proposal

Student Researcher: Jacki Bauer
Advisor: Dennis Groth

Target Interest Group:
Teachers at Fairview Elementary School


Problem Space:
Effective use of technology is an important issue for education administrators. Currently, the U.S. Department of Education is interested in funding studies that involve understanding how to best empower educators to use technology to provide students with the most benefits. At first glance, it seems that there are many resources for teachers that help them learn to use technology and provide lessons and examples for them to use in the classroom. However, many of these resources are outdated, incomplete, hard to use don’t work. There is a great deal more work to be done in this area to make technology work for teachers and students in K-12 education.

The project plans to study effective use of technology, using Fairview Elementary in Bloomington as my research base. Fairview is an ideal setting for this type of project because it is situated in a low- income area of town and is considered a high needs school. 86% of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunch and many have difficult home lives. Abuse and neglect are both problems that these students experience. There is a lice problem at the school and many students are sent home, some for long periods of time because their parents are not able to rid the home of lice. Test scores are well below the state average.
Governments and companies are often more than willing to provide support to schools in the form of cash or product grants. The previous principal at Fairview was a technology enthusiast and successfully applied for many technology grants. The school has a wealth of technology resources, including several smart boards and LCD projectors. Teachers’ opinions of the usefulness of this technology ranges from enthusiasm to cynicism. I intend to learn more about the use or lack of use of the available technology and to attempt to devise a strategy or software application that will allow teachers to more effectively integrate these innovative tools into the classroom.

Background: This proposal is based on research done in HCI Design II. Observations were conducted at Marlin Elementary School in Bloomington. Several of the concepts developed as a result of this project involved using interactive whiteboards to more effectively teach concepts such as mathematics and geometry. The capstone project proposed here will investigate ways to effectively integrate technology into schools using smart boards as a base of study.

Predispositions

1) Teachers are slow technology adopters. Schools seem to have a very difficult time adopting technology, although they are often very willing to spend the money to get equipment into the classroom. When teachers have access to technology, they don't necessarily know how to use it, or they don't use it creatively or to it's full potential. This is probably due to a complicated number of factors, such as lack of time, lack of training, and the culture of education.

2) Teachers don’t have time to think of innovative ways to use technology. They are hard at work trying to keep up with national and state testing standards. They have to pack more and more curriculum into the same amount of class time. Teachers want to use technology, but spending time looking for lesson ideas or learning to use the tools is a very low priority for them.

3) Much of the software available for teachers to use is not very innovative. It simply digitizes traditional lesson styles and lacks computer imagination.

Initial Insights:
There is definitely a school culture that is very rich and historical. There are the relationships between students and teachers, the tools that students and teacher use and the structure of the school day, just as example. While these things change over time and vary from school to school, there are many similarities. Any designer thinking about putting new technology in the classroom must think about these things.

While students seem very enthusiastic about using new technologies in general, I think that there will naturally be resistance to technology that greatly changes the traditional classroom culture. An obvious example: students enjoy writing on the chalkboard. A student is chosen every day to write the weather and homework on the board. An electronic whiteboard that updated the weather constantly would be a terrible idea, because it would sterilize the classroom culture and students enjoyment of using a chalkboard. It is really a huge challenge for a designer to design appropriate technology that will work with classroom culture and not against it.


Project Details

The project will involve a comprehensive literature review and extensive use of human-centered and ethnographic research methods. Classroom observations and teacher interviews will provide the background for the conceptualization of a strategy or solution. Interviews with teachers will explore their attitudes and use of the technology that is available to them. Observations will be conducted in classrooms where the technology is being used. An iterative development cycle will be used to conduct evaluations and user testing of possible solutions.





Deliverables
1) Paper for conference, workshop or journal admission
2) Project web page
3) Poster
4) Prototype
5) Final presentation
6) Project journal
7) Interview and observation notes
8) Archive CD of all deliverables