level of maturity and discipline not all secondary students have; the same pilot project might not have the same results in Hong Kong and in Trois-Rivières.

Howard Gardner on Education and Digital Media

Welcome to the Digital World ...

... a community that presents many opportunities, but also many challenges for young people. Although teenagers-and sometimes, children- do have great technical skills and media literacy, they are usually unprepared to deal with the various ethical issues that might result from submitting to a public network private information, thoughts, videos or pictures.

The Internet is a "community of unknown size", to quote Professor Howard Gardner (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izRRmW5KKLY), which means that what would be one little, unnoticeable event that only your neighbourhood or schoolmates would witness can easily be shown to more than one hundred persons in a few hours. Just think about Facebook, and how many people forget about adjusting their privacy settings, therefore making public their name, location, videos, pictures and posts which could eventually be spread on the Internet- or accessed by any "friend", whose identity might be not even be clear.

The digital world allows people to try on "new masks"; some make responsible use of these "new masks", while others use them to abuse or deceive, as Professor Gardner mentioned. This sense of moral duty and obligations, also called ethics, is what young people should develop: a sense of identity first, but also a sense of privacy, and a better understanding of the moral obligations they have towards the whole community.

                                                                     Did you know ... ?

• Teens are willing to meet with strangers: 16 percent of teens considered meeting someone they've only talked to online and 8 percent have actually met someone they only knew online (Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. 2006)." Retrieved November 12th, from http://enough.org/inside.php?id=3K03RC4L00#2)
• Four percent of all youth Internet users received aggressive sexual solicitations, which threatened to spill over into "real life". These solicitors asked to meet the youth in person, called them on the telephone, or sent offline mail, money, or gifts. Also 4 percent of youth Internet users had distressing sexual solicitations that left them feeling upset of extremely afraid (Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, 2006).  Retrieved November 12th, from http://enough.org/inside.php?id=3K03RC4L00#2)