Blog Promt #3

Interdisciplinary and ICT Knowledge

In working my two placements I have learned a lot about the role ICT plays in 21^st century education. The biggest difference I see in today’s education system is that more accommodations are being made for students with different learning needs. For example, the main focus of one of my placements was to use ICT to communicate the same information taught in the in class to ESL students who struggle with just verbal/non-verbal information and need to learn visually.

            In working with my placements I have learned a lot about the available ICT tools that I have never used before. This was my first time working with Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Forms and though I used Google Docs/Drive before, I have learned a lot about how to use them effectively, making them a much more powerful tool.

Thinking and Inquiry

            Organizing and planning projects is something I have always struggled a great deal with. During this project I have had to not only plan around my schedule but also the schedules of my partner Danielle but most importantly both of my placement teachers. Before meeting with our teachers Danielle and I had to plan exactly what to ask the teachers to make sure we know what they want from us. Once we understood their needs we made to make sure we knew what we required from our teachers to accomplish our goals. Now that we have a plan and clear idea of how our finished product should look and function, we are able now able to make adjustments to our work and fix technical problems that we are facing.

            Some examples of ICT analysis we have done are looking at teacher’s old websites to see what the problems are and what tools/information are worth using in their new websites. Also, we have had to find and sort through many educational resources for health/fitness and pick and choose which ones will be the most beneficial for teachers and students.

            My teachers challenge me creatively because often they do not know exactly what they want from us but have a more general idea for the site. For example one of my teachers wanted away to digitally submit an assignment that students have to do every year. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to create a dropbox type system or if there would be a more efficient way to do this. Because the project required students to fill out a daily log we created a form he cite for students to submit their answers. This ensures that students fill out log everyday and not all at once at the end of the project.

           

After we had everything on the cite that are teachers wanted from us, we had to make sure that everything was functional and laid out logically. This is because the website was actually going to be used by students. Every time we added a new feature it seemed like we had to change of the layout of the website to make sure it was organized and easy to use.

Communication

            We didn’t develop any written instructions on for teaching ICT skills. We verbally explained how to use what we built for our teachers because most of it was self-explanatory. What we offered to one of our teachers was for him to contact use via email, so that we could make him video tutorials answering any further question he might have.

            One of our placements was entirely dedicated to finding resources for ESL students. We found videos which teach the content taught in class. Also, for some of the topics we posted multiple videos which the same content if different ways.

            The only oral communication we really did for this project was between our teachers and us. Though there wasn’t a lot of oral communication, I think that the oral communication that did occur was clear and effective. This is because our teachers were satisfied with our work, which means that we communicated effective we was required and was going to be done.

            All the materials on our sites are spelt properly and because most of what our teachers wanted were links to online resources, so, most the formatting and spelling was already done for us. The only thing we had to do was make sure that the link were organized properly.

Application

            What we used was things like Youtube, Google docs, Weebly, Google sites, Google forms and websites specific to course curriculum. We combined these tools into websites for students to use in order to get extra help, contact teachers and submit work.

            We didn’t get too advanced with our work mainly because making these webpages was a learning curve for both of us. We used the web tools in the way they were intended to be used and didn’t change much about how they could be applied.  

            I discovered or rather enforced my belief that digital files are better for my leaning style because they are easier to send to people, keep track of, edit, and most importantly reorganize. In terms of being an educational tool, I think the best way to describe the internet is as a giant sharable notebook. Hopefully our website will be help to students who use it but I am really hopeful for is to allow teachers to get a better idea of how ICT can be used in the classroom and maybe inspire them to try new methods of teaching.