VELS ICT

ICT supports knowledge-building among teams and enables team members to collaborate, inquire, interact and integrate prior knowledge with new understanding.

I love a good concept map! I find it an excellent way to collate my thoughts into some sort of useable format. I can’t work in a linear fashion when I’m brainstorming, I need to be able to go off on tangents. They are a fantastic way for students to visualize their thinking and make links between concepts.

Unfortunately my concepts map scribbled on the back of a scrap piece of paper (or on the whiteboard during class) can be a bit confusing to read. Creating an electronic mind map, either with Powerpoint or Word, or a Interactive whiteboard program if you are doing it as a class has a number of benefits. Benefits beyond the obvious legibility of the text! An electronic concept map can have greater impact because you can use colours and fonts to highlight themes and commonalities, which encourages a deeper level of thinking. It also allows you to move thought bubbles around so they are in a more logical order. If you were to do this with a pen and paper, this would require you to draw a long line, which makes your map cluttered and confusing. Christophersen (2006) claims that graphic organisers “immediately engages the student in learning and focuses on identifying essential information” (p. 57)

My school has a class resources folder on the shared drive where teachers and students can save information. Unfortunately as a teacher candidate I can not access this, but I can see the benefit of it, and if I had easy access to it, I would have uploaded videos, articles and other interesting links so that students who finish tasks early to go in and have a look at. The class resources folder also helps with group work because it provides a central spot for students to put their information so that if they are away the next class, their group members can still carry on with the task. Students can also share resources that they have found interesting or useful with their classmates by using the folder. This sort of resource sharing could also be done with a blog, wiki or application such as Drop Box. However I feel it is important to use the structures in place at the school – if they are sufficient – to create positive habits and a culture of using ICT in the classroom.

Christophersen, P. (2006) Making connections between dimensions, Compak, 2, 56-58.

There is an article in today's Age that discussed a positive correlation between textese (the annoying abbreviations used in SMS) and literacy levels. Here is the link: http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/textese-gr8-training-4-poets-of-2moro-20110909-1k1o1.html

Students in my 9/10 Legal and Politics class have a strong aversion to writing. They will say their point of view, but hate having to write. Writing only gets better with practice, and my mentor teacher told me I had to keep encouraging them to write. However, the more I pushed, the further they stuck there heels in. Perhaps if I got them to write 140 character responses I would have more luck.

A few weeks ago, I confiscated a phone from a girl in that class. She loudly protested "How am I going to play Words with Friends now?" I looked down at her phone and she was indeed playing scrabble. This girl has very poor literacy and has a strong dislike for school, yet in appears when the means suits her she will engage in literacy tasks. Unfortunately I have finished up with this class now, but it would have been nice to have some more time with them to test out different ICT methods of engaging them.

EduStar

While I was on placement I had the opportunity to attend some EduStar training put on by the Hume region. For those who don't know, EduStar is a collection of software provided by the Department of Education for students and teachers to use in the classroom. Some of it is freeware (e.g. Google Sketchup), while others the department had to pay for. I wasn't able to have in installed on my personal laptop due to licensing issues so I haven't had a chance to play with it since the training, but it gave me a good introduction to the package and got me thinking about how I would use it in my classes.

Some of them were not related to my subject areas, such as Stellarium which allows you to look at the stars from a range of different places in the world. If you are a science teacher (or a star nerd!) I recommend you check it out.

A program I really liked was called Kahootz (http://www.kahootz.com/kz/). It allows students to make a 3D world, similar I suppose to the Sims games, but with more graphics. In the short time I had to play with the program, I made a dragon who roared and flew around the mountain. I can see this program being useful for a lower secondary creative writing task in English as you can add a voice over so you could make a mini film of your story. While the finished product would be very impressive, it would take quite a bit of time to the learn how to use the program, and you could argue that it would take away from developing creative writing skills. There is also the risk that the stories may be dictated a little by the graphic available, so you would end up with multiple stories about dragons. From memory there was quite a range of scenes and characters, but it is never going to be as broad as a child's imagination.

As with all software program, you need to question whether it will add value to the lesson or whether it is just a gimmick. If you could do a better job with an old fashion pen and paper, I would do that instead. But EduStar does offer a range of ways to engage student students through ICT.