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.