Generation A+ in the Digital Media Lab #2: Computer Keyboards, HTML and iPads

As I’ve explained in the first post of this series, I’m spending 10 weeks teaching, observing and learning from 10-year olds this semester.

Before I start sharing what happened in our 2nd meeting, I have to tell you about the new addition to our group. We got a new member, another boy who didn’t originally sign up but was interested in checking the digital media workshop his classmates were taking. As I mentioned in my first post, I’m offering this weekly extra-curricular activity at no cost to 5th and 6th graders at the local elementary school. So, it was easy to welcome a new inquisitive mind.

When kids meet HTML, keyboards can mess things up

My goal for our second “digital media lab” meeting was to introduce the kids to HTML.

I didn’t expect them to learn how to code a web page by hand (although I’m sure we could do it in a couple of sessions), but I wanted to give them an idea of what’s under the hood of the websites they use on a regular basis — as well as an appreciation of what a CMS like WordPress can help them achieve.

During this session, we had some interesting tech issues – which made me appreciate how challenging using technology as part of the regular curriculum can be for teachers.

While I would probably be arrested as a fraud if I tried to wear a Propeller Hat at any High Ed Web Conference, I’d say I’m a confident tech user: I’m used to learning new apps or web services while hitting the ground running. It comes with the territory of working for an agile professional online school like Higher Ed Experts.

Yet, I still managed to get stuck with my 10 10-year olds during our workshop, because I wasn’t prepared to deal with the quirks of a pretty old-school device: the computer keyboard.

Yep, half the computer keyboards in the library of this bilingual elementary school were set to use the virtual French keyboard.

(Not familiar with virtual keyboards for different languages? The physical keyboard looks like your regular US or Canadian keyboard, but if you type a key, you get a very different result from the label on the key)

When my group tried to type some HTML code of their own in the neat practice environment from Code Avengers, we literally couldn’t find the bracket (greater than/smaller than) signs.

I did try to switch from French to English, but it looks like a restart would have been necessary to make that change work. I couldn’t afford time-wise to restart 10 computers, so we tried to poke around to see if we could find the right keys. Meanwhile, a couple of the kids started to fool around a bit. I was losing very fast the small amount of attention capital I still had.

After several failed attempts to find the brackets on the keyboard, one of the 2 girls in the group found by herself a creative way to complete the assignment: she copied and pasted a tag from another area of the page (I had showed them the “right-click mouse move & show source code” trick previously) and replace the element by the H1 element we’d been trying to type for the past 10 minutes.

Kids + Technology in the Classroom = Too Much Goodness?

I only had 10 kids but when most of them called for help — because they couldn’t type the brackets –, I had a hard time to identify, troubleshoot and fix the issue in a timely manner.

The most difficult thing for me was to keep the kids engaged while I was trying to find a solution.

I can’t imagine how a teacher who doesn’t share my comfort level with technology would have reacted in the same situation even with more “kids experience” than me.

Now, I understand better why it can look overwhelming for “old school” teachers to make the leap and use new technologies in their classroom. It’s often seen as an added challenge that requires them to invest time and energy sometimes with no guarantee it will work at all. That’s definitely something to take into account for any technology use in the classroom.

iPads & Audio Headaches

During this 2nd meeting with the kids, we also got to use the iPads for the 1st time as I wanted to show them a small portion of a great online video tutorial on HTML for kids.

My goal was to show my group a 3-minute section of this tutorial and invite them to check it out at home if they wanted to learn more.

Audio proved to be a challenge with the iPad too as most of the kids couldn’t figure out how to turn down the volume from the controls on the screen.The rubber covers on the school iPads seem to make the physical volume controls on the devices difficult to access for most kids.

So, I had to show them how to use the volume controls of the video player.

The tutorial video we played was NOT hosted on YouTube. Consequently, the player might have looked unfamiliar to the members of my group. However, I wonder if this can be explained by the fact that the kids rely so much on the physical volume controls and never use the ones from the video player.

I was so focused on making sure they could hear the audio this time (we had some issues with the audio on the computers last time) that I literally didn’t think it could be problematic for the kids to watch the video independently on their device.

Of course, it was impossible to hear anything — too much noise from 10 iPads playing the same video.

I wish you could push an online video to the iPads and have the master iPad broadcast the audio so everybody could watch and listen to the video. You know, a bit like, how video works for in-flight video system in airplanes. Do YOU know an app that does this?

Fortunately, these 5th and 6th graders all have headsets at school for the iPads. so they went get them from their classrooms.

Is Video Really the Future for Knowledge Acquisition in the Classroom?

When everybody was set and started to watch the video, it was fascinating to see how kids who were all abuzz a second earlier got focused very quickly on the video explaining the basics of HTML. The headsets helped, I’m sure, but that’s not all.

When I see how my group of 10-year olds react to online videos, I really think there might be something worth investigating. Have online videos become so natural for this generation that video will become the best format for knowledge acquisition?

Anybody has heard about research done on the topic yet?

I want to test this assumption by trying to see how my group will react to materials presented face-to-face vs. pre-recorded materials. I won’t be able to test this right away, but will probably give it a try when we talk about creating short online videos.

Now, the plan for next meeting is to introduce the group to WordPress and get them to publish their first post. I’m sure I’ll have interesting observations to share on the topic next Friday.

In the meantime, I’d love to get feedback from you (ideas and suggestions are also welcome) about this little experiment.