My Blog Reply for Philippa Ross

I want to discuss one key point that you typed about in the article, which is the potential that ICT has in the Art classroom, to allow students to take risks in a controlled and safe manner. This is important as you pointed out about your art student, who was able to aesthetically alter her Art project by using an image of her work on a computer program but not damage or change her original physical work. I believe this is vital to a differentiated curriculum (if that's your goal) ICT allows students to experiment, innovate and create meaningful art at their own pace; which allows for all learners to acquire knowledge according to their ability.

Love The Post!

Catch up soon!


http://artroom2.blogspot.com/2011/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-au-ja-x.html

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

I’m going to honest and upfront with my non MTeach readers, I know I promised a blog about Prezi, but I must talk about how ICT (Information and Communications Technology) can enhance knowledge-building in student team activities. So I want to discuss an in class project that I have put in place and how it is related to using ICT in both a interesting as well as knowledge-building way. But first I want to address the ICT standard, I would to discuss in relation to my in class project.

Ohoh yes the knowledge they could build......

ICT for communicating

The ICT for communicating dimension focuses on students using ICT to:

• present ideas and understandings to audiences
• communicate with known and unknown audiences
• support knowledge-building among teams.

Students use ICT to support oral presentations to live local audiences and to present ideas and understandings to unknown, remote audiences. They use ICT to communicate with others, both known and unknown, with the purpose of seeking and discussing alternative views, acquiring expert opinions, sharing knowledge and expressing ideas. Students also locate information from a range of online and multimedia resources to support their own learning.

Source: http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/structure.html

I wish I could make any subject as exciting as Mr Jones!!!

Now on to the exciting stuff! My in class project is part research and part presentation, students are to use search engines to both build their knowledge on what makes up a Coastline. This includes the landforms, the process in which they are formed, what kind of wildlife that calls beaches their home and lucky last, what is the process of Erosion and Deposition (The main Objective of the project).  Now the research aspect of this task is not particularly interesting but you would be surprised how uncertain or perhaps unsure students are of the internet as a knowledge building tool. For example a student asked me how does she find how about Hump-back whales, mind you she was staring blankly at her laptop, which was also on the search engine Google. The presentation aspect of the task is where students are instructed to use Prezi to communicate their researched knowledge; I love Prezi because it allows for such freedom of direction and allows the students to in-bed youtube clips (Expert opinions). It also allows the students to share this multitude of information in a fun and dynamic way. If you don’t believe me, check out Prezi on http://prezi.com/. Anyway guys the weekend is just 8 hours away!

Think about ICT in a Low SES School.

Another super serious post about the trials and tribulations of working at a Low SES school in a rough part of Melbourne. I wanted to follow up my previous post with something a bit more light hearted but I seem to be going home and reflecting on not simply my own personal issues in the classroom, but both the state of the School's budget as well as the culture towards ICT by the staff as well. I would like to preface my next paragraph with a story. On a Wednesday afternoon, after school had finished of course, I attended a year 7 and 8 staff meeting about innovative ways to use ICT in the classroom. Now this meeting began with the following statement "Let's pretend that our three school projectors work, the laptops don't take 20 minutes to log into the school network and that the school network doesn't crash every hour", I found this an interesting yet pragmatic way to begin a staff meeting. Apart from being slightly pessimistic about using ICT in the classroom, I threw in my 2 bob just for a laugh about using PREZI.

We all have these little moments.......

I was met with the following statement "I've used Prezi, it would take two or three lessons to teach them how to use it, you're entering dangerous territory", I of course kept my mouth shut, me being the student teacher and all. Now if you didn't quite pick up what the inference was, here it is, instructional classes on using presentation programs would be a waste of time with students that are well known for challenging behavior. I found the whole meeting confronting for a number of reasons but I will just point my main two issues:

1. This school is clearly suffering due to its current budget, 

2. Staff are jaded about using ICT due to a collection of behavior management issues, poor resources and their own misunderstandings about technology.

I often feel like this when I come home from staff meetings.

As you can tell from this post and my last post I'm struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I promise that my next post will be exciting! Until then look at what I did in Photoshop today.

Try and Maybe Fail.

I've been thinking of an appropriate post topic and I think I would like to talk about my last lesson of the week, which was period 4 Friday afternoon. There are times where new experiences humble me but I have never been humbled or perhaps forced to witness the total unraveling of my classroom before my eyes, I type this because I was naive of the day to day problems that face teachers in the Public sector. Now I won't go into detail about the school I am placed at but lets just say it's in a suburb that isn't well off and is also trapped between two low Socio-Economic Status areas. It is very much a victim of its surroundings, my experience so far has at times been challenging with students that don't care for school or anyone that wants to help them for that matter. But last period Friday afternoon, was home to aggressive and bully like behavior from eight year 8 students towards teachers and their class mates alike. Constant actions that were by nature undermining class respect for the teacher as well as control over the class. This has ultimately lead me to my philosophical problem of where do I go from here?

At times I do think some students are pure Evil.

I posed this question to myself and to some of my colleagues, and was answered with "everyone has a bad lesson once and a while", to which I do agree with, but upon further reflection I have asked myself if students that are repeat offenders for what can only be described as continues disruptive, aggressive and bullying behavior be given any kind of pity? I ask this question because these eight students in particular have and continue to be trouble for the majority of the staff, at times I have thought that the behavior of the violent minority should never have priority over the majority of the students in the class who want to work and learn. I'm sure that this comment will upset other teachers, because we as teachers should never give up but I often wonder that all the time, effort and love of teaching we invest in problem students means that someone else is missing out. And it's typically the middle ground of students who are neither brilliant or violent. So why should they be denied a better education for the sake of a minority, who quite frankly don't care and go out of their way to show you that they are proud of it? 

I don't intend to give up on these eight students, so do not think me heartless, but there are times I do ask, what if there are others who are far more deserving of that same time and effort, I so readily give to challenging behavior.

  

Study Video Games In The Classroom.

I have often thought about where Video Games fit in Society, like the range of titles as well as the genres themselves we push these games into convenient yet one dimensional categories, like Predator of Children, Scapegoat for civil violence/disobedience and Virtual babysitter. But have we ever stopped to consider Popular Video Games as a topic of study in Education, similar to the way we look at literature and film as text, now I'm not referring to those lovely educational games that we used in high school to teach us how to touch type. No I refer to titles like Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft and other popular titles, which means the study of the Conceptual underpinnings of Video Games and by extension the culture that comes with it. Now I know what you're probably thinking "oh LJN how dare you compare Video Games to Art, you're so crazy, thinking you can discuss Video Games beyond the Programming classroom". In which I reply with "why the hell not?"

  Ayn Rand would be rolling in her Grave........

Video Games can be discussed in the classroom from all different Method perspectives, for instance Objectivist underpinnings and the use of  post WWII Art Deco to convey ideas of Grand Vision, in the Video Game BioShock. You could possibly go further and compare both BioShock to its sequel BioShock 2 as virtual perspectives on Objectivism vs Altruism in a Philosophy class about issues of Utopia and Dystopia. Or you could go look at the pros and cons discovered in the Virtual self through interactive Avatar based environments like Second Life, World of Warcraft and Eve, better yet discussions of virtual currencies in reality based Economics is bound to be fun.

                        
Before you laugh and make some kind of joke about WOW click the link below

THIS LINK

Make a Movie!

I'm slightly embarrassed to type that I haven't really thought about implementing Movie Making in the classroom, it might be because I haven't had an opportunity in placements. But I have thought about this at great length while I was at lunch and believe I'm making excuses for being narrow minded and not thinking like a teacher when I see movie making programs. And I'm willing to call out other teachers, who still believe that Movie Making has no place in the Humanities classroom. Movie Making is a fantastic task that contains a clear set of Objectives, Roles and at the end has a completed effort where all the hard work can be seen. I won't go into too much detail but think about the roles of a Director, Costume designer, Lighting expert and etc. These are all complicated roles that can be discussed as well as questioned before, during and after the process of Movie making; which is vital to observing whether or not the student understands the task. But it is also important to remember that a task as exciting and involving as movie making is going to force personalities to rub up against each other.

 

Warning: Students may exhibit furious anger during this task......

Now that the justification for Movie Making is complete, lets discuss some the creative ideas for respective topics. When I use the term Movie, I don't use the term definitively, documentaries or news broadcasts are both equally valid when setting up Humanities projects. For instance a documentary response to this article by Andrew Bolt (I could say something witty about him and his values but you know..........is there really any point) http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_cameron_is_right_and_multiculturalism_has_failed/  . Or a theatrical response to the political underpinnings of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. There is a reason why I continue to place an emphasis on Response, student's interpreting data and then creating a response can be useful when observing signs that infer critical thinking.

 

There are a lot of people who wish they had thought of this earlier.

Today's entry will only be a short one, so I leave you with a request rather than a quote, read through the blog by Bolt and then scroll down to the comments. Even these comments can be used in the Humanities classroom, whether you agree with them or not, they still provide interesting and diverse data for students.

Read My First Entry

My google, uhhh I mean my computer has often stood more as a tool than an interactive opportunity for learning. That isn't to say that I'm Computer illiterate, actually quite far from it. I think it would be fair to say that today's tutorial confirmed that I can indeed make effective Power Point slides, which I might add is a blessed relief considering the fact that I have been using slides to teach year 9 SOSE. 

                                          Narcoleptic convention...... I think not!

Apart from confirming my ability to create dot points and action buttons, a question did occur to me while I sat in class single digit typing "Last Lesson". How do Power Point Presentations become magical cures for Insomnia? Well I think there are a number of ideas that come to mind:

1. Too many words and such!

2. Clashing Colours.

These of course are the obvious ones I heard in class but upon thinking a little bit more on the topic, (while trolling Conservative News Paper Sites) I came to the conclusion that the beauty of an effective Power Point Presentation, like any kind of delivery of information lies in its Simplicity. Now that's not to say that I subscribe to the "Keep it Simple, Keep it Stupid" principle for giving presentations (although I do when trolling the Herald Sun forums, ouch.... too easy) but a presentation that is accessible by all students, which is clear and concise is going to be more effective than an overloaded and overstimulating PP. Let's be honest, who wants to stare at this for 20-30 minutes? 

                            So pretty and colourful, your students won't know what hit them!

 Or This?

                                        Even the teacher can be forgiven for losing track.

4 Quick Tips:

1. Your Background does not have to be supercool-blow your student's minds awesome. Try to stick to single colours, so you don't have to stuff around with the font colour as well.

2. Short, Sharp and Concise. No one likes a show-off, and it allows more time for fun activities.

3. This one seems obvious but you should mention your sources after each image used.

4. Try to make it interactive or even Smart Board friendly (it's ok to have students move around the classroom).

I will leave you with a nice quote that often describes my frustrations with computers.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.  ~Joseph Campbell