“Distributed cognition is a way to understand how people interact with their environment and how they can be enabled by the environment to undertake highly complex tasks that would usually be beyond the abilities of the unassisted individual” (Brickell & Harper, 127).

The second lesson that I viewed in my first grade Canterbury classroom was something a bit different than usual. In this classroom observation, the children were required to complete an assessment to gauge where they were at in the subject of ELA. The quote above fits perfectly within the context of this lesson, because the children completed these assessments on the iPads provided in the classroom.
These iPads enabled the children as well as the teachers to complete a task in a more efficient, organized and individualized way than if it was completed without the use of this technology.
This classroom is not on a one-to-one correspondence with iPads, so this means this assessment had to be done by passing the iPads off to their peers in order to complete it.
As discussed in the last distributive cognition entry, there are affordances of technology as well as with technology. There are many effects dealing with the technology usage and availability within the conduction of the lesson plan. For example an effect of this technology usage would be the time needed to complete it. If all children don’t have an iPad at the same time, the length of the lesson will be much longer. If we look at it from a different perspective though, we see that while the children who had iPads were completing their assessment – the other children waiting were working on different subject skill sets. This could be seen as a great use of time and an efficient learning opportunity.
Though this post will not be discussing the effects of and effects with technology, I believe it is important to tie these posts together cohesively.
This blog entry will discuss the idea of offloading – which “can be thought of as a change in the distribution of tasks and subtasks across systems. Off-loading is always in aid of efficiency, and it can aid coordination by freeing up cognitive resources so a person (or other cognitive system) can focus more directly on the task of coordination itself.” (Martin, 94). In other words, it does some of the work for the student or teacher so that they can focus on the actual, intended task at hand or what their focus should be on.
“Because educational technologies require time and money to implement, there is an expectation that they will do more than simply fit into an environment, but will also lead to significantly improved outcomes in thinking and learning” (Martin, 88). Due to this expectation we will be exploring the idea of offloading in the context of this assessment lesson that was observed.
This assessment required the use of headphones, in which the children would listen to reading passages and answer comprehension questions to ensure understanding.
The passage can be re-read as many times as the child would like or would need in order to answer the following prompted responses.
This pre-recorded reading offloads some of the work for the teacher. If you were giving a whole class reading comprehension assessment, the amount of times it may need to be repeated for their students could hinder others learning as well as be extremely time consuming for the whole group.
This pre-recorded reading also offloads some of the work for the student. If the student were given the passage to read on their own, instead of read out-loud to them it may hinder their comprehension. For example, accidentally skipping over lines or misreading words would effect their comprehension skills. If the goal of the assessment is to check if the student understands what they hear and can relay it back, then that is all it should assess.
Lastly, we should look at this idea of offloading as individually appropriate in the context of developmentally appropriate learning. “When off-loading increases the efficiency of some parts of the system, it can make individual change (individual learning) more likely” (Martin, 94). As stated previously, if the children can go at their own pace, re-read passages or questions as many times as they’d like and work on their own – we see individual learning take place. This is crucial in all methods of learning – differentiating to make learning available to all students not just a select few.