Collaboration and Execution

Hello Fellow Students and Readers,

I am progressing through this course and my expectations have exceeded. One of the areas that I have particularly developed is that of collaboration. For me, I have a great deal of computer experience, but this course has solidified what I do know is that we are in an environment that ensures that we are continuous learners, regardless of the level we believe we have attained.

Getting the comments from my classmates as well as other teachers at school, and even collaborating with the students who are the recipients of the content was exciting for me. I love to learn and to be taught something new that I had not known before. The ideas I received from classmates on the synthesis assignment made me clarify and add to areas that I had not thought about, and that I believe is what is so enjoyable for me.

With regards to the website search, at first I thought that the exercise was tedious, but, it allowed me to produce a lesson with the right site for the right purpose! My assignment three and synthesis lesson received greater thought about the qualities of each site and as I collected sites for the students' webquest it made the development and implementation of those lessons much easier and much more successful with surprisingly positive unexpected effects. The students' response and even the teachers' response to the lesson was heartening: students did not need much teacher intervention, even technical because they were more technosavvy that I had realised an the teachers were motivated by first seeing how ICT can be used to teach in a practical and easy way and in the classroom how much less work the teacher has to do in the class when ICT is utilised. The students are totally engrossed in the work as all students were on task, forming their own groups. As a Principal, to see my teacher become motivated and excited because of the ways in which I have been taught to integrate ICT is worth millions as this is one of the difficulties that too many Principals deal with in many schools across the nation. This course has given me a strategy to actually be the instructional leader and not just a boss over my workers.

With regards to my personal goals, I believe that I will work towards increasing the number of teachers that I can motivate and get excited about ICT integration and continue work hard to learn and not get too complacent as the course continues. I am also pleased that I have met my deadline for the final assignment and hope to continue doing so throughout the others. Additionally, I need to be more active and spend more time commenting on other classmates assignments and hopefully they will receive the benefits that I have gained from their comments.

I am looking forward to the next module and I really do appreciate this course because I see it as a means to motivate and bring excitement into the job of teaching into my school and to actually perform the duty of instructional leader.

Thank you CCTI

Learning is FUN!!!

Logistics of Computers in the Classroom

Limited resources in the classroom calls for a lot of pre-planning on the part of the teacher. Where there is only one computer in the classroom the teacher must be in charge of that computer, but additional peripheral resources, such as multimedia projectors, is vital if it is to benefit the students in the class as a whole.

Learning takes longer with only one computer in the classroom as students will not get sufficient contact time on the computer to practise skills learned in class. This, I imagine, would be frustrating for the teacher and the student because many of our classes have over 30 students. When would all our students learn to use the spreadsheet effectively with only 1 computer in the classroom? This is almost an impossibility and would serve better as a teaching tool for content other than teaching a topic in IT. Just imagine a Science lab with only one Bunsen burner and a class to test that requires each student to conduct the experiment. That class would take days to complete and learner and teacher frustration would increase.

Therefore, one computer in the classroom cannot be used to teach IT skills because the logistics of getting students 'practical lab time' is impractical.

If however, there was a lab with student ration 1:4 I believe this is even better than just one computer per child as children would learn better as a group in learning IT skills. They can watch others perform the same task repeatedly and they to repeat the task for others to learn.

In this instance where students can share the computer fitting four students around a PC is a bit difficult if the lab does not have much space between computers as it will be a jostle and perhaps chaos to fit so many students in a small space. The teacher can have to halve the class: half on the computer with a reduced ratio of 1:2, while the other students participating in a written or discussion activity. The students in the class can then rotate. This would work well and give each student a chance to use the computer.

The strategy the teacher uses would be more towards that of a differentiated classroom to reduce chaos and manage the class effectively.

This exercise pushes you into thinking how to best use the resources available and to accept the reality of limited resources and not to expect to get similar results with a fully outfitted lab. I see that I have to work with what I have and be satisfied with what I can do with it.

Learning is Fun!