SimSchool - Pedagogy and Technology

Last week I got to know SimSchool. This is a simulation of a classroom where you can practice with teaching.  In the simulation you can give different tasks to different students and also say or ask something to them. As the developers of SimSchool say: ‘SimSchool is like a flight simulator for educators’. It is a place where teachers can explore different kind of pedagogies, discover the difference between students and see the result of their teaching. In SimSchool the time goes faster, so 1 minute lesson time is 10 seconds real time. This way you can in a short time practice a lot and figure out which kind of pedagogies fit whit which kind of student. In figure 1you can see what SimSchool looks like. In this module there are only two students. In figure 1 Everly is selected and now you can assign a task to Everly or talk to him. While the simulation is running you can see how he is performing. Right now he is listening, his power, happiness and academic skills (graphics below) are zero. If you assign a task to Everly you can see these graphics change. And if the bar next to his head is full, he can’t learn anything more and you have to assign a new task.

Figure 1 - SimSchool

To try it out I played the module ‘Everly’s bad day’.  In this module there is a certain lesson plan. In this plan there are three task each taking 15 minutes. The tasks are: go over last week’s lesson, take notes during lecture and take an oral quiz. If you use this plan, Everely doesn’t perform well. Your task is to find out when he does perform well. I noticed Everely likes to work with someone. Also he needs someone who will encourage him. So I changed the tasks and when he got disruptive I asked him to get back to work or if he needed my help. The tasks I assigned where: Oral quiz,  a whole class oral response,  compare and contrast, a team work sheet and play a game. The sentenced I used where: get back to work now, are you doing what I asked?,  do I need to show you?, do you need my help?, can you tell me what you know? After 45 minutes I ended the simulation. The results turned out to be very good. And looked like figure 2. So I experienced that changing the plan was really positive for Everly.

Figure 2 - Results simulation

This experience with SimSchool made me think about this way of learning teachers how to teach. I think SimSchool is a good way to let teachers think about different pedagogies that they could apply in their classroom. Only you don’t know exactly what the students are doing. What does ‘do an oral quiz’ mean? And also aren’t there really much possibilities when you want to talk to the students. Most of the time the thing you really want to say isn’t in the options of the simulation. Also letting every student do another thing is possible here, but that’s not realistic. And last I think school doesn’t have to be fun all the time. I noticed that only specific tasks got Everly studying and his academic abilities up, while I think also the things he doesn’t like he should do sometimes in class. So there are few things that aren’t really realistic in the simulation and this makes it difficult to use it in teacher education. It is a good start, but you can’t learn everything with it. I think this could function as an introduction of the teacher education course, so they can think about different pedagogies and experience the difference between students. But to really learn this you still need to practice in reality and something like SimSchool can function as additional help material.

Thinking about a combination of pedagogy and technology, I think there are a lot possibilities. First of all you almost never use only one pedagogy. If you use problem-based learning you can also use collaborative learning and it can at the same time be project-based learning. So you can’t name technologies that fit with a specific pedagogy, they can fit with different pedagogies. SimSchool is a technology that supports learning different pedagogies and experiencing what the effect is. But when you are using a pedagogy in the class you can also use technology, like with discovery learning you can use mobile phones to learn. Or even with traditional learning you can use a whiteboard and a beamer.  When you talk about teacher education you can still use these technologies and let the students use it themselves. If the students of for example the Dutch Pabo want to learn how to apply collaborative learning, they can do it themselves. Let them work collaboratively and let them choose a technology they want to use. This way they can experiment with it themselves and learn how it works. For this collaborative learning they can use blackboard or a wiki to share their ideas. This way they learn the pedagogy by using it themselves and also experience which technologies are useful and which are not.

Boer (2004) says: ‘it is important that the pedagogy models in teaching are not technology driven, although technology can provide options for stretching the mold’. I think the same. If you want something and it is useful to use technology, please do it. But don’t use technology just to use it. First choose how you want to teach, which kind of pedagogy and then look if there is a useful technology. If there is not, then don’t use technology.

So to come back to SimSchool. I thinks SimSchool is a good tool to start with, but isn’t realistic enough to do everything with. To learn the different pedagogies and combine these with technology, it is best to try it out yourself and experience it. Not only in a simulation but also in real life. Than the teachers know the best what a different pedagogy means and how it works. For every pedagogy there are different technologies you can use, easy or complex ones, everything is possible. As long as you make sure it fits with the students, the content you want them to learn and you can work with it yourself. Only don’t start with a complex online learning environment if you don’t know how it works, then start with the simple version. And if you don't agree, let me know! Maybe we can have a discussion about this topic!

See SimSchool at: www.simschool.org

Reference: Boer, W.F. de (2004). Flexibility support for a changing university. Doctoral dissertation. Faculty of Educational Science and Technology, Univeristy of Twente. Enschede, NL: Twente University Press.