Excellent examples of Computers in 21stC Eduk8n February 17, 2007
Posted by Joseph Papaleo in Colleagues, classroom, podcasts.2 comments
On our first day back this year, we had a combined campus secondary teachers’ meeting. I got word that there was going to be a presentation on how IT can be used in the classrooms. I was actually rapt that someone would be presenting and a little jealous it was not me!
Our Head of School started the session and spoke about this teacher and how many others would not think of him as a user of IT in the classroom. He introduced a colleague based at our other campus, Colin Turner. I really don’t know Colin well and it will be an aim to get to know him much better now I have seen what he did in class. I have seen Colin at various PD sessions at work and he has been an active particiapnt in AGQTP activity that I organised last year. I always wondered why he showed up to many of these sessions and now I know why!
Colin got up and spoke as a non-IT professional and showed how he used camera phones, iPods, podcasts and PhotStory in his English classes. He spoke passionatley about his Romeo and Juliet unit where the students “switched on” when he used an iPod recorder to get them to record their inner most thoughts. He stated that some of his most difficult students took to the learning activity and benefited from it in their exam.
He also showed us how he got students to write very personal pieces by supplying various cartoon images of characters in different poses. They wrote their piece and inserted the image that best represented the “mood” they were in. To finish the topic off for the students, he produced large posters of the writing and pictures and displayed them in the library. Apparently, the Librarians reported that it was one of the more popular displays in the library.
He also got his students to take pictures of an item in the school yard using their mobile phone camera (if they had one). They then wrote a descriptive piece to describe the photo without mentioning what it was. To top it off for the students, he put the final piece into PhotoStory with some nice relaxing music to “show off” the work. The writing was not the focus for the PhotoStory piece, nor was the photo. But rather, I felt that the students would have seen how much they wrote and how each of them did the same thing. A new confidence boost for some I’m sure.
Well done Colin. I look forward to learning more from you. As a Maths/IT teacher, this is how I would envisage IT would be used in an English classsroom, but couldn’t get through to some “dinosaurs” over the years who were not prepared to listen. To see Colin do it on his own was inspirational.
Rumour has it that after his talk, some of his own English faculty bailed him up. Pity that some dinosaurs (any older teacher that refuses not to look at new technological practices) feel compelled to bring down the educational uses of the tools that the students are using in their everyday life to suit their style of antiquated teaching.
The sooner dinosaurs in any school evolve or retire, the better.
