REFLECTING ON THE DIGITAL TOOLS USED TO DATE

It's been another busy week immersing ourselves in the world of ICT's. It has also been a very frustrating week for me as my computer decided to have a mid life crisis and began doing a variety of weird and wonderful things that even the technology guy ( my husband) couldn't work out what was going on.

So it gave me time to think and the biggest thing I thought about was that the use of ICT's in the Classroom is all very well but somewhere at some stage things are going to go horribly wrong for you and a backup plan in this case would be most helpful. By it's nature technology can be unpredictable frustrating and perplexing and you could find yourself wasting an entire lesson just trying to sort it out.

Which brings me to my next point and that is the time factor. I have to confess and say that most of what I achieved this week has been in haste. I felt under alot of pressure to do a video, get a pod cast sorted, upload a picture and so on. My reflection on all of this is that for ICT's to be truly effective they need to be well thought out, well planned and well executed. If Marc Prensky ( 2005)  is correct then students are used to receiving their information in a slick and professional format. My worry is that some crappy old wiki, produced under time constraints with a limited budget might not really be what the student envisaged when we began talking about the unlimited and exciting possibilities of ICT's.

Maintaining ICT's is also a factor of time. I have on several occasions had to reorganise my wiki when headings were lost, content disappeared after people "edited" and this in itself took up around 1 hour or more this week.  I am not complaining about this by the way but merely reflecting that the time it takes to engage in ICT's should be considered in planning any unit of work.


Thirdly I confess that I am finding it hard to come up with specific "ways to use this in the classroom" without really having a good idea of what exactly we are meant to be teaching. So having never worked in a Queensland school before I'm guessing at the hows and why's of where a particular ICT might be relevant.

I do keep referring back to my learning Framework ( http://nessatuni.blogspot.com/2011/03/elearning-framework-recipie-by-vanessa.html

This is helpful in general terms by thinking about the ways I can use ICT's to...

• be a smart 21st century learner using a range of ICT tools.
• collaborate in real world projects
• innovate, create and publish
• investigate research and problem solve
• discover, collect, organise and store data,
• act ethically, legally and responsibly
• ( all taken from Smart Classroom Bytes, Effective e-Learning Framework presented on p 12. Education Queensland, August 2008 http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/pdf/scbyte-elearning.pdf).

However I am continuing to search websites for useful ways pod casts, video, images and so forth can be utilised in a real world context.

Which leads me to my last point. Which is that I am beginning to understand that we should not overestimate the 21st century literacy of our students. I take this definition from the following link provided in the course work. Taken from A Global Imperative, The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit (2005)http://archive.nmc.org/pdf/Global_Imperative.pdf and that is that
                 
21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural,visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms.


So while our students might use Facebook, the Internet, twitter and text they may not necessarily be 21st century literate and that will be our job. Marcus (2005) writes " They are 'out there', living passionately in the popular culture, saturated with pictures, music and chat....delivered by digital media. But are they literate with them? Do they have the thinking skills to be both analytical and creative with these symbol systems".http://archive.nmc.org/summit/New_Literacies.pdf

That is what ICT's in eLearning Design is about. Not just throwing ICT's into the mix because they exists and it's about time everyone started to learn to use them but to think about the definition of Digital Pedagogy which is "the convergence of technical skills, pedagogical practices and understanding of curriculum design appropriate for digital learners" and "Digital Pedagogy used effectively supports, enhances, enables and transforms teaching and learning to provide rich, diverse and flexible learning opportunities for a digital generation." Education Queensland page 3. http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/pdf/scbyte-elearning.pdf