Facebook & Co 4 teacher development in disadvantaged areas. Findings from a social mobile media feasibility study from rural India

Authors Christoph Pimmer, Urs Gröhbiel, Christoph Widmer

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Background and rationale

Primary education: more than 8.2 million teachers should be trained and employed globally by 2015. (UNESCO, 2012).

Mobile technology: promising initiatives, e.g., foreign language learning in Bangladesh; English in Action (EIA)

Teachers' methodological repertoire improved and enhanced language acquisition by the students (Walsh, Shrestha, & Hedges, 2013).

Gap: little is known about the qualities that the increasing convergence of mobile and social media (see, e.g., Pachler, Ranieri, Manca, & Cook, 2012) offers for in-service teacher education in disadvantaged areas.

Local context: Community Education Centres in Chhattisgarh State, India.

Disadvantaged rural areas in Chhattisgarh State, Bastar District

Chhattisgarh: least developed state in India (HDI of 0.358)

Literacy rate in the region of about 40% (wider region about 70%)

Good Samaritan Schools" (GSS)

Managed from Jagdalpur

Founded by Ananthi Jebasingh 1990 in Delhi

3 rural schools for 200 children in three deprived areas: Chhindawada, BhelwaBhatta, Bhejripadar.

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Local challenge: lack of qualified teachers

Problems to recruit qualified teachers

Current teacher training: a few training days per year.

Themes: classroom management, lesson planning, activity-based teaching methods, use of mother tongue in teaching, multi-lingual methods, community involvement, English as a Second Language or student evaluation.

Need for more regular support

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Goals, approach and research question

Goal: first step in exploring the role and feasibility of the use of mobile and social media for in-service teacher education in disadvantaged areas,

using the example of Community Education Centres (CEC’s) in Chhattisgarh State, India.

Approach:

To understand the meanings of social mobile media for teacher educators

and to develop and investigate iteratively an environment

that leverages the qualities of these tools,

the principles of educational design research were followed (Barab & Squire, 2004).

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Methods

1) Semi-structured interviews, follow-up emails with three key stakeholders: identification of training needs in the light of potential functionalities of mobile and social media

2) Operationalization & piloting of selected functions piloted with the 3 users (June and July 2014).

o 3 teacher educators followed a script: instructions about how to perform relevant tasks on social mobile media platforms Facebook, Dropbox, WhatsApp, and regarding the recording of videos.

o Support by an experienced computer science student.

3) Final analysis: integration of perceptional and observational data

o Content analysis of the Facebook site combined with a survey (open questions) to elicit participants' perceptions of the educational use of mobile social media, to understand personal/subjective experiences and to identify ways how social mobile media can be applied more systematically in professional teacher development.

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Preliminary findings (1): the concept

Core concept to complement existing teacher training program:

(1) support the preparation and follow-up phases of face-to-face workshops through questions and information on digital spaces;

(2) enrich workshops in the form of phone-based video recordings of role plays to provoke discussion and reflection and to allow for digital dissemination within the group;

(3) provide regular micro training as well as support on demand through synchronous and asynchronous communication channels between the workshops;

(4) enable the management of teaching material using document repositories.

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Preliminary findings (1) Pilot activities

Activities completed:

Teacher educators created Facebook groups, invited members …

and posted questions, self-created images, videos and links to documents in a file repository.

In the Facebook groups the participants created 29 posts which were commented 41 times.

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Preliminary findings (2) Perceptions of participants

Affordances

Participants appreciated enhanced flexibility of communication: provide instant feedback to the teachers' questions, for example regarding the preparation of a specific teaching sequence or a more general problem,

Educational videos deemed to be useful for personal or group reflection for range of subjects, ..

allowing the demonstration of progress, and enabling a more appropriate support.

The teachers’ video can be helpful to the coaches for ev.aluation of teachers’ skill so that they could arrange the training materials accordingly. [Participant A]

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Constraints

Training of the features was perceived to be challenging, time intensive and required much virtual support

I feel somewhat confident, though I would like to improve on self-recording and posting. I will try it once more soon. [Participant B]

Concerns about privacy and internet security issues, and about the danger of wasting too much time with social media

Preliminary findings (3) Perceptions of participants

Tentative conclusions

Experienced teacher educators perceive qualities of social mobile media to be valuable to supplement teacher training in-between & during on-site seminars

But: Initial focus on one main digital platform

Allow for sufficient time for training and

address the individual queries/concerns of the participants.

complement individual mobile learning with regular on-site peer-meetings (Walsh et al., 2013)

Next step, the concept will be implemented and researched more broadly

Interested in our work? Get in touch

e-mail: christoph@pimmer.info

twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/christophpimmer

academia: www.fhnw.academia.edu/ChristophPimmer

website: www.christoph.pimmer.info

Contact

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