27th January 2016

Classroom behaviour management and technology.

There are five elements of classroom management practice identified in the first article, briefly describe how would you plan to incorporate these elements in your lessons? 

Supporting activities for ICT Tools

In my experience teaching with technology there are usually technical difficulties which can cause a lot of frustration, particularly for students who aren't experienced with computers.   As Lim, Pek & Chai (2005) suggest, we provide written step by step instructions for beginner students to perform routine procedures such as starting up the computer, entering username, password; saving work.  Graphical representations are also useful for students with low levels of English.  The instructions are laminated so they can be re-used.

Role of Teacher

Teaching in dedicated computer rooms can be challenging as the physical layout means that students are looking at a computer monitor, rather than the teacher.  It can be challenging to encourage students to work collaboratively as well for the same reason.  In the computer room we teach in most of the time we have computers set up around the perimeter of the room with desks in the middle facing the front.  Most of the lesson is conducted with students seated at these desks, students move to the computers only when working on the tasks.  As Lim, Pek & Chai say,  the role of the teacher does shift from "information giver" to "guide on the side" (Frand, 2000) or facilitator.  In our computer room there is a teachers' computer that can override the students' computers so if the teacher needs to grab students' attention quickly to demonstrate something on the computer, they can take control of the class computers so all students can see what they are doing.  This is useful in classes of students with little technical knowledge or experience.

Role of Student Helpers

Students in my area usually have widely varied experience and knowledge of technology in the classroom, some students have worked in ICT in their country or origin while others have never used a computer before (some Tibetan refugees for example).  So we usually assign experienced students to assist others with less experience.  This usually works well as it encourages communication and collaboration between students, we always like them to talk to each other as much as possible in ESL classes.  Of course there are challenges too as we don't like to hold back the experienced students from getting on with their own work.  Often it is necessary to have students working at their own pace when incorporating technology.  We have a learning centre to help students with basic computing skills, this centre is open outside class time so beginner students can go there for some help getting started.

Technical Assistants

How great it would be to have a technical assistant in the classroom all the time!  That will never happen in my workplace, 2 or 3 technicians support one entire campus, so we have to log a help desk call and wait for someone to come, we can select "urgent, affecting classroom delivery" and someone will come fairly quickly, but if there are a lot of problems at the same time (e.g. the network going down) no one will come to assist for some time.  I do keep the mobile number of one of the tech support people in my phone which I will use in an emergency.  Usually if there are technical problems we have to work around them, as Simmons (2009) points out, lesson objectives and outcomes  should be written so that a variety of activities can be used to achieve them, so if you are teaching an email lesson for example and the network is down, you can still teach the lesson with communicative activities, teaching terminology, language features of emails etc.

Establishment of Rules and Procedures

Rules and procedures are essential in any classroom or chaos will ensue.  As Lim, Pek & Chai point out, many rules used in traditional classrooms can be applied in ICT classrooms (Wong 2000), however additional routines particular to computer usage need to be implemented such as procedures for starting up computers and rules about which activities are to be performed.  Unsupervised students will usually surf the net or check their facebook accounts, so teachers need to be constantly moving around to check what students are doing.  The configuration of computers around the perimeter of the room is helpful for this as the teacher can stand in the middle of the room and see what students are looking at on their screens.

References:

Lim, C.P., Pek, M.S., Chai, C.S. (2005) Classroom management issues in information and communication technology (ICT) - mediated learning environments:  back to the basics.  Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia.  14.4 p. 391

Simmons, C. (2009) Teaching ICT:  Planning to teach an ICT lesson pp 54-105