Applied ICTs

I had first-hand experience of a year 1 student using ICTs to put a project together.

My daughter Lily is doing a unit on mini-beasts this term, and one of the her assessment items is to do a presentation in front of the class.



Lily decided to do a talk on snails, and put together a book about snails to show to the class. She used a Google Image Search to look for suitable pictures of snails, which she printed out to stick in her book.

Lily also found a poem about snails that she wanted to use in her book. We decided that it would be a good idea for her to type it into MS Word, and then print it out. She did all the typing herself.

We then helped her to edit her work - there was a spelling error and some double spaces that needed fixing. She then made some changes to the formatting, by selecting the title text and changing the style, and also selecting the text in the main body and changing the size of that text. By doing this, she was demonstrating some of the higher-order thinking that is described in Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.

Helping Lily really brought home some of the relevance of ICTs in the classroom. She is growing up as a "digital native", as Prensky would put it. As I witness her using the technology herself, the culture-shift is becoming more apparent. My own paradigms of what a classroom should be, and how it should operate, are gradually changing. I'm steadily realizing how much the students of the modern classroom are immersed in technology, and how much we as educators need to try to utilize it in our lessons.