Science and the Internet at KS2 or Snakes and Ladders
A report on the project to ASE 1997 by Mike Farmer
I present this paper with a certain amount of hesitation. It is a picture which those who are successfully involved in this area might wish to challenge for it focuses on struggles with technology and attitudes which I think question the role of this new technology in the classroom and its place in the curriculum.
This might seem strange from somebody who is running a large project which is promoting the use of the Internet in the classroom but as you will see the two year project is only in its first six months and asi a project that is examining the potential of the use of the Internet so we are in the early days of our investigations.
A bit of background - 2 steps forward up a ladder.
The project is centred on 16 schools in the Ladywood /Newtown/Aston area of Birmingham. All but three of the schools are primary schools and they range in size from 130 to 500 pupils. The project is funded by City Challenge/TaskForce/UCE and other development agencies. The funding has allowed each school to be provided with a lap-top computer, modem and small printer, a telephone connection, telephone usage, INSET and technical support over a two year period.
The aims of the project are
to investigate the use of the Internet in the classroom
to develop children’s information handling skills
to promote the excellence of the schools within the project
to look at community links and the Internet
The schools have been encouraged to work on their own projects and a variety of these have emerged, year 6 children are teaching year 5, the WWW is being used for a variety of applications, schools are linking to Chicago schools, schools within the project are talking to other schools within the project, teachers are using it for research and communication and I have been involved in a project working with four of the teachers using the Internet to enhance the science experiences of the children. It is that project which will be part of the focus of this paper.
Development - one step forward down a snake back 10 places
It is easy as a project develops to forget the problems that are involved. Simple things like getting to use the mouse on the computer, working with Windows 95, fitting a modem. The modem doesn’t work, the modem seems to work but Windows 95 doesn’t have a driver for it, you spend hours on the phone to a help line. The access provider has a nice package but when you come to read the instructions they are meaningless garbage, much to technical. You find you need some more modem instructions so its back to the telephone again. At last you are on-line but what on earth do those words like Internet, WWW, Java, e-mail, flaming, 28,800 bits mean? The whole area seems to be crowded with words which are designed to keep the outsiders well on the outside. At this point you find that your modem is a 28,000 bits but you have set it for 14,000 bits………
After this you come to your first steps at using the system. Send an e-mail. How to do this? What address? What is your address? Where do I type? And finally after a little message appears that the e-mail has been sent to the outbox….where is the outbox? You tentatively send your e-mail and a little basket appears on the screen and some arrows indicate that it has been successfully sent. Oh I do hope it gets there….supposing it doesn’t? Wait somebody is sending a message to me…….."Mail Returned" address unknown.
Training - 4 steps forward up a ladder
The project established training programmes to overcome this problem. Teachers were trained in the use of the computer, accessing the Internet and sending and receiving e-mails. It was arranged so that all teachers had hands-on experience of a lap top and accessed the WWW and sent and received an e-mail through a telephone link as well as getting some support information. These training programmes were successful according to feedback.
One step forward down a snake
The problem of course is that unless these skills are put to immediate use they are lost. Teacher’ s who then met technical problems or other non access problems were found to need extra help within a week of attending the. And the technical problems were met. Disc drives failed to work, modems failed to connect and software problems occurred. A problem as simple as forgetting the password could mean that the computers were not available for three days or more and this small denying of access is the final straw for a teacher who might just have overcome the intimidation and fear of the new technology , who tentatively tries it and then fails to interact with it. There is a tendency to go back to square one.
It was particularly interesting that of 10 schools active in Phase 1 of the project the five who were fully supported by the project support team such that they were constantly goaded into action over the first ten weeks all responded to an e-mail exercise in the last week while from the other schools was not a peep. I wonder how many of those schools are back at square one?
Science and up a short ladder
There were two schools in the project who were both involved in a similar science programme for their year3/4 classes. The work was materials. Both schools were within half a mile of each other but like a lot of schools in Birmingham they had very different catchments . One school had a mainly Muslim intake while the other was more mixed with children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The year group teachers (4) in both schools had been on a training day where they had used the lap-top computers for sending e-mails and accessing the Internet.
The experiment was to see if the communication element of the science work could be enhanced by getting the children to communicate and correspond over the Internet with children from the other school.
This was perceived to enhance the science work in a number of ways. It could help children in the predicting and hypothesising phase where they could compare and discuss their predictions and hypothesis. They could also compare results and discuss findings. The communication skills would obviously be enhanced by such an exercise.
How could this be done? There were two possibilities using the intended resources. The first of these was e-mail. The children could send electronic letters to each other and also send pictures by attaching files to the letters. The other technique available to them was to publish their results on the WWW. One school was considered capable of producing to WWW pages so this school decided to forge ahead on that route while the other decided to rely on e-mails.
E-mails and attached files - Down a small snake
This of course again lead to another set of problems. One was that to attach files which might contain pictures of work done was easy but it was in the accepted BMP format of programs like Paintbrush this caused problems with respect to time to download files. As an example we had another school which was sending some pictures of shoes that it had created to another school. The pictures took so long to arrive that the receiver thought that something was wrong with their e-mail….15 minutes with little arrows going into boxes is a frustrating length of time …..something was wrong so they gave up and this clogged up the whole of their e-mail system. To send pictures successfully you need a different format like GIF or some equivalent (again you are talking technical language which is intimidating for all those who know little about computers/internet/etc. ). That’s OK but if the sender is sending GIF files then the reader has to be able to interpret them. So a suitable program like Paintshop Pro has to be loaded on both machines….plus licences of course. Teachers then have to taught how to use them….and then to some extent the children if it is they who we want to communicate.
Needless to say if you are going to present pictures of children’s work you need a scanner and the skills in using one. Children used a slightly ancient black and white portable scanner while other work was scanned using a desktop scanner in the Faculty. Primary schools do seem to be buying scanners particularly as they become more confident in using the available IT. A scanner is essential if you are contemplating creating your own WWW pages.
Who communicates - another snake
Who was to do the communicating ….the teacher or the pupil? It was decided that the pupil was to be the communicator through e-mail and the WWW page were a teacher responsibility. Training the children thus became a task and a problem which the project has to face. Time is an incredibly valuable commodity so where does this time for training and for communication come from? Children’s keyboard skills were not of a high quality and communicating using a computer became a time consuming process without the proper keyboard skills. Time had to come at lunch times, break times and other slots.
And another very large snake
This time was not enough. Children couldn’t access the WWW and send e-mails in free time, other resources were needed. The teacher was given free time during the science lessons and extra teaching help so that the science was taught while the teacher supervised and trained the children in the WWW access and using e-mail. Even here it was found that it was only possible for two groups of five to have any sort of interaction with the Internet within the hour and half period. I suppose it might have been possible to type the letters on the machine in the classroom during the week and then to move them to the lap top. But yet again we would have another level of skill attainment being breached. Does this make it feasible for the normal classroom teacher? I can guess the answer and agree. There would need to a culture change in education and schools to allow this sort of commitment to occur.
We do have one school which seems to have made a small impression on school culture by including an e-mail policy from Year1 to Year 6 within its IT and language policy but I doubt that this is anywhere near a trend within the schools.
Back to the start
Another problem which the schools faced was one that established itself right from the start of the project in almost all the schools. Where were/was the telephone line going to go. Where in a school do you put it? We had little idea other than it might be useful in a public or central place thus giving staff general access to it rather than the exclusive headteacher access. Lines therefore went into medical rooms, empty classrooms, libraries, staff rooms, community rooms…. Not one of them in the classroom. After all who has heard of a telephone line being in a classroom. The telephone is a bit of technology which has yet to reach the classrooms. It is this positioning that lead to one of the major problems for children to access the Internet they had to leave the classroom. This is obviously possible with some focused Year 6 children but a little difficult with excited Year 3/4 children.
The solution was to move the telephone link into the classroom via an extension which in some cases was more than 100 metres but was probably the most worthwhile extension of facilities that the project achieved in the first 6 months.
Clay - 5 steps forward up a ladder.
So what about the science we did . We used clay as the vehicle and linked it to art work through William Morris. Children looked at a variety of materials and created some criteria associated with solids and liquids. They then examined plasticine and then clay and applied the criteria to them. They decided that clay had water in it. They investigated the drying of clay over a four day period. They found out how to use small electronic balances and then used them to find the mass of the clay. They discussed ideas on where the water went to. They created a William Morris Design, using only five colours, made a clay tile weighed it, let it dry, fired it, weighed it and painted in the design. All obviously very achievable within a six week period, one hour and half hour session per week!
Overall the two classes reached tile level. All classes created designs and there was some communication between classes on designs ideas and writings about science. Probably the most interesting debate was on fairness and where did the water go to. These actually did produce a limited e-mail discussion. The obvious of course happened … the weight ( I really found myself on a very sticky weight/mass wicket) of the clay increased as it dried out for some of the children. The e-mails on this lead to the stimulus to try the experiment again and arrive at a more reasonable result possibly taking more care in the measurements, recording of the data and the identification of the item being weighed (mass determined).
Where the water went to was one of those classic debates where they thought that it had gone inside the clay and also that gravity had had some influence because of previous teaching on the solar system and the role of gravity by a student teacher who was attached to one class. Explanations included the Moon pulling the water up to the sky. Children did produce work for WWW pages
In essence the whole project was too ambitious. The teachers and pupils didn’t have the electronic communication experience. The equipment being used was not tried tested and working. My lap-top hardly ever fails mainly because I have sorted out…or others have sorted out the bugs. With a much smaller level of support a Father Christmas e-mail exercise has proved far more successful in terms of quantity and quality of communications. Over a ten day period this produced nearly 200 letters from project schools with children lining up to send messages. We are extending this to a Science Bug and an Eid figure so that children will continue to be encouraged to use e-mail communications. The Bug will also have a WWW page so that they will access that and get WWW experience. From this basis a communication exercise might be more feasible and the resource implications more realistic.
A double six and a big ladder
What ever the problems and failures the delight on the children’s faces when they saw their work published on the WWW and when they received an e-mail was a fitting reward for the efforts of the teachers involved in this experiment.