Teaching and Learning with Technology

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• CTLT Advisory Board
• Contents

As machines, clothing, buildings, even body parts become ‘smarter’, humans’ digital literacy practices need to be anticipatory to avoid disruption. Anticipatory digital literacy practices are pre-active. They help humans understand what digital literacies practices they need to acquire and/or abandon to successfully adapt to new sociotechnical realities characterised by linear exponential technological change. In a probable future, some individuals and organisations will employ their anticipatory digital literacy practices to productively capitalise on technology innovations to maximise their business, economic impact and profits. But in a preferable future, all individuals have authentic opportunities to use anticipatory digital literacy practices at school to work successfully with others and artificial intelligence to address global challenges. Critical to addressing these global challenges is education’s ability to help individuals understand the ethical dimension of their anticipatory digital literacy practices so they not only use them pre-actively, but with respect for others and the Earth. Equally paramount, is understanding that anticipatory digital literacies practices are not skills or competencies, rather they are cultural ways of doing things predicated on taking a pre-active stance to avoid disruption with different affinity groups.

This paper explains how I implement technology in my cross-disciplinary honors course on mathematics and music to strengthen student engagement and learning. I encourage my students to use technical computing software, online tools, and personal computing devices to explore solutions and develop expertise. Students learn to apply technology and mathematics to analyze, manipulate, and create music.

In line with the 4-year undergraduate curriculum that commenced in Fall 2012, the Office of University General Education at The Chinese University of Hong Kong developed a new Foundation Programme that consists of two new GE courses, In Dialogue with Humanity and In Dialogue with Nature for all junior students. In Dialogue with Humanity aims to inspire students to reflect on questions concerning personal life and society, as well as to encourage multiple perspectives in such reflections. Students are required to read and discuss one classic per week in a semester spanning 12-14 weeks. In order to facilitate students’ comprehension of the classics, the learning support committee of the GE office developed a mobile app DAIMON. The app consists of interactive multiple-choice questions at various difficulty levels, serving different purposes: as reading companion and as self-assessment exercises. In the new revised edition, four mini-dictionaries with audio functions are added.

With relating to basic courses of electronic professional, the theoretical teaching and the experimental teaching need synchronization, flexibility and relativity, in order to enable students to accept new knowledge faster, more deeply in the teaching process. This paper emphasizes the idea of “integrating theory with practice”. It is suggested that both experimental and theoretical courses should be paid more attention and the new knowledge will be more conducive to the transformation of knowledge.

The author suggests that the same teacher teaches theory and experimental class of the same class; pay attention to the change of students’ thinking, modify timely curriculum arrangement; rational use of multimedia teaching forms and more development of different forms of teaching resources.

The SAMR Model is an instructional model which guides educators to infuse technology with teaching and learning thus enables teachers to design digital flipped-class learning experiences that utilize technology in class time. In this action research, we synthesize reflection about how SAMR Model can support flipped classroom in design-based course through (1) Substitution, (2) Augmentation, (3) Modification and (4) Redefinition to support design-based learning for art stream students in high education level. As the reflection, we use principles of effective teaching to guide the approach. The respondents were 2 independent groups of 82 students who had went through SAMR module in 2 semesters. The findings suggest that the implementation of flipped classroom using substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition are capable of supporting the design based learning for art stream students. We are able to conclude that that there are significant difference between implementation of flipped classroom using SAMR model and students’ achievement.

The Xidian University is a university in Xian China focuses on the teaching and research in electronic engineering. In 2013, a new e-learning system called “Active Campus” was introduced to facilitate interactive learning, effective school administration and collecting student feedbacks. The system uses the mobile and WiFi network for linking students’ devices such as desktop, laptop and mobile phone for accessing information, conducting two-ways interactive class discussions, collecting survey feedback and course evaluation. It also uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) for student attendance and tutorial registration of which the location of the students is important. Over 90.4% of the students who participated in the pilot agreed that such an interactive learning platform is useful to increase the quality of teaching and learning. This paper describes the system architecture, operations and performance of the project.

Corpus linguistics typically involves using a computer to explore large datasets, sometimes of both written and oral text, to reveal patterns of language use. This article reviews some of the research relevant to second language teachers and researchers. It details some of the tools available for corpus linguistics research, and poses questions that teachers and researchers might explore.

Fullan and Langworthy (2013) identified eight Deep Learning Skills in 2013. Michael Fullan later focuses on Key Future Skills or the 6 C’s, which students need to know in order to live in the modern times. Public schools, worldwide, are gradually adding Deep Learning Tasks to their curriculum in order to prepare their students for a modern life.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of adding an online Learning Management System to a teacher training programme for language teachers who are not digitally as literate as their students to prepare these teachers to develop their students’ Key Future Skills.

This study was conducted over a period of 9 months with 50 primary and secondary school English language teachers in a rural school in Malaysia during a project by the British Council for the Ministry of Education. The teachers’ online behaviour was monitored and documented during this period. Data were collected through questionnaires (10 questions) at the end of the project and through interviews 6 months after the end of the project. The results show that the teachers became more vigilant towards Deep Learning Skills and their significance for life in the 21st century and the application of technology in their own teaching context. On a positive note, their active online presence and collaboration with each other on the selected platform also helped them feel more confident in preparing their own students to develop their 6 C’s independently.

“Signals and Systems” is an important professional basic course of electronic engineering and information science majors. Because of strong theory, much content, and abstract concepts, students generally feel difficult to learn the course, even cannot well understand and master analysis methods and basic theories. This paper discusses about teaching methods of strengthening connections among chapters, emphasizing principles, and combing with the practical engineering, which is helpful for students to understand the course and can improve the teaching effect.

The study dealt with the practical skills possessed by technical teachers and their level of confidence in applying ICT for teaching in polytechnics in the North-East Geo-political Zone of Nigeria. It answered two research questions and tested two hypotheses. The study employed descriptive survey research design. Questionnaire was used to collect data from 100 certified and 114 uncertified technical teachers. The questionnaire which was divided into sections was validated by two experts in Industrial Technology Education from the academia. The validated copy of the questionnaire was trial tested on 25 technical teachers chosen from Plateau State Polytechnic, Barkin Ladi, Jos, Nigeria. Using the Crombach Alpha formula, the trial test gave the reliability coefficient of the instrument as 0.91. Six weeks were devoted to the administration of the questionnaire, at the end of which 209 valid copies were obtained, upon which analysis of the results was carried out. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while the Z-test tested the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study found that practical skills possessed by technical teachers’ in using ICT for teaching in polytechnics was moderate. It found that technical teachers had high confidence and motivation in applying ICT facilities for teaching. The study also found that a significant difference did not exist between the mean scores of certified and un-certified technical teachers on the technical teachers’ level of practical skills in using ICT for teaching in polytechnics. Similarly, a significant difference did not exist between the mean scores of certified and un-certified technical teachers on the level of confidence in applying ICT facilities for teaching in polytechnics. The study implied that for teachers’ level practical skills in applying of ICT in teaching to fall in line with expected standards, teacher training and professional development, and as well funding and provision of ICT facilities, must be given a serious consideration. This has become necessary since the teachers’ level of confidence and morale in applying ICT facilities in teaching is high. In this connection, the study suggested that there is need to train and retrain technical teachers on ICT use in order for them to effectively apply the facilities in teaching.

In the traditional teaching of “Principles of Automatic Control” course, some concepts are abstract and hard for understanding. The graphical interactive user interface of Matlab software makes it easier to demonstrate the abstract theory teaching for its powerful computing and visualization capabilities. Concerning the emphasis and difficulty in the teaching process, this paper establishes the simulation platform for Principles of Automatic Control based on Matlab GUI, which can effectively improve the pertinence and intuition of teaching. This platform is designed with four sub-modules, including time-domain analysis module, root locus analysis module, frequency-domain analysis module and the space transform analysis module. The application of this platform shows it has significant reference value to the teaching and learning of “Principles of Automatic Control” course.

The contribution is focused on making familiar with the current activities related to learning and teaching with technology at the Slovak University of Technology, Faculty of Materials Science and Technology, mainly in the fields of the English language and the Institute of Applied Informatics, Automation and Mechaatronics. Regarding the English practitioners, and due to excellent interdisciplinary cooperation with the aforementioned Institute, they are involved in two specific projects utilizing technologies, one of them concerning the developing of on-line conferencing skills and the other one on boosting the vocabulary background within the program studied. Regarding the latter, the paper is aimed at looking closer at the prepared multimedia textbook within the project “University text-book The means of automated production by interactive multimedia formats for the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava and Technical University in Kosice”.

Signal and Linear Systems (SLS) course plays a vital role in training engineering talents which takes the Fourier trans-form, the Laplace transform and the Z-transform as core contents traditionally. But the three traditional transforms do not possess the ability of localized time domain analysis, which is necessary to specific engineering application scenarios. Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) is taken as a bridge to introduce the localized time-domain analysis. In this paper, we adapt computer graphics to help students understand the complex relationship between time and frequency domain analysis which is the latest extension of traditional contents in the SLS course.

This paper reports on a mentoring project underpinned by action research methodology that has been implemented in the DRB-HICOM University of Automotive Malaysia (DHUAM). The project is part of a larger strategic organisational development initiative to position the university in a globally competitive market. A mentoring specialist based in New Zealand has been brought in to work with the university to design a mentoring framework, coordinate a six-month pilot programme in conjunction with the Director of DHUAM’s Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT), and manage the rollout of the mentoring programme across the institution over a 3-5 year period. Electronic platforms and on-site campus visits have enabled regular communication and dual management of the pilot programme between New Zealand and Malaysia.

The study examined the leadership characteristics of technical college administrators in the North-East Geo-political Zone of Nigeria. One research question and one hypothesis were answered and tested respectively. The study employed descriptive survey research design in which a 13-item structured questionnaire, validated and trial tested, collected data from 75 technical college administrators, 135 technical teachers and 180 students. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 17, to answer the research question and to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The study found that leadership characteristics of technical college administrators, such as dependability, responsibility, friendliness, emotional stability and integrity, were moderately effective. The study also found that a significant difference existed in the mean scores of administrators, teachers and students on the leadership characteristics of technical college administrators. A post-hoc Scheffe test showed that administrators were the respondent group responsible for the significant difference in the mean scores of respondents. The findings of the study implied that if the goals of the technical colleges must be realized, and that the technical colleges did not experience one form of leadership crisis or the other, administrators needed to improve upon their own personalities and leadership. Consequently, the study recommended that administrators of the technical colleges needed to improve on their administrative and leadership characteristics towards the effective management of the technical colleges, in areas such as responsibility, emotional stability, integrity, cooperation and intelligence.

Under the influence and impact of Internet MOOC, this paper discusses blended teaching reform based on teaching objectives of “Signal and System” course. The blended teaching combines merits of traditional classroom and network study. It not only keeps teachers’ role in instructing, inspiring and monitoring the whole teaching process, but also fully promotes students’ initiative, enthusiasm and creativity as the main body of the learning process. In this paper, the MOOC blended teaching reform for “Signal and System” is proposed and implementation is discussed. Firstly, efforts are made to develop the best use of massive online resources. Specific videos such as lessons recording about difficult explanation and engineering case analysis are also constructed. Secondly, the stratified education is carried out. According to particular professional training objectives and learners’ different learning abilities, different requirements are adjusted to teachers and learners. Lastly, and most importantly, the capabilities of teachers’ independent teaching and students’ independent learning need to be improved. The blending teaching practice demonstrates that the reform ways are beneficial to further strengthen teaching objectives, inspire students’ engineering abilities, and improve the teaching quality.

Pre-school education is of great value to all children because it provides a sound basis for learning to develop knowledge, skills, attitudes, personal competence and confidence and a sense of social responsibility. Educational research indicates that Pre-school education is a key factor in the promotion of equal opportunity. The survey design was used in the research and a stratified random sample was used to collect data from the selected sample in Colombo district during 2014 and 2015. The descriptive statistical method was used for data analysis. The main objectives were investigating the involvement of Pre-school teachers in the teaching - learning process of their Pre-school child and examine how they support to enhance creativity through language their Pre-school child. The findings showed that the majority of Pre-schools are run by private organizations. State supervisory bodies of Pre-schools insists that all Pre-schools should have professionally qualified staff. Ninety percent of Pre-school teachers said that all training programs have content in language development activities and making suitable teaching aids, but they were not focusing in developing creativity in the Teaching Learning process. Sixty percent Pre-school teachers said that they faced problems in preparing lessons to develop creativity. The highest percentage of Pre-school teachers have no idea about the concept of creativity. In conclusion, it was felt that the Pre-school teachers do not have adequate knowledge regarding the implications of Pre-school education for their Pre-school age children.

Extracurricular reading plays particular role in students’ cultivation and intellectual training in higher education. In fact, lots of students spend much spare time on readings those non-related to their majors. In this paper, we conduct a questionnaire survey on student patrons with the help of university library’s activities supporting in Xidian University. The aim of this survey is to find out the overview of extracurricular reading preference in nowadays university and the difference between undergraduate and graduate students. The data analysis provides an entrance to study the students’ learning preference. The activity procedure and analysis results in mobile Internet environment are also presented. We also propose feasible suggestions and solutions to teachers and administrators in university.

Although many articles discuss the differences of cultural learning styles between Chinese and Western, it seems to be that they tend to follow either one side or the other. The author is facing the challenge of teaching students, who are Chinese background, studying their third or fourth language (Japanese) in an English university environment. This project originated from a small scale action research where beginners were provided with three steps using three different applications to process in outside of class time and bring the knowledge back to the inside of the classroom. These results led to the next question of higher level student activities. The author tackled the current issue of students learning behavior and how the learning platform is used outside of the class leading into the maximization of activities in the classroom setting. The paper attempts to address the differences of the university expectation and the students learning behavior related with concept of Chinese and western learning styles. The module was redesigned and provided a new learning procedure with different applications via Xerte, Rogo, and Moodle. The findings of this research show changing student learning behavior and also through the students’ evaluation analyses how this non-traditional approach influences the connection between outside and inside of the class learning.

Evaluating course outcomes based on various assessment components may provide guidance on the quality of teaching and learning. In this paper, a web-based course outcome assessment tool is presented that automates a direct grade-based assessment method to evaluate course outcome performance. This on-line automated course assessment tool is expected to help faculty members in several operations such as systematically judging individual class performances as well as comparing class performances over several semesters. The assessment is presented in both tabular and charts forms.

Signal & System, with many basic concepts and broad connotation, is a foundation course in the electronics and communications study. For the basic principle of “Signal” and “System”, this course builds the knowledge into an organic whole and cultivates the students’ talents through practice of engineering experiments. The application cases such as: audio signal analysis, frequency domain denoising of digital image, template convolution image enhancement and so on, have been introduced appropriately into classroom teaching, preliminarily exploring the new teaching method under the guidance of engineering concept. In practical work, we design the comprehensive and innovative experiment, take the embedded platform as the carrier and carry out some technological activities related to the navigation and control of the rotorcraft. The teaching results come out to show us that this course does a good job in stimulating students’ interest in learning, strengthening students’ understanding and comprehension of the knowledge what they have learned and improving students’ abilities in analyzing and solving problems.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing people (DHH) are the linguistic minority in Georgia and their language is Georgian Sign language (GESL). Georgian DHH has no national diversities inside this community and GESL is a united language for the all Deaf people in this country. I elaborated a few technological approaches for teaching spoken Georgian to DHH children at special schools. The main issues are the following items:

The following sections are included:

• Establishing a new Georgian dactyl alphabet in education system of DHH with support of local authorities;
• Elaborating Georgian dactyl font for the teaching-learning process to improve its results;
• Providing spoken Georgian e-learning material for home work (exercises and translated texts);
• Creating the multimedia material for teaching spoken Georgian and later inserting these materials in DHH studying process;
• Creating the multimedia (visual) material for improving the existed agrammatism;
• Elaborating the two-way dictionary GESL-Spoken Georgian using the new technologies - Leap Motion and Kinect data;
• Finalizing the elaboration of a new engine for Georgian dactyl and sign recognizing and establishing it in DHH studying process.
• The presented paper describes the details of the used innovation technologies.

This article covers the selection, implementation steps, issues and challenges faced by the Khalifa University libraries in setting up the library’s digital and print collection on Summon discovery for the purposes of facilitating information discovery using a single search box, increasing resource dissemination, and maximizing value from library materials. This article statistically analyses the impact of the knowledge discovery tool on information retrieval at Khalifa University.

The Fundamental of Electronic Circuit is a technical introductory course for all electric majoring students, which is a basic course with rigorous theories, strong logic, comprehensive and high-capacity requirements on engineering practice. Based on the analysis of and discussion on the traditional teaching methods of The Electronic Circuit Fundamental course, this paper proposes that the traditional teaching method and new coming E-Learning G teaching method should be used under the “E-Learning” environment, and their developments, advantages and disadvantages should be tracked, studied, and applied to promote the current education reform. Combined with the classroom teaching, this paper puts forward a practicable teaching method to meet the growing education needs of the society.

Technology in education is used to support not only the teaching and learning processes but it has created a platform also for the research in education sciences. During the last two decades the research in education sciences has paid a great attention to quality of teachers and their professionalization and it has become a key issue of the state educational policy in the EU countries. In 2006, the government of the Slovak Republic expressed its resolution to set up such legislation for teaching staff which would stimulate the quality growth of their career by means of a motivating salary system directly related to their professional development. The aim was to improve and stimulate the efficiency of education through the professional development of teachers, which would be based on a system of their professional standards. Currently a great attention is paid to issues related to the evaluation of teacher’s competences and consequently to finding the ways and tools for evaluation of teachers’ competences required for their qualified performance. This issue has recently become a focus for a team of researchers at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, which has a long term tradition in teacher training. The team submitted a bid and received financing for a national research project Evaluation of Teacher’s Competences from the Slovak Research and Development Agency. The paper presents some partial research results of the abovementioned project, focused on professional competences of primary and secondary school teachers. In an on-line survey the research sample of primary and secondary school teachers evaluated the rate of importance of selected aspects of teacher’s professional profile necessary for their successful teaching performance (ability to design teaching process, to create appropriate school climate, to identify learner’s developmental and individual characteristics, and others). In the paper the authors summarize an overview of the obtained data and results of the survey, and mutually compare their findings about the significance of different professional competences of in-service teachers from the point of view of both teachers and head teachers.

This project explores the potential for multi-modal learning in the use of smartphones, tablets and notebook computers in lectures and seminars at an English-as-Medium-of- Instruction (EMI) university in China. Through surveys and focus groups, existing practices are investigated and staff and students consulted to understand how these resources construct or obstruct classroom learning. Effective and innovative ways of systematically exploiting these mobile devices in teaching and learning are also explored. Preliminary findings suggest that there is a significant gap in the attitudes and perceptions between students and staff. Ways to fill this gap and implications for pedagogy will be discussed.

Women, in general, are underrepresented in engineering and technology fields. An online survey has been conducted worldwide to understand the current state and perception of women engineers, challenges and obstacles faced by them in their engineering profession, mentoring or any other support available to them, and opportunities available and scope for their professional development. This paper presents the experiences and perception of women in engineering and technology domains and recommends potential solutions from their perspective to retain and attract more women into engineering and technology fields.

Not only does science core-text reading provide opportunities for students to gather evidences and knowledge, but also to explore how renowned thinkers investigate and understand Nature. Yet, some students, especially those who have not had an acquaintance with basic knowledge of science, find difficulties in understanding science texts on their own. Dianable with audio pronunciations is a tailor-made learning mobile app which serves as a 2-level reading companion and a self-evaluation tool to help students comprehend the texts, and, more importantly, to improve students’ ability to read science texts. Statistics show that Dianable does help students perform better in preclass quizzes, and students’ feedback from quantitative online survey and qualitative focus group interviews suggests that DiaNable does enhance their understanding, as well as their ability to read science texts.