Modes and levels of IT use

As the internet began to spread through common classrooms, traditional modes of education are under great challenges and destined to be changed and innovated, paving

12

the way for the emergence of IT integration into core subject curriculum. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to further explore and analyze the modes of how information technology can be applied in classrooms using a variety of discriminating factors. Both Lin (1999) and Chang (1999) believe that ways of integrating IT into curriculum can be classified into three distinctive modes based on the teaching and learning activities. In Lin’s classification, in an IT integrated class, students could search for needed information from available resources so as to make an IT presentation of the assigned topic, work with their peers in order to surf the Internet, searching for answers to the series of more complicated and sophisticated questions designed by their teachers, or work with members from other groups either as a new group or as individuals. As for Chang’s theory, the activities in IT integrated courses, teachers should search for all kinds of proper and useful information and carefully integrate it into their lesson plans. They also encourage students to make multimedia presentation in a meaningful way, and build a virtual learning environment for students to do simulation exercises while facilitating students' comprehension by visually presenting abstract ideas or concepts. In addition to describing IT integration in terms of the activities to be conducted in class, Weng (2003) went on to put them into ten different categories, including record keeping,

teacher-parent communication, teacher-student interaction, making teaching outlines, outside materials, students’ self-learning materials, and most importantly, creating a virtual classroom for students to do on-line learning activities, assignment, and

assessment. With the large variety of activities, Weng believed that teachers would have better management of students data and teaching materials, students could engage themselves in problem solving process and on-line discussion, and the communication and interaction among teachers, parents and students would be significantly promoted.

Similar to Weng's categorization, Liu (2002) decided to analyze IT application modes according to the teaching process with specific teaching and learning procedures

13

and examples of the software being employed. As stated by Liu, in a typical IT integrated class, teachers start with preparation before class and presentation in class, use IT tools to facilitate students' learning, and then set up virtual learning websites for teachers and students to interact with one another through web-based activities like videoconferencing, social network learning, and even collaboration project learning. Apart from the

activities and methods mentioned by Weng (2003), Liu extended the list by adding the following: students exploring learning by operating browsers, digital cameras, or microscopes, synchronous teaching or interactive learning across schools or countries through internet videoconferencing and multiple assessment approaches such as self evaluation, peer evaluation, and profile assessment.

While further analyzing the function of IT integrating into curriculum, Chang (2002) then discovered that IT could play four diverse roles in the integration process. With ready-made multimedia presentation software and on-line resources, IT integrated instruction could facilitate students in knowledge construction by assisting them to express their newly learned knowledge, achieve meaningful learning and strengthen their achievement through reconstruction of concept, theories, and beliefs. Moreover, it could also aid students in knowledge exploration by offering opportunities for them to make hypothesis, search for evidence with available resources on the internet, and finally learn to carry out knowledge exploration and to collaborate peers in their quest for the solution to a designed question or problem. Meanwhile, IT integrated instruction also played the roles of helping students learn by doing and through collaborative learning with all sorts of online communication systems and interactive websites. By involving themselves into these web-based resources, students learned to construct their knowledge through constant operation and practice instead of from the knowledge delivered by the teachers.

In this instruction style, teachers played the role of coaches to guide students during the

14

process whereas students either worked together as partners or groups, or interact with one another to achieve a task assigned by their teachers.

After studying different information processing theories, Roblyer (2003) identified two contradicting educational stands taken by experts in this field: Directed Instruction and Constructive Instruction. According to the researcher, in the theory of Directed Instruction, the teacher played the role of a delivery person of knowledge while the student played the role of a passive information recipient, which made the process of learning the delivery of knowledge. In the theory of Constructive Instruction, however, the teacher functioned as a guiding mentor while the student work as an active individual learner, which treated learning as the construction of knowledge. Namely, students under DI (Directed Instruction) mastered learning within limited realm of the subject but grew to have independent capability through CI (Constructive Instruction). Further examined in terms of teaching and learning activities and strategies, DI contained activities such as lectures, demonstration, exercises, and tests with its focus on individual learning and traditional teaching and assessment. On the other hand, CI consisted of group projects, real exploration and work development with special attention given to group learning, liberal exploration of open-ended question, and cultivation of students’ problem-solving ability and research skills.

With these carefully analyzed information, researchers were attempting to point out a more practical or applicable direction for educators and teachers to follow if IT

integration into curriculum is to be actually implemented in daily classrooms in the nearest future. To expect to be able to elicit results and conclusion that can make real contribution to improve IT use in EFL class in elementary schools in Taiwan, the

researcher of the present study made the decision to define IT integration into instruction as a student-centered teaching approach in which teachers, as believers of Constructive Instruction, make deliberate and purposeful use of all sorts of information technology.

15

The teachers will better prepare teaching materials and class presentation, promote students learning interest by engaging them in active learning activities in an IT environment, and thereby facilitate teachers’ teaching as well as enhance students’

learning achievement.

Levels

In addition to studies focusing on the general concept or goals of IT integration into curriculum, another way to analyze teachers’ actual use of IT in core subject instruction is to set distinctive standards for different levels of IT use, which makes it easier to identify a teacher’s IT use behavior simply with a general description of frequency of use and manners of applying the technology (Barron, Kemker, Harmes, & Kalaydjian, 2003).

Over the past decades, researchers ( Hall & Loucks, 1977; Apple Computer, Inc., 1995;

Moersch, 1999; Wang & Li, 2000) have made continuous efforts to conduct series of research and have thus developed such a system to measure how exactly teachers have been using information technology in the classroom (See Table 2.1).

Table 2.1 Evolving Versions of Levels of IT Use in Instruction Researchers Levels of IT Use in Instruction Hall & Loucks (1997)

16

As listed in the above table, the higher the level, the more the teacher tends to integrate information technology and also moving from teacher-centered instruction toward more student-centered activities. At level 0 to level 1, teachers don’t use IT in classroom and still depend on traditional teaching approaches such as one-way lecturing.

Moving toward level 1 to level 3, teachers are beginning to include the element of IT in their instruction with an increasing frequency and proportion. As teachers gradually get used to using IT in the classrooms, they are stepping into level 4 to level 8. It means that they not only engage the students in IT related activities but help enhance students’

capability to use IT to find answers, solve problems, finish tasks, and eventually

construct their own knowledge system (Barron, et al., 2003; Chang, Chu, & Hsu, 2007).

In the present study, the researcher intends to gather information with the instruments of questionnaires, semi-controlled interview. Nevertheless, with the diverse and ambiguous definitions given to levels of IT use by different researchers and scholars, it will be difficult for participants to make a decision on their own perceived level of IT use in the questionnaire. Therefore, if the present study is expected to give an overall generalization

17

of about real IT use in EFL instruction among teachers in elementary schools, the researchers needs to pay special attention to teachers’ level of IT use during the process of interview and .