Last week I discussed wicked problems and narrowing down the many questions I had brainstormed in my blog post. With Warren Berger and his book A More Beautiful Question in mind, I was able to choose my wicked problem of interest to dive deeper into. How do I foster a healthy relationship between high schooler and technology, such that it improves empathy and interpersonal skills and does not negatively impact these skills? Before going further I also shared that I created a survey to learn about technology and its impacts on social skills from the experiences of others in my professional learning network (PLN). Higgins and BuShell (2018) describe how "students and teachers are connected now more than ever, and if that connection is used for the purpose of teaching and learning, the one-to-one technology environment can be a powerful place." I used email, Facebook and other forms of social media to spread my survey and reach out for help. My expectations were set low when I sent it out for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it was the first survey I had created and I did not feel super confident in my survey creating abilities. Second, I expected to have many negative opinions and attitudes towards the topic of technology and social skills, so I wondered if the feedback would be helpful for my specific question. Despite my concerns, I was pleasantly surprised by the results.
My survey has received 44 responses so far and have been teachers of all ages and teaching all different grade levels. Currently, 68% of the respondents teach at the secondary level, 15.9% teach at the primary level and 11.4% elementary level. All three types of school districts are represented, 43.2% suburban, 34.1% rural and 22.7% urban. Each person also states they have some level of access to technology within their school with over 90% who agree that technology can be a useful tool in the classroom. I have multiple perspectives to learn from and the majority feel that technology can be used in a positive way!
Next, I asked how are your students most comfortable socializing at school? This resulted in responses I had expected. Of the responses, 52.3% said they feel their students are most comfortable both face to face and using their cell phone. Then 31.8% said face to face and 9% said cell phones. Majority of the people that answered face to face alone were primary to elementary teachers and majority that answered both were secondary level teachers. I see this data as pushing towards a solution that involves face to face and technological communication in the classroom.
My last question of the survey was, in your experience, how do you try to maintain a healthy relationship between your students & their technology in the classroom? I asked this question for the purpose of gaining an idea of how my professional learning network tries to establish a healthy relationship in their classroom. I wanted to know what expectations they set, rules they created and how they build a culture. There were many interesting and unique answers I received. I decided to create a word cloud to display the main ideas that shined through.
Some of the words that stood out to me were expectations, time, play, facilitate, and collaboration. Also, GLOs, general learner outcomes, and HĀ, which are programs used in the state of Hawaii. There are two GLOs that directly connect to my wicked problem, effective communicator (the ability to communicate effectively) and effective and ethical user of technology (the ability to use a variety of technologies effectively and ethically). HĀ focuses on 6 outcomes to build strength, stability, and social/ emotional learning skills. These are all ideas that can be incorporated into a possible solution to develop a relationship between technology and social skills. Although, I have received valuable information from my teacher survey, I feel that I am missing some other perspectives. What if I surveyed parents and students? More to come next week!
Resources:
Higgins, K., & BuShell, S. (2018). The effects on the student-teacher relationship in a one-to-one technology classroom. Education and Information Technologies, 23(3), 1069-1089. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/10.1007/s10639-017-9648-4
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