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.