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!