Lauren's Blog

ICT in general

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:18:07 +0000

When the term ICT is used I usually try to hide. I don’t know much about ICT at all, and am quite scared about teaching it or using it within the classroom for many reasons. These reasons include the fact that the children may actually know more about it than I do in the first place, although this may not be a bad thing, and also ICT has a habit of not working when you want it to..breaking down in the middle of a lesson for example. I am also quite scared that a child may ask me a question about a piece of software and i may not know the answer, this however may be good as we can investigate together and learn as a whole group.

After the ICT module this year I do feel more confident about using ICT and believe that using different pieces of equipment and software has really helped increase my knowledge on the subject.

Creativity

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:13:16 +0000

Using ICT in the curriculum allows children to be creative in many ways. Children don’t have to worry about making mistakes as they can go back to what they were doing before. They can make music in new ways, make their own animations, podcast and many other great exciting and creative things. It is also a great tool for children who can’t or do not like to draw…they can find pictures on the internet or even use te paint tool to create something on the computer. There are many ways ICT can be used to help creativity but some people believe that it can hinder other aspects. For example, when using a word processor, it usually tells you the correct spelling, tells you when the grammar is incorrect and if you need to include a paragraph…so is this really the child’s work? I believe that if you are giving a child a piece of ork that should be creative and imaginative this is a great way of going about it as the child does not need to worry about these things and can concentrate on producing a good quality piece of creative work.

Music

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:03:16 +0000

The lecture about making music using ICT was quite interesting as I never realised how easy it was to make music. The fact that many songs are made using a very simple beat that is repeated means that children can do the same very easily. This would be great to include ICTwithin a music lesson and would appeal to many children as they know they can record their work as they go along.

Animation

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:59:18 +0000

When we were told we were going to create our own animation I was very excited. Watching the animations the children had done was amazing, they looked so good and it isn’t an easy task. It didn’t take us too long to decide what we were going to do for our animation but once we had an idea they kept rolling in. The most difficult thing was the timing, as there were 16 frames per second..once this was sorted it wasn’t too bad….although after spending what felt like hours making an animation, all we had was 30secs of playback. Children must find this very interesting and it can also help them with their problem solving skills as they would have to work out timings and how slow, or quick things need to be moved. I intend to use this in schools one day.

Map

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:54:50 +0000

Making the interactive map was fun. It sounded very complicated when I first heard about it and I wasn’t sure as I do not really know the campus that well, but the activity was very useful in learning a new ICT tool that can be used with children. In our map we included some old pictures from the REAL Rolle as well as the new Rolle, showing how different the two are. We also found an advert for the university on you-tube so we uploaded that on to the map aswell. This tool could be quite useful in the classroom for children, and perhaps they could make an interactive map of their own school.

Medium term plans

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:51:14 +0000

Creating a medium term plan is not easy, especially when it has to include something that I am not that great at…ICT…however, by creating this plan within my group, I believe it has helped me understand why ICT is useful within the curriculum and when used well can enhance the teaching standards and learning that comes from the chidlren. It has also helped me think about how cross-curricular subjects can be taught together to aid the children’s learning.

Presentation

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:48:02 +0000

As the presentation is coming very soon, I am getting even more worried. Although, I believe that the idea of haing a presentation as part of the module is a good idea as it allows you to present your thoughts, findings and ideas to your peers and see what feedback you get. I also think it is a good way of getting ideas by listening to other people’s presentations to see what they would include in a medium term plan.

Geo-tagging

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:45:30 +0000

The use of geo-tagging is quite amazing. Allowing you to be able to pin point your exact location by using a small device. This would really help children when teaching geography and I am sure it would appeal to boys greatly by using ‘gadgets’. Not sure if I would be extremely confident using one though as we did not use one for our map.

Podcasts

laurend22 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:42:31 +0000

When creating our own podcast in the seminar, I’m sure many will agree that it was probably the most fun session we have had this year. It was good to play around with the software and see what it could do and the outcomes were very entertaining. My group have included the podcast software in our medium term plans as we believe it is effective use of ICT for many reasons….It gives all children chance to participate in something and also allows for children with different learning styles…there are many other reasons why it is a great tool and I hope to use it one day within schools.

SMART boards in the classroom

laurend22 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:39:02 +0000

I don’t know about everyone else but I believe SMARTboards can be really useful in the classroom to assist teaching, but in many schools I have been in they do not use the board how it should be used. Many teachers only use it for powerpoints, where there is no interaction what so ever, and of course this is the best part of the SMART board, letting the children learn interactively. For powerpoints, you do not even need a SMART board so it just seems like such a waste of good technology.

I must admit when I first saw a SMART board myself I got a little scared, I/m not very good with computers and thought that perhaps I would just leave the board alone and stick to a white board and pen. My opinion has completely changed now. I decided to use it during teaching practice for maths, letting the children move objects around to show different fractions, the children loved doing this activity as they were actively learning.

There is so much I could say about SMART boards but I don’t want to waffle on, so if anyone has something they would like to say…please comment.