IWB

I don’t think I have ever learned so much about an interactive white board. Following the advice of our weekly tasks I have looked up the make and model of the IWB’s located in the schools, I have learnt so many little facts and ways to use an IWB that I hadn’t thought of before. It makes me wonder how many opportunities I have missed over the years by not taking full advantage of the ICT’s in my classrooms. What technologies in the classroom am I underusing, what ones am I misusing entirely? This has inspired me to look at new and old technologies in creative and interesting ways.

The link for my IWB’s user guide.

Week Ten Blog Post #2

I feel much more comfortable now discussing ICT in the classroom and the many challenges that come with it. My highschool’s ICT policies reflect and are similar to many other public schools ICT policies. Walking into someone else’s classroom is difficult and I don’t think it will ever become easier, what I am not ready to do is implement completely new strategies and concepts even with ICT. I don’t think I will ever be comfortable with this idea of coming in, taking over and then leaving when all your strategies will most likely never be used again by that teacher.

Being at private schools before this professional experience I really have been spoilt with how many ICT resources I had at my disposals. But even just being introduced to this new schools environment I could immediately tell that this school would have a much reduced amount of resources. I hope my planning has prepared me for this, but really all the planning in the world can never truly prepare someone for a new experience. I just hope the planning makes the transition easier.

Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship is defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behaviour with regard to technology use. A digital citizenship websites illustrates that there are nine main themed umbrellas all of which are explained in detail through this link.

Many cyber safety websites point out the obvious, its about not exposing yourself on the internet, don’t give away your details, no last names, addresses etc etc. But all of these measures are preventative, and you can’t control what other people post online. With how deeply social technology has been integrated into society its basically impossible to not expose yourself in some way online.

Digital citizenship is about how you present yourself online and how you are therefore perceived, with your everyday use of technologies, where you shop, protect yourself, etiquette. etc.

Your reputation is very important, memories used to fade, nowadays the internet doesn’t so everything you do will be there forever. And while scary as this may seem, I think we are all learning to live with the consequences.

Lollipop – I am not sleeping tonight

I would just like to use a four letter bad word to describe how I feel about being lulled into a false sense of security with a pretty lollipop that then turns into one of the creepiest things I have ever seen in my entire life. So thanks for that I suppose.

On the other hand it was an effective tool, immediately after I talked to a friend about my experience which then started a group conversation about how truly easy it is to access someones information that could be so easily used against them. So I suppose that it fulfilled its main purpose in a creative way.

If you want to watch it again here is the link.

Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying has swept over the globe and students, teachers and parents alike are just beginning to understand how to deal with it and how its differs from traditional bullying. I have personally never experienced cyberbullying but have seem the effects on friends who handled it in my opinion very well. ICT is becoming more and more ingrained in our society so bullying through it is becoming more of an issue every day. Teaching kids how to use ICT safely and effectively is paramount for their futures no matter what they may be.

For the first quiz i was surprised at my result of only 50% but in comparison on the Cybersmart Kids Quiz, originally I received a score of about 95%, however they let me try again and achieve 100%. The quiz to me seems to be an outdated attempt to teach kids about being safe, the same way it was taught in the 90’s, kids even the young ones this was aimed at would most likely treat this as a joke. The quiz just asked the obvious questions, nothing that would really provoke much thought or discussion in a classroom about cyberbullying.

Something A Bit More Personal

I have not even looked at Assignment three yet.

But I know one thing, even though I highly doubt its true, and even though many would consider this “easy marks”, right now while I am writing what is thankfully my last blog post for Assignment two, I really really really hope that for the next assignment, against the odds that I do not have to write a single more blog post.

I am running out of ideas about what I should be writing, I hope at the very least that the next assignment at the very least comes with a list of themes or ideas that I could use as inspiration.

I Want It That Way

With the Australian Curriculum recently introduced into every school across the country, suddenly there was much less room for teachers to be individualised in what they taught to their classes. In my personal opinion, the Australian Curriculum is amazing as a guideline for what teachers should be teaching, specifically for teachers like us who need all the guidance we can get when just starting out in the profession.

I understand that some older, career teachers may disagree, but really all the Australian curriculum is doing is making sure that each student across the country has the opportunity to learn the same thing as every other student, even if their teacher hates chemistry and would have previously ignored most of the content and instead focused on other areas more deeply.

All the Australian curriculum does is say what we must teach, not how we have to teach it, and that is a good thing.

The Teaching Machine

One of the main reasons I chose to do an education degree was the fact that unlike many other professions the chances of my job in future becoming obsolete was very small. But sometimes I wonder if it could happen, how would  it happen?

The most obvious idea would be some sort of teaching machine, B. F. Skinner is a rather famous theorist and one of his most controversial ideas was a “teaching machine” that would allow the brighter students to quickly excel while other students could progress more slowly, with a machine that would never run out of patience. This is not a new idea and can be seen in many other forms, in 1910 a french artist depicted what he thought the world would look like in 100 years, amongst the many paintings was one showing how education would be run like a machine.

HackEducation

I really hope that a teachers influence in the classroom never becomes irrelevant, because a teachers job is beyond teaching what a “teaching machine” could even begin to teach.