Seminar; The practice of ICT in schools in 2011: reflections from my placements.

Comment on a VELS post

Below is a reproduction of my VELS comment, which was first posted at http://rachel-ivey.blogspot.com/2011/09/ict-provides-rich-and-flexible-learner.html

"Media truly can use ICT in all its forms to create such a rich learning environment as you have wonderfully pointed out, Rach!

I see the fact students are creators as one of the cornerstones of how ICT can benefit students and how it makes this easier to occur in a Media Studies classroom.

I also think that one of the great things about Media Studies is that as students are creating a film or a manipulated digital photograph or one of the examples you mentioned, the subject forces them to think about intended audience, as you pointed out, so they are consciously aware that their experimentation and risk-taking with ICT must serve the purpose of finding an audience, engaging them and moving them.

Good stuff!"

VELS IT post: using Publisher in Year 7 English

This blog post will focus on the statement: ICT provides a rich and flexible learner-centred environment in which students can experiment and take risks when developing new understanding.

The first thing that comes to mind when pondering this statement is a task I set last week for a Year 7 English class at my placement school. I had decided students would write a news article involving the key characters at a certain point of the text they are studying. At my mentor teachers suggestion I set that this would be presented as a newspaper front page using Microsoft Publisher.

The first thing the ICT aspect of this task offers is a rich environment. The fact students can create a product that can have significant resemblance to a real life newspaper provides a richness that is not achieved by either attempting to hand design one or if they simply word processed their article. More “richly”, the students are “shifting from a text consumer to a text producer” and using “linguistic and visual” skills when using Publisher (Tan and Guo 2009, p. 318).

Publisher also offers plenty of flexibility as, is required by VELS level 5 for English, students “develop their planning, drafting, editing and proofreading skills” while “using computer technology to organise, format, revise and present their texts.” This also relates closely to the ability for students to “experiment and take risk”. With Publisher students can think about fonts and the layout of words and pictures, but this also offers the potential for them to increase understanding. They have to decide whether they are going to place the picture at the top of their story or next to it or below it, which gives them an opportunity to consider their audiences and purpose as required by English VELS.

Their understanding of newspapers as a medium is also increased as they consider the “purposes” of it. Using ICT via Publisher brings this home in real ways. For example they may discover that three sentences of their news story do not fit when they arrange their pictures/headline/newspaper title in a certain way that will have most appeal to their audiences. The question for the student will be, though probably not expressed this way, ‘should I sacrifice design for content?’ and ‘is this information really crucial to my readers considering I have written in the newspaper style of putting the most important information early in my story?’

This example of a task set for Year 7 English students perfectly highlights how ICT can add richness, experimentation and understanding to a task while helping students better engage with the English requirements for VELS.  

References:

Tan, L and Guo, L. (2009). From Print to Critical Multimedia Literacy: One Teacher's Foray into New Literacies Practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 53 (4), p315-324.

Victorian Curriculum and Assesment Authority. (2010). English - Level 5. Available: http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/level5.html. Last accessed 13th Sept 2011.

Will the classroom catch up soon?

TO me one of the biggest problems with centring classrooms around ICT is that the curriculum is not designed to allow it.  I was reminded of this when reading an article on The Age website earlier this week titled “Let’s think beyond ink in exam room: principal”. It was about an eastern suburbs school leader advocating for the use of computers for VCE exams. “'I think it's ridiculous that in 2011 we are still doing pen and paper testing … It's holding the learning back at a time when we're actually saying there are a whole lot of skills they need for university and the workforce, which involve the use of technology,'' Ringwood Secondary College principal Michael Phillips said.

It is a statement I agree with, and not just because I had to mark literally more than 200 pages of student handwriting last week. There have been more than a few times during this year where a guest lecturer or allocated reading has suggested something ground breaking and worthwhile, and the thought in my head has been: “this would be a great thing to do, except I’m not sure how it is going to help students get a high ATAR.” To me it seems that the VCE curriculum and assessment structure is holding back a lot of exciting initiatives with those related to ICT among them.

Another concern of mine is that knowledge and remembering still seem to have too much emphasis in some VCE subjects. For example in recent weeks I have sat in VCE English, English Language and History classes where the main aim appeared to be to help students know and remember as much content as possible for upcoming SACs. While thousands of 18-year-olds are cramming themselves with quotes and theories of speaking and communist Russia dates, in the real world people use google when they want to know something and therefore the focus is on knowledge use rather than knowledge discovery. I would argue in a world where there is so much knowledge the aim should not be to make adolescents ‘know things,’ but to guide them to make better use of all the things they can know at the click of a mouse or the slide of a finger across a touchscreen. This is how ICT has changed the world, but obviously not our classrooms or VCE curriculums.