At the 2008 National PCA/ACA Conference in San Francisco, dance specialists Natalie King and Erica Nielsen discussed popular learning technologies, and pointed out shortcomings where dance education lags behind other fields. They led the audience through the features of a revolutionary dance e-book project using the innovative XplanaBook platform. Lastly, they introduced their company, in its first stage of development, designed for the specific needs of dance educators to help maximize students’ learning outcomes. The following is a transcript of their presentation.
Natalie King:
I am a dance educator in a large inner city high school in Phoenix, Arizona. My biggest obstacle as a teacher is broadening my students’ perceptions about dance. I begin by identifying my students’ prior knowledge.[video of students] As you can see, my students perceive dance as forms of celebration, ritual and entertainment. However, I want them to investigate dance outside of familiar events like a quinceanera, wedding, school dance or liturgical performance; and beyond what they see on MTV, BET, or even VH1.
Prior to entering my classroom, students are filled with sugar coded notions that after one semester in my class they too will be able to “drop it like it’s hot” and thereby transform their figures into “Fergalicious” states of being. However, over the course of a semester or even two, they discover that dance is more than a mere form of entertainment. Instead they realize dance is also a disciplined art form in which mind and body unite to execute, to create and to evaluate movement vocabulary from a variety of techniques. My hope is to inspire them as artists. [video of students]
This transformation is not always an easy task due to the fact that traditional methods of pedagogy alone do not suffice. As a teacher I explain and correct, demonstrate and give tactile feedback, to teach students concepts through movement skills. Yet the difficulty lies in contextualizing concepts through verbal explanation alone, and I spend a lot of time searching for appropriate supplements. Nevertheless students unfamiliar with dance vocabulary and abstract movement concepts run into frustration through this text-based approach. It is especially difficult in my classroom because English is a second language for over 75% of my students. Thus, to bridge the gap between students’ prior knowledge and my pedagogical goals, I had to look beyond conventional tools of instruction.
Many dance teachers use technologies in their classrooms to illustrate their lectures and get feedback from students. However, there haven’t been major advancements in the dance field in regard to online content solutions and social networking specifically for dance educators. Erica will address that in a bit.
First, let’s look at some of the most popular classroom technologies. Today, most classrooms are equipped with projectors for showing videos, slides, and transparencies. Many have upgraded from transparency projectors to document cameras, which allow the teacher to project opaque pages. Soundfield systems with speakers and microphones specifically designed for classroom use have enabled classroom size to get larger through increased ability to hear and be heard.
PowerPoint presentations are a popular way of delivering information to students, because they help to summarize content with optional color-coding, as well as audio, image, and video features. This is good because it caters to different learning styles, as some students are able to recall what they see better than what they hear in a lecture.
Interactive Whiteboards also provide visual learning stimuli, but can be more spontaneous, allowing the teacher to actually create the content during the lecture. An interactive whiteboard is an electronic version of the traditional chalkboard, and it records the teachers’ notes in the order they are written. This kind of technology is especially useful in classes where order matters, like in dance, because students can see how in movement one step leads to the next.
Classroom Response Systems are among the most recent classroom technologies. Response systems address the problem of teachers wondering whether students are actually understanding concepts. With the click of a button, students can answer an informal poll or pop quiz, and the results will be immediately tabulated.
Outside of the classroom, students are exposed to a variety of technologies in their everyday lives. Educators have taken advantage of social networking and Web 2.0 open source trends to create innovative learning solutions that bridge the gap between school and life. With Blackboard, a teacher can post documents for students to download, collect homework electronically, and monitor online discussions, among other features to facilitate teacher-student and student-student interaction outside of the classroom. Many teachers are using blogs to build classroom communities, as well. To learn more about how teachers are using blogs to promote learning, you can check out weblogg–ed.com.
Finally, most students are familiar with CD-roms that come as supplements to their textbooks, and some have even used e-books as alternatives to traditional textbooks. The publishing company Freeload Press, for example, offers free electronic textbooks by notable authors. These e-textbooks are a great solution to people who can’t afford textbooks, but differ little in that they are like PDFs of hardcopy textbooks. This has been one of the biggest criticisms of e-books.
Erica Nielsen:
While some people may enjoy carrying around an entire library in an electronic device, others find the simplicity of old-fashioned books more appealing. One of the differentiating features of PDF-style e-books is the ability to search for keywords, which is especially useful for students when studying. One potential downside is compatibility issues, since some e-books only work with certain e-book readers. A laptop or electronic device could also run out of power or cause headaches from screen glare, which aren’t issues with regular books. Finally, there is the possibility of damage if the device is accidentally dropped or spilled on. It costs a lot less to replace a traditional book than an e-book along with the device used to read it.
The main reason e-books haven’t become as popular as people originally thought is because they’re not that different from regular books, and they seem like a lot more hassle. But with all the technological innovations available today, it’s possible to create a highly interactive, dynamic e-book that caters to a variety of learning styles, thereby maximizing learning outcomes. The solutions provider we have worked with to create the pilot of a dynamic dance e-book is Xplana Learning, an online educational publishing company. This kind of interactive e-book solution could be very useful for dance educators to teach dance concepts in new and innovative ways.
Traditional books are based on learning through text and static images. [Pilot e-book demo] In our dynamic e-book, important words are reinforced with rollover text. Students can also click on a word to hear its pronunciation and definition. There is an interactive glossary for verifying definitions. Students can search using the index, basic search, or advanced search. Furthermore, embedded videos or pop-up videos offer more than static images or written description. Students can personalize the e-book with notes, bookmarks, highlights, internal page links and external Web links.
For different viewing options, they can rotate pages, change the page size, or read in either a one-page or two-page format. After students complete a textbook assignment, teachers rarely give immediate feedback. With our e-book model, students take quizzes and get automatic feedback, which they can send to their teacher. As a result, the teacher is then able to assess more efficiently student comprehension. This engaging solution can drastically change how students learn, and how teachers teach, because content is not restricted to text and static images, and it can be delivered to students in a variety of ways.
We believe that new e-learning solutions should be developed by dance professionals and made available to people, particularly dance educators, who can benefit from having such resources in a centralized location. Furthermore, we think dance educators should have a location for dynamic e-books and teaching services, where they can also share their ideas and be able to interact with each other. Now, we would like to introduce a forthcoming Web-based company that does just that.
Dance Education Solutions (DES) combines professional dance research and educational expertise with digital media in order to create affordable, dynamic solutions for the advancement of dance education. Some of the resources DES provides for dance educators include: lesson plans and activities, reproducibles, media resources, interactive e-books, product reviews, and dance education links. DES also offers pedagogical assistance to dance educators through case studies, reviews of products, editing, transcription, digitizing and video editing. Finally, DES creates community networking opportunities for dance educators to share lesson plans, activities, creative works and performances, dance products and events, and related ideas through virtual interaction.
In summary, we have touched upon the challenges of teaching dance as an art form, discussed top learning technologies, and addressed why e-books haven’t been widely accepted. We then showed a different way to perceive e-books; that is, as interactive learning environments that employ modern technologies, catering to diverse learning styles. Lastly, we introduced Dance Education Solutions, a revolutionary site based on collaboration, where dance educators can go for materials, services, and social networking.
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