Vibal and PNU create Center for Digital Education

Written by  Ann Nolasco

Vibal Publishing House, Inc. celebrated another milestone last Jan. 29, 2013 with the formal inauguration of the Center for Digital Education in partnership with the Philippine Normal University (PNU).

Vibal Group of Companies Chair Mrs. Esther A. Vibal, Vibal Publishing House President Mr. Gaspar A. Vibal, and PNU President Dr. Ester B. Ogena led the ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the official turnover of the newly-renovated PC classroom that aims to promote the advancement of technology in Philippine education.

The ceremonies started at 10 a.m., witnessed by PNU officials, Vibal representatives, and some members of the media. Mrs. Vibal, Mr. Vibal, and Dr. Ogena led the ribbon-cutting rites, followed by a short programme highlighted by the symbolic turnover using a keyboard for the Center and a tablet PC to represent another set of donation to the PNU Center for Teaching and Learning (formerly the PNU Laboratory School).

Located on the third floor of Pedro T. Orata Hall in PNU, the PNU-Vibal Center for Digital Education contains 36 PC desktops powered by a Windows8 operating system. Part of the donation package is a projector screen, interactive whiteboard, two airconditioning units, and renovation of the old classroom. The Center will be used to develop proficiency in technology across disciplines for both faculty and students. It will offer online courses for teachers starting on the first semester of AY 2013-14 and is set to be the venue for the annual PNU-Vibal Summer ICT Training program.

Aside from the Center, Vibal's generous initiative also includes the turnover of the V-Smart Classroom-PC Tablets in a Mobile Cart to the PNU Center for Educational Technology and Distance Education headed by its director, Dr. Leticia V. Catris. Thirty-six tablets, loaded with Vibal interactive e-textbooks in all subject areas, will be used by Grade 1 pupils and stored inside the mobile cart. The V-Smart Classroom system is powered by Vibe Technologies, Vibal Publishing's technology arm.

In her speech, Dr. Ogena expressed her appreciation to Vibal: “We promise to take care of the Center, the computers, mobile cart, and tablets, and put them all to good use. This shall serve as a free service education not only to students but also to the future teachers in this institution,” she said.

Mr. Gaspar Vibal meanwhile stressed that the PNU-Vibal Center for Digital Education will surely become “the most fruitful and nominative digital learning and teaching platform” because the facilities will allow the students and teachers to use technology seriously.

“The donations are not just mere donations but they are Vibal's way of installing a software called 'V-Smart' for every student and teacher at PNU, which is really a learning management system through the tablets and PCs,” he noted.

The landmark partnership project is in line with Vibal's advocacy for digital education, while PNU is driven by its commitment to the advancement of teacher education through the use of technology in all learning areas as a means for promoting greater interactivity, widening access to knowledge that will enrich learning, and developing skills in accessing, processing and utilizing information.

(taken from:http://www.vibalpublishing.com/news/item/481-vibal-and-pnu-create-center-for-digital-education)

Study: Emerging Technology Has Positive Impact in Classroom

A recent study highlights educators' feelings of goodwill toward technological innovation.

Stacey Roshan, an Advanced Placement calculus teacher at Bullis School—a private school for students grades three through 12 in Potomac, Md.—faced the problem of trying to keep her students engaged as she walked them through the difficult mathematics curriculum. During her previous three years at the school, Roshan notes, students were routinely stupefied by the traditional classroom lecture and often left class with more questions than answers.

"They wanted so much more time in the classroom to work on problems," Roshan says.

To meet the needs of her students, Roshan made radical changes to her lesson plans. Using Camtasia Studio, a screen recording and video editing program, Roshan uploaded her lectures to iTunes and assigned them as homework. "We've kind of reversed the whole dynamic of the class," she says. "Instead of lecturing in class, I lecture to them when they're at home, and we work problems together [in the classroom]. I liken it to an English classroom where the kids go home and do the reading and then they come into class and have this lively, engaging discussion."

Taught with the video lectures, Roshan's students in the 2010-11 school year scored an average of 4.11 on the AP calculus test, compared to the 3.59 average among her students who took the test and were taught in the traditional classroom setting the year before. And a third of the class—a 10 percent increase from the previous year—scored a 5, the highest score a student can achieve on an AP test.

Other teachers have successfully implemented technology in the classroom, according to a recent study by CompTIA—which surveyed 500 K-12 and college instructors across the country. The report,IT Opportunities in the Education Market, revealed that 78 percent of K-12 teachers and administrators believe technology has positively impacted the classroom and the productivity of students. Roughly 65 percent of educators surveyed also believe that students are more productive today than they were three years ago due to the increased reliance on technology in the classroom.

Jim Tracy, headmaster at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass., sees the "process of technology coming into the classroom as inevitable." Under Tracy's watch, Cushing has provided an interactive whiteboard in every class and wifi access across the high school's campus for students to use laptops and tablets. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is Cushing's implementation of an all-digital library.

"We were able to offer our students a library that was anywhere on campus where they were," Tracy notes. "For the same amount of money you would pay for a few thousand books on a shelf, you could have access to digital databases that give students access to literally millions of sources."

Working with a larger budget gives a school system more freedom and flexibility to purchase new tools and technology to use in the classroom. According to the study by CompTIA, 27 percent of K-12 educators believe obstacles, such as budgetary restraints, will make the adoption of new technology more difficult during the next 12 months. Respondents to the survey were instituted at schools with operating budgets ranging from less than $5 million to more than $100 million.

Tracy notes that, while having the luxury of a larger budget, Cushing's goal is to provide a technological guide for public schools. "Everything we try to do is designed to be an experiment," he says. "If it's successful, it's designed to be replicable in the public schools."

For a public school district, such as the Chicago Public Schools, budget concerns "are always an issue," says Talha Basit, the client computer service manager at CPS. Though there are more than 400,000 students among 675 schools, only about 100,000 computers and 5,000 iPads are available for student use.

CPS made iPads available through a grant process in which teachers had to apply for the technology and articulate how the tool would be used in their lesson plans. Using a management program called Absolute Manage MDM, Basit was able to track and oversee the usage of the tablets during the school year. "You can't just hand out iPads just for professional development or training for the teachers," Basit notes. "If you have the teachers who are motivated and know how to use a tool, we've seen some good results."

Basit says the jury is still out on test score improvements, but that the schools have seen improved attendance and a lot more enthusiasm from students. "The kids are eating this stuff up," he says.

While many educators have expressed goodwill toward the use of technology in the classroom, others are resistant to change. According to the study, 17 percent of respondents stated that purchasing new technology provides little benefit for students or instructors.

Kristen House, a former instructor at Belmont University and founder of A Novel Idea, a novel-writing workshop for middle school and high school students, believes that any school with a limited budget should be spending the money on training teachers. "As educators, we're expected to do so much with so very little," House says. "And instead of sitting down and getting to the root of the issue, which is the [student], we throw gadgets at the problem."

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While acknowledging that the use of smart phones and tablets has helped students do research and communicate, House says that the technology is only as good as the teachers that are using it. "A great teacher can do more for a student than any amount of money or technology you can throw at it," she notes. "Gadgets go out of date and humans do not. We only get better with age and with teaching and our gadgets all break down."

Cushing Academy's Tracy believes that educators who are against the implementation of technology in the classroom are fighting a losing battle. "Students inhabit a 21st century world for 18 hours a day," Tracy says. "And, all too often, educators put them in a 19th century classroom for six hours of that day, and the students feel a tremendous disconnect. We have a responsibility to teach them the skills to optimize these tools."

With the implementation of technology being such a popular topic in high school, Bullis School's Roshan—who plans to introduce iPads into her AP calculus class next school year—suggests teachers stick with what makes them the most comfortable. "I don't think that your material ever gets old if you're delivering it effectively," she says.

(taken from: http://www.usnews.com/education/high-schools/articles/2011/07/14/study-emerging-technology-has-positive-impact-in-classroom?int=96e908 )

What is the Impact of Technology on Learning?

Research literature throughout the past decade has shown that technology can enhance literacy development, impact language acquisition, provide greater access to information, support learning, motivate students, and enhance their self-esteem (ACT, 2004; CEO Forum, 2001; Boster et al., 2004; Mann et al., 1999; Tracey & Young, 2006; WestEd, 2002). Indeed, researchers have affirmed that computer technology provides abundant opportunities for students to build or modify their personal knowledge through the rich experiences that technology affords.

Technology and Content Area Learning

Kinzer and Leu (1997) demonstrated positive effects of technology on both learning in a content area and learning to use technology itself. They studied the potential of multimedia and hypermedia technologies. One study, The Reporter Project, used multimedia technology to enhance sixth-grade students’ information gathering and writing skills. The Reporter Project was developed and tested in sixth-grade classrooms for two years and showed that students made statistically significant improvement in their recognition and use of elements such as main ideas, supporting details, and cause and effect relationships. Their writing was also more cohesive than their control-group peers who were taught using similar materials and sequences but without the use of technology.

Technology and Reading Comprehension

Findings consistent with these emerged from a meta-analysis conducted by Pearson et al. (2005). The authors reviewed 20 research studies related to using digital tools and learning environments on middle-school students in the following areas:

• Strategy Use
• Metacognition
• Reading Motivation
• Reading Engagement
• Reading Comprehension

They defined digital tools to include a wide range of media forms: images, video and audio clips, hypertext, hypermedia, and Web pages. The majority of studies they found dealt with reading comprehension and vocabulary development. Pearson et al. concluded that a wide range of digital tools enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary development by providing students access to word pronunciation, word meaning, contextual information, and comprehension scaffolds to guide an individual’s reading. Thus, a strong research base supports the conclusion that technology can enhance all aspects of literacy development.

Technology and Language Acquisition

There is also a large body of research that supports the benefits of technology for language acquisition (O’Hara & Pritchard, 2006; Pritchard & O’Hara, 2005; Leu, 2005; Cummins, 2005; Zhao, 2005; Duran, 2005; Egbert, Chao, & Hanson-Smith, 1999; Pennington, 1996; Zhao, 2003). Numerous other studies demonstrate that students who learn in existing multimedia and/or hypertext environments show greater gains in areas of language development than students who learn in more traditional environments (Ayersman, 1996; Boone & Higgins, 1992; Charney, 1994; Martinez-Lage, 1997). Studies investigating the impact of student construction of hypermedia environments on language development came to similar conclusions (Goetze, 2000; Lehrer et al., 1994; Nikolova, 2002).

In a review of studies that focused on technology’s impact on language acquisition, Zhao (2005) examined studies that researched the use of digital multimedia and language. Zhao concluded that technology can be used to enhance language acquisition in the following ways:

• Enhancing access efficiency through digital multimedia. Multimedia presentations (video, images, sound, text) can create stronger memory links than text alone. In addition, digital technologies allow instant playbacks, which provide the learner with quick and easy access to different sections of instructional materials than when they are using a textbook.
• Enhancing authenticity using video and the Internet. The Internet provides learners with access to authentic materials, like news and literature, while video can offer context-rich linguistic and culturally relevant materials to learners.
• Enhancing comprehensibility through learner control and multimedia annotations. Video materials online can be enhanced with full captions, key-word captions, and speech slowdown, allowing the reader to more easily digest the information. Digital reading materials can be hyperlinked to different media, which students can choose to help their comprehension of the material.
• Providing meaningful and authentic communication opportunities. Students can engage in authentic types of communication through e-mail, chat rooms, and other digital means. (p. 16)

Technology and Improved Test Scores

In addition to facilitating language and literacy development, technology has also had positive effects on mathematics achievement. Boster’s study (2004) of 2,500 sixth and eighth graders in Los Angeles showed a statistically significant increase in math achievement scores when students used digital video.

In a study reviewed by the Milken Exchange (Mann et al., 1999), teachers using the West Virginia Basic Skills/Computer Education (BS/CE) program found that all their fifth graders’ test scores rose on standardized tests, with the lower achieving student scores rising the most. Other findings revealed that BS/CE was more cost effective in improving student achievement than class size reduction, increasing instructional time, and cross-age tutoring programs.

Sandoltz et al. (1997) reported positive findings from the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project after nearly eight years of studying the effects of computers on the classroom. Aside from performing better on achievement tests, they found that ACOT students were developing a variety of competencies not usually measured. ACOT students delivered lectures along with their teachers. They became socially aware and more confident, communicating effectively about complex processes. They became independent learners and self-starters, worked well collaboratively, and developed a positive orientation to their future. Children were seen as learners and as expert resources, as they were challenged by complex and open-ended problems. These are the skills that will enable students to live productive lives in the emerging age of communication. Moreover, technology use in the classroom helped to decrease absenteeism, lower dropout rates, and motivate more students to continue on to college (Sandholtz et al., 1997).

In 2002, The WestEd Regional Technology in Education Consortium reviewed a number of research studies related to the impact of technology on learning. They chose studies that they judged to be the most methodologically sound and that had analyzed change over time. When reviewing this body of research they found convincing evidence that technology can be effective in teaching basic skills, can significantly improve scores on standardized achievement tests, can provide the means for students with special needs to communicate via e-mail, and can help teachers accommodate students’ varying learning styles.

Technology and Learner Motivation

Technology also motivates and engages the learner. When students have a choice in their assignment, see the relevancy, or can self-assess with teacher feedback intertwined, student motivation increases (Daniels, 2002; Ganske et al., 2003; Harvey, 2002). Technology lends itself to all of the above.

In the article, “Nonfiction Inquiry: Using Real Reading and Writing to Explore the World” (2002), Harvey concluded that the vehicle for increasing relevancy and motivation was through surrounding kids with compelling nonfiction. Researching online or using a CD-ROM allows students to search for information they are passionate about learning. Students can make choices when navigating online, which is engaging for learners. When students are given more choice in their tasks, those tasks are more meaningful and increase the students’ intrinsic motivation (Jordan & Hendricks, 2002).

Technology Use and Self-Esteem

The research literature also suggests that technology can have a positive impact on the self-esteem of students, especially for at-risk students with low self-esteem and self-confidence (O’Donnell, 2005; Kenny & Gunter, 2004; Taylor, Hasselbring, & Williams, 2001). In 2005, a study conducted by Romi and Zoabi examined the impact of computer technology on the self-esteem of dropout youth. The study focused on a control and intervention group, both consisting of 60 secondary level students. The intervention group was exposed to the MS Office Suite of tools to use in their learning, while the control group had no access to technology. Pre- and post-questionnaires were administered to determine attitudes toward learning, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. The findings showed a significant increase on all measures.

In 2000, researchers commissioned by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) examined 311 research reviews and reports from published and unpublished sources. They reported that the reviews show that technology can have a positive effect on student attitudes toward learning, self-confidence, and self-esteem (Sivin-Kachala & Bialo, 2000). Other reviews (Coley, 1997) have reported that technology has been found to improve school attendance and decrease dropout rates with a positive impact on students’ independence and feelings of responsibility for their own learning.

© ______ 2009, Allyn & Bacon, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission.  All rights reserved. The reproduction, duplication, or distribution of this material by any means including but not limited to email and blogs is strictly prohibited without the explicit permission of the publisher.

(taken from: http://www.education.com/reference/article/what-impact-technology-learning/)