ICT supports knowledge-building among teams and enables team members to collaborate, inquire, interact and integrate prior knowledge with new understanding.
My learning areas require a lot of team-work, especially in a classroom that promotes inquiry based and student directed learning. In my year 11 English class I used a number of ICT activities in order to promote collaboration and interaction between class members. For example, one of the activities required students to work in pairs to fill in a worksheet about advertisements on fast food chain websites. The students had to decide what restaurant they were going to research, and then conduct an investigation into what the advertisements were. Finally, the students discussed the persuasive techniques used and their intended effects.
Another example of ICT supporting knowledge building among teams is an activity I used in my year 10 History class. The students were put into groups of three or four and were required to look at a visual source, a photograph of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Between them they had to decide on the important surface features, inferences and background knowledge to include in a summary of the event. This activity worked so well because afterwards the students were played the footage and allowed time to examine it in their groups, before submitting their summaries. Most students added information to their summaries and all were captivated by the news footage.
At level 6 of the VELS standards for ICT students are expected to “build on skills developed in previous levels to share ideas with the teacher and others through a range of electronic communication means such as email, contributing to forums, SMS messaging, and interacting with websites…” In my year 11 English class, while this is past level 6 of VELS, my students were still encouraged to develop and use ICT skills gained from previous years to share their learning. My class emailed their work to me for correction and feedback, and they were also encouraged to look around in technological areas such as TV and the internet for interesting persuasive techniques.
It is crucial for students to work collaboratively on tasks in order to facilitate learning in their subject areas, as well as interpersonal skills. ICT use in the classroom easily helps to enhance this.
Liz, I really like how you've integrated ICT into your classrooms for both your methods. My methods are the same as yours and you've given me some great ideas for how I can implement ICT into my future teaching practice as an English AND Humanities teacher, as up till now I've mainly had opportunities to use it in humanities but have had a few issues with using it in English in the senior years.
ReplyDelete