Week 4

ICT in ENGLISH:
Today we have been looking at the Dreamtime stories and English retell using Inspiration 8, and cutting and pasting in 'Paint'. The activity was made difficult as we tried to interpret the story line in the video. Here is my attempt. We were required to take screen prints of the video and make a concept map in Inspiration. The idea is to use the teacher guide, and instead of the students numbering the order of set sentence strips, they would be required to watch the video over, to find the relevant part of the story and match it to the teacher captions.

This is a fantastic way of breaking up the monotony of writing summaries and comprehension cloze. In literacy groups with 4 or 5 computers in the classroom this would work very well or indeed as a whole class activity if the class were to have individual laptops. If you did not have a video of a story, you could also ask the students to work on a concept map of a selected text and to map the main ideas, in order of the story.

ICT in MATHS:
Again I am amazed at the professional results you can achieve, with little effort, with the aid of software. Greg was showing us how we can implement Excel into our Maths lessons, by using graphs, interpreting data, presenting our findings in a logical, visual manner. In a maths rotation, some children can use graph paper, some could use paper and glue, while others could be doing it on the computer. A website that we visited for graphics was m-ms.com.au or the US site: us.mms.com/us/fungames/ecards/. There is also information presented as percentages and nutrition information that you could use in a science unit.


This week's lecture was focusing on the Victorian education departments ICT site - The Learning Federation -. There are thousands of short clips and interactive games that are designed to stimulate the students and enhance their learning. Again this would be great for the visual learners. Many of the games for the younger ages have audio, so the youngsters can listen to the stories and follow the verbal instructions. A great idea. Just a pity that we had already completed our 'Webquest' and had no room for any of them.

I have found since being on practicum, that not all school internet servers are reliable. Each time I have tried to implement ICT into my classes in a meaningful way, the server is always down. I have had to quickly revert to plan B, on at least three occasions. This is not encouraging me to use ICT in the same way I was hoping. I now understand why the other teaching staff look at me with great interest each time I suggest I am going to give it 'another go!'. When technology does not work, it can throw your whole lesson plan out the window. I am not deterred yet. I will endeavour to try again next term!

Other interesting ideas for future classroom projects can be obtained from another education department site. There are many different uses and you could scaffold different activities across the educational levels. http://epotential.education.vic.gov.au/showcase/index.php?showcase_id=53

Week 3

Creativity and Design in VELS. We all participated in completing a design brief, and were challenged to make a jumping frog from these set materials; cardboard, rubber band, frog picture, sticky tape and scissors. Design briefs include I/D (Investigate/Design), P( Produce), A/E ( Analyse and Evaluate). Under VELS' design and creativity domain, students should identify simple systems using common materials. They need to test, evaluate and revise their designs and identify what has led to any improvements in their design. By all having a go, I could appreciate that it is actually a difficult task, and by looking around the room and all sharing our ideas, there was a large variety of options available. This enabled us to listen to other people's explanations and reasoning behind their choice in model. There were some designs that left me thinking 'WOW'. As a primary student, being given an insight into other ways of thinking, may just be able to open a 'doorway' for students who need to look at things from a different direction.

Today we also looked at games on www.quia.com/web. Moving onto the Quia activities was eye opening. Instead of the students using Blackline Masters to complete comprehension 'cloze' activities, it would be more engaging for the students come up with their own activities to determine their level of comprehension. A teacher could use cloze activities, matching game or 'Who wants to be a millionaire?', as fun ways of determining students' prior knowledge at the start of a unit, or to see how they have developed during a unit of work.

While we looked at the fun side of ICT, we also looked at the serious side of ICT, bullying, privacy and safety and our responsibilities as teacher. The DEECD site has a great teacher section on Cybersafety outlining 6 stages of cybersafety in the classroom: 1) Lead - the school in safe and ethical use of ICT, 2) Educate - staff and students what is safe and regulations on copyright, 3) Manage - internet management - filters, and the use of educationally approved sites, 4) Support - what to do when things go wrong, 5) Empower the students through student leadership and 6) Participate. It has been shown that learning occurs not solely because of the use of ICT, rather through teachers creating authentic student centered learning.

A better site aimed at children themselves is Cybersmart.gov.au. It targets children age appropriately by having different modules - lower primary, middle school and teenagers. Audio is used to get the messages across as well as interactive games and quizzes. The students should be introduced to this site and educated on responsible use on the internet as they start to use it, rather when it is too late and cyberbullying has occurred. Topics covered include: online bullying, mobile phone bullying, privacy and staying e-secure.

Week 2

Introduction to Publisher and ePortfolios

Introduction to MS Publisher. This week's workshop has progressed at a much better pace. Using the interactive board to slowly go through the steps, the class has been able to better follow the steps. I can see that I am not the only one, as everyone is appearing more relaxed.

Our first task was to produce a brochure of a holiday destination. Publisher was a great mode to do this in, as it provides you with professional looking results, quickly. The design templates allow you to experiment with different looks. The students would take great pride and ownership of their works, when using these ways of displaying their texts. A great way to complete procedural texts - as Greg said - for example - 'How to change batteries in a torch.'

After completing the brochures we moved onto ePortfolios - looking at how we can use them in the classroom and also how we can use these for our own job hunting. The readings advise us that the use of Digital portfolios allow for the students to learn ICT skills in a real life situation, by creating their own multimedia presentation, and saving their works in a 'workable area'. Rather than using their ICT skills in the ICT lab to produce works that are often thrown into the schoolbag - never to re-emerge.

James Andersons' (2004) article of Habits of Mind - informs us that students, using a digital portfolio can learn skills that will help them become lifelong learners. The 4 important steps are: 1) Collection of data to display 2) Selection of the types of data to display, 3) Reflection upon the progress that enabled you to complete the work and 4) Projection for future self learning. For example the students can show a range of works and how they have improved, or learnt how to complete these. From here, they can set their own goals on how they want their portfolio to look, and how they can go about learning the steps to show further progress.

Woodword and Nanlohy's reading highlighted the benefit for visual and auditory learners. That it is a good tool for authors of a digital portfolio to learn ICT skills. As student teachers, their study group found it good for developing self esteem, a tool for professional development and a method of ensuring good teacher practice. A digital portfolio also allows the author to think about who their audience is and provides them with an opportunity to design their own individual, creative presentation while still complying with all the task requirements.

Here is an example of my first attempt at an ePortfolio. It requires a lot more work!