Thursday, August 26, 2010

Assessment...

Reflective Synopsis

There are so many different ICT tools that can be used in the regular classroom that it’s a little embarrassing to admit that I rarely see any ICT used in my prac classes. My teaching areas are English and the Study Of Society and the Environment (SOSE), so I usually look at the tools we use in this class and can visualise what I would do with them in my own classroom. With the world moving online, it is important for the 21st century teachers to be aware of the technology that surrounds them and that their students are immersed in outside of the classroom. It’s important that we have the knowledge of how to take these pieces of technology and use them to further our understanding and improve the student’s learning experience. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have stated that if everyone could take their teaching and learning online and become totally flexible with the technologies used then we could have a classroom where 100% of the students learning is catered for (1998). This idea should be encouraging teachers to get their classes online so they can better interact with their class, but in most cases the teachers believe in the “old” teaching methods because that was how they were taught and it worked for them.

One of the first technological tools we were introduced to in this class was Blogging. I think this is a fantastic tool. I haven’t seen it implemented outside of the university environment, but I think it’s something I would love to have in my classroom. It would enable me to look over the student’s work without standing over their shoulder. I would be able to see who is participating and who is not. I would be able to see the student’s ways of thinking, what they liked and disliked about the lesson and this would enable me to teach them in ways that would keep them interested in the class. By keeping the students engaged in the class they are more likely to succeed in any task that is set (Gross-Davis. B, 2002).

Another tool that can allow a teacher to see the way students are thinking would be mind maps. Mind maps are a great way of getting the students to effectively communicate what connections they have made during the classes which can show a teacher if the students have interpreted them incorrectly or have had trouble understanding something, and also if a student has made connections with the work that you hadn’t mentioned and they are using some higher order thinking which Barak M. et al (2007) state is a necessary outcome in today’s classroom because it is the best way to enhance a student’s thinking skills. This tool would also be a great way of finding out the prior knowledge of a student. This can ensure that the class is built at a level of learning not repetition or confusion as prior knowledge gives a foundation for the learning process (Rochelle. J, 1995).

Group work is essential to skill building in students (North Carolina State College, 2010) and a tool that I think I could use in a group working situation would be Wiki spaces. A Wiki is like a Blog but it is open for editing by more than just the owner of the Wiki. This could be a great way to show a collaborative project between the students. This means they don’t have to be together to get some of the work done, which helps with their time management and can also be a bit of fun rather than boring homework.

Another tool that we came across in this class was creating a Weebly website. Since then I have actually seen English classes create mock websites for assessment and I think this is a fantastic idea, but why only a mock website? Why not a real one? I realise that there are age restrictions on creating websites (most of the time), but this is a great way to get the students making an effort in their work because other people are going to see it, and the outcome would be something the students would be proud of. I would set the assessment to be creating a website on a topic of their choice so that the student is interested in the task and engaged in the topic so the students can feel that the task actually relates to them. This is something that the Schlechty Centre promotes in their Theory of Engagement as being incredibly important to the amount of learning a student will retain from a class (2010).

One tool that stood out to me was Power-point presentations. Power-points were in use when I was in school and I hated it because it was always slide after slide of notes that we had to copy. My opinion of this tool has actually changed in just a few hours by seeing all the different applications that power-point can be used for. You can use it for assessment by making the pages interactive and linking the correct answers to the next question and the incorrect answers to a “try again” page. You can use it to create a DVD for the parents as a summary of the students work through the year, or of a school camping trip, which is a great way to get the parents interested in the students work and the students would be keen to make the greatest presentation for their parents to see. Another interesting fact I learned about this tool is that you can actually make interactive movies with it. I wish my teachers had used this when I was in school, I would have had so much more fun with the content. When I get to use this in my classes in the future, I hope that I can engage the students by using this simple tool to create incredible lessons.

Another tool we were introduced to was using images and resizing them. I had always thought of images as a way of visualising aspects of the learning and using them to aid those who are visual learners, however it was suggested by one of my classmates that a picture could be used as the task itself; having a picture that just looks like scenery and asking the students to describe the ecosystem and what flora and fauna they would expect to find there. This seemed so simple that I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it earlier. In this class we also learned how to resize images to post them on the internet; this can be used in the above mentioned Blog, Wiki or Weebly website to show examples of the students work, or just to make the site look prettier.

One more tool we were introduced to that I thought was absolutely amazing was a Voki. A Voki is an animated person (or animal if you choose), that you create by choosing a face, facial features, hair styles, accessories, clothes, and a background before you type in text that you want your character to verbalise. This was so much fun; everyone had a blast creating these characters and I am sure that students would love to do this too. In my class I will use this tool for sure. I would set it up so that the students got to create a Voki as an introduction to their assignment, on their Blog or Weebly or Wiki. I would use it as an engaging hook at the start of a lesson to create a Voki to introduce your work to the viewer. By using something engaging to start off the lesson I will be able to have the students interested in the class and they are likely to retain more of the learning because they are enjoying the activities that they are doing in the class (Schlechty Centre, 2010).

The final tool I am going to discuss is Google maps. This is a tool that I use personally when I need directions to an address that I’m not familiar with. I think it would be a great tool in the classroom to use to engage the students in a SOSE project, in the case of looking at the environment we are studying in a historical context, and comparing it to what it looked like back then. Maps can also be uploaded into the Blog, Wiki or Weebly as extra data on the student’s work, or can be put as an image into a power-point movie. I love how by using one piece of technology in the classroom I get to weave its use into the class through the use of other technologies and this is a fantastic example of that. This tool can also help the students relate the task back to themselves so that they find it relevant and engaging and this helps me help them to retain more of the learning in my class (Schlechty Centre, 2010).

There were a wide variety of other tools that we used and I really enjoyed, but these were the ones that stood out to me as the ones I wanted to involve in my teaching, and to have in my classroom to keep my students engaged and entertained while they are learning.



References

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