Web 2.0 and the RAT Model

                                                          

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I teach freshman biology at Dakota High School in the Chippewa Valley School District.  After reading the post on the RAT model, I can appreciate its simplicity as compared with the SAMR model.  The author brings up one of the exact sticking points with me when I read about SAMR this spring: I could never distinguish between augmentation and modification, and I did not see a single example that helped me tell the difference.  It seemed like a needless and vague distinction which I am glad to see was brought up.  So, out with SAMR and in with RAT: Replace, Amplify, and Transform.  In addition to this post provided in our unit 2 agenda, here is another helpful post on the RAT model.  Here is a post that provides a critical examination of the lack of evidence that the SAMR model works.

It is easy for a teacher- with all the best intentions- to replace one medium with another.  I’ve done this for most of my career, expecting that using technology to deliver content would somehow magically redefine or transform my teaching.  Superficially that seems like a valid expectation: everyone touts technology in education, especially fun, flashy stuff.  But thanks to the long-running discussion between Richard Clark proponents (Clark, 1983) and Robert Kozma proponents (Kozma, 1994), the distinction between simply replacing a medium of delivery and developing instruction with technology that transforms your teaching has been helpfully examined and discussed.  There are plenty of examples of replacement, in which one medium supplants another as a mode of instructional delivery.  Web 2.0 tools span the spectrum of the RAT model, but I have not used them extensively in my teaching because until recently I had not been convinced that they are worth the time.  One example I have used as a replacement for traditional classroom instruction is Office 365.  (Here is a useful review, which includes a continuing chronology of updates and improvements that Microsoft has been addressing up to June of 2017.)  Office 365 allows users to create, upload, and real-time modify documents online, and each user has his own account that he can use to share documents with other users.  Two or more users can even modify the same document simultaneously, meaning that collaboration can be more equitable.  Now, this suite of tools can easily extend into amplification and transformation, but upon reflection I think I have only taken advantage of its ability to replace media.  For the past 5 years I have done a river project with my students, in which they go out into a stream near campus, collect biological, chemical, and physical data, and work with partners to create a presentation that answers a question that each group developed on their own.  From 2012 through 2015 I had students keep their data and documents as hard copies in their folders, but these would constantly get lost and disorganized.  It was also a challenge to determine how evenly students contributed to the workload.  So last year I tried to use Office 365, with the aim of helping students work, stay organized, and collaborate.  Except for a lot of really annoying technical bugs, its use was very successful: students reported that they found collaboration easier, that they were more organized, and that they rarely “lost” any documents, because they were saved to the Office 365 server instead of their flash drive or student account, both of which somehow get lost sometimes.  Clearly the use of this tool constitutes replacement, because instead of using hard-copy papers to do their work, students were using an online medium.

I would also consider our use of Office 365 to be an amplification.  Amplification is when technology in education enhances certain capabilities of teacher or student in ways that are not possible without the technology (streamlined, more efficient, more organized), but the content and learning experience are not essentially transformed.  There are two main features that I think qualify this level of RAT in our river project.  The first feature of Office 365 that qualifies for amplification is that students can share work with others simply by opening the share tool and typing in their partner’s user name.  Once their partner has been tagged, he or she has the ability to view or edit the document, depending upon what permissions the creator user allows.  This click-and-share ability really streamlined communication and collaboration, because students do not have to labor over creating multiple copies of data, or worry about their partner losing something they have spent a lot of time on.  Students reported that collaboration was “much easier” using Office 365, mostly because of the share feature.  A second aspect that qualifies Office 365 for amplification is that students can simultaneously modify a document at the same time.  I watched up to 4 students editing a Word document at the same time: some were proofreading, some were creating new paragraphs and summarizing data, and some were making recommendations about layout and formatting.  I also witnessed multiple students editing data in Excel spreadsheets, which can also be shared and simultaneously edited.  Students really enjoyed being able to see what their partner was typing or calculating, and if a tech-savvy student was partnered with another that was not as comfortable with the technology, this simultaneity was helpful for the students to form an informal sort of tutor-learner relationship.  Some students reported that they learned how to use Excel primarily by watching their partner edit a spreadsheet.  Together, the sharing and simultaneous editing abilities provided by Office 365 qualify this tool as amplifying the learning during the river project.

Although we used Office 365 to tap exciting possibilities last year, upon reflection I do not think that the way we used it qualified as transforming the educational experience.  Students found collaboration easier and sleeker, but the essential way in which they collaborated was still the same as with traditional instruction: they either divided the workload into smaller pieces or each worked together on the same piece at the same time.  And although they ultimately used Office 365 to assist them in creating materials for a poster presentation later, the actual product was not the result of an essential instructional transformation.  I think we would probably want to move beyond Office 365 in order to transform, so I think that a Web 2.0 tools that would have qualified as transforming the experience is the use of student wikis in order to create the presentation.  I could have had students create pages on WikiSpaces, where they create, modify, and share introductory information, tables and spreadsheets, photographs and maps, and discussions and conclusions.   The product of student work would be essentially transformed from a traditional presentation to a collaborative website in which each student can upload, share, and modify content.  A discussion board or comment section in the wiki would also be an excellent opportunity to promote dialogue between different groups.  I think this would be preferable to something like a Facebook discussion wall, which O’Bannon (2014) found was not very helpful in learning class content, partly because of the leniency of discussion requirements.  Students could comment on several other projects while responding to comments made about their own.  I could even create a class wiki for each section in which students summarize big ideas about the river and can edit and discuss our work in a class-wide forum.  Siko (2016) describes some simple ways to promote equitable (if not equal) collaboration and contribution to group projects such as wikis, which I found helpful in thinking of assigning points for collaboration, such as reviewing time-stamp records and using self-evaluation surveys.  Collectively, using Web 2.0 tools such as Office 365 combined with a wiki to create, communicate, and collaborate would qualify as a genuine transformation of the learning experience.

Clark, R. (1983).  Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445-459.

Kozma, R. (1994).  Will media influence learning?  Reframing the debate.  Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7-18.

O’Bannon, B.W., Britt, V.G., & Beard, J.L. (2014).  The writing on the wall: Using a Facebook group to promote student achievement.  Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 23(1), 29-54.

Siko, J. (2016).  Assessing collaboration: More than just lip service.  MACUL Journal, 36(2), 8-9.