Australian Professional Teaching Standard: 2.6 – Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
My Year 7 HSIE class were learning about different areas in the world in Geography and therefore in order for them to benefit the most out of learning the content I decided to make their lessons more interactive. I thought that the would benefit more from seeing what they were learning about in videos and statistics rather than just learning content from the textbook, especially when most of them don’t know anything about other countries (eg. water systems, currency, facilities, ect.)
For the first two weeks I had no issues with ICT however one day in the third week I had planned a double period that relied heavily on ICT. In the first period I would be using the internet and projector to show the class a video that summarised the content they had been learning. They would the video and we would go through it as a class. As we were doing so the student were required to answer key questions in a worksheet provided to them. In the second period the students were using the school MacBooks to start working on a research project that they would submit.
I chose to incorporate ICT so heavily in these lessons because the students had been doing heavily content based work and I wanted to provide them with the opportunity to learn in a more interactive way, particularly leading up to them doing a research task.
In the first period the projector began playing up and the projector kept turning on and off. I used a different adaptor and that seemed to solve the issue. As the class we were in was on lower ground, often if I would pause the video to discuss something with the students the internet would drop out and then it would take a couple of minutes for the video to play again.
In the second period we went to the library so the students could use the MacBooks from there. The students were able to log into the computers, however we once again had an issue with the internet and it took them a decent amount of time to actually complete the work without interruptions from the internet.
In this lesson I aimed to incorporate constructivist approach by getting the students to be active participating in their learning as a result of responding to the video and creating a task based on what they had learnt. They were given the opportunity and the resources to show what they learnt by actively participate in activities, therefore allowing them to process and make sense of the information they had learnt for themselves.
While I do understand that ICT can play up and it isn’t anyones faults it is something that happens and as a teacher I need to be prepared and have back up plan to teach the same content without the technology.
Next time instead of getting the students to try to get the internet to work, I could just get them to write the instructions down in their books and brainstorm what they will do in the next period where they use the technology.
EDFX348 Reflective Blog 