ICT & VELS

 "Through the selection and application of appropriate equipment, techniques and procedures, students learn to process data and information to create solutions to problems and information products that demonstrate their knowledge and understandings of the concepts, issues, relationships and processes related to all areas of learning."

I swore in the opening post of this blog that I would make a conscious effort to integrate ICT into my teaching this semester. No one was more surprised than me when it actually turned out I used something digital in every single class I taught in the block round. And I don’t mean I just checked the time on my iPhone, or played Angry Birds, or discreetly looked up words I didn’t know the meaning of with online dictionaries (although that did happen once – who knew ‘mendacious’ was a word? I’m yet to meet anyone who does… apart from this student in my Year 10 ESL class who managed to use it in a closed book, in-class essay. I know right. What. A. Gun.). But I did use various other ICT techniques to enhance my students’ learning and engagement during class. 

My focus on this round has been with Year 9 and Year 10 ESL classes. The Year 10 cohort has been given laptops this year to help them develop their learning and ICT skills base. Interestingly, they all hate the things – apparently the laptops are slow, heavy, unreliable, distracting, and since they aren’t allowed to charge them at school, always running out of batteries. However, none of them can deny that the laptops have made extra room for them to “demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the concepts, issues, relationships and processes” in a way that handwriting never did. Now they are able to swiftly type up ideas, checking their spelling and grammar along the way, and as teachers we can see their conceptual understanding of texts in half the amount of time. They are suddenly able to show off knowledge much more effectively. Often, we will plug their personal laptops into the projector and read through individual work on the screen so we can edit together as a class, which has shown to be a valuable learning experience for us all. 

The Year 9 students will not get their own laptops until next year, and at the moment the computer literacy in this group is very low. On top of this, more than half the class are recent arrivals to Australia and the English language, and therefore have extremely low written skills, so I think it’s pretty important for them to get up to scratch on their hand writing before we put them onto computers. To integrate ICT in this class then, I decided to use my own laptop to help with presenting ideas. As we were doing a unit on poetry, I had a lot of fun showing them examples of poetic devices on the projector, and listening to music together that had lyrical components showing these poetic devices (even though sometimes my music was “GROSS, Miss!” and I had to find some less “gross” music for future lessons).

Although at first I was hesitant about using ICT in my classes, I’ve had so much fun with it on this teaching round that I’m sure I’ll continue to use it as much as possible. Also because I’ve already spent the $30 on an adaptor to plug my Mac laptop into their PC-only projectors.

[My comment on someone else's blog can be found here on Emma's site.]