Presentation success

So, presentation all done and sorted and I think it went well. Personally, I like presentations where the presenter gets to the point quickly and doesn't drone on and on reading out their slides, so my whole presentation was done in about 25 minutes. Now I'm hoping that my colleagues will take the opportunity I offered and come and see me during my regular "talk geeky about computers" time and we can come up with some constructive solutions.

Key words for e-learning

I'm a huge fan of wordle. There is something so satisfying about seeing keywords visualised in this way. I particularly like this one - I love how the words learning, create and interact dominate the image.

Task sharing and collaborative learning in an ICT environment

As in the two previous posts, I have been caught up with my Y9 Science class and their final group project on communities. Today we finally got down to the activity. My time spent on Tuesday drilling them about their roles in the task were not wasted, and I saw some awesome work produced. It's a shame that they didn't actually follow the instructions - you know, the ones that asked them to put their results into a googledoc that I had set up for each group *facepalm*

Nevermind. I am not giving up on the utility of googledocs as a tool for collaborative writing of reports and authoring of presentations online. I am going to keep experimenting until I get it right, dammit.

A stocktake of ICT in class

I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....

Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.

Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it

Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen

So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.