ICT Integration

Content Management Systems

Content management systems like Edmodo would be very useful as a tool to organsie information and promote collaboration between students. Edmodo also allows teachers to test the students’ knowledge with a simple standardised testing program which can provide valuable feedback to the teacher. Students and teachers can create questionaires which might be used to vote on class decisions.

Unfortunately, Edmodo might not be the best choice in every school or every subject. The best choice is likely to be whatever the school is currently using as all the information can be in the one place. If the school I work at doesn’t use a content management system, I’d happily train the teachers how to use one that suits the schools needs.

Presentation Skills and Tools

Past: What presentation tools was the preferred delivery method of your teachers when you were at school?
During primary school, there was heavy use of the whiteboard and an overhead projector because that was the technology that existed at the time. There were limited projectors so most teachers had planned to use the whiteboard. Highschool was mostly whiteboard based as most of my subjects were math and physics.

Present: How are you going to present to your students?
In physics and math, there is is an element of practice that requires some demonstration on problem solving. The demo will likely to be using a white board or projector with a tablet connected wirelessly (depending on the technology at the school). The introduction to new concepts and exploration of phenomena of physics phenomena will make heavy use of a computer for animations and simulations.

Future: How will I use tools to present in the future?
Websites like Socrative.com would be useful in a middle school class for fun quizzes that provide feedback to me of teaching effectiveness.  I want to use Quizlet.com as an end of class activity when teaching new content. It involves teamwork and competition and would be a good reward for students if they behave and get their work done early.

Literacy and Numeracy

Should ICT be considered as important as the 3 R’s?: I’m not sure if we are actually getting away from the ‘basics’ but ICT should be taught parallel to the ‘basics’ starting from a young age. Basic literacy and numeracy skills are essential throughout our life and ICT skills are becoming increasingly essential. There should be no excuse for being IT illiterate when leaving school.

Choose one program and comment if it is useful/not useful for your content area: Geogebra is a pretty nifty tool as a math teacher as it makes it easy to investigate the shapes of functions and other geometric properties (like a circle fitting into every triangle) (Links to an external site.). It might not be the best tool for problem solving as students will only have access to a graphics calculator in an exam and need to be able to work problems out with that.

Do you think that the role of the teacher has changed as we move from the industrial age to the information age?: The pedagogy has changed a little bit. The same basic content needs to be taught but now we need to teach students about how the internet works and what sort of information you can trust on the internet. Students have access to an enormous amount of information – they just need to know whether or not that information is any good. I also think that teaching students how to learn independently is important as the internet provides a platform for learning many skills that exist outside the realm of schools.