The school I was allocated for my practicum is a non-systemic primary boys’ school. Although I was unable to watch my Colleague Teacher running the classes for year 5, I got to observe the teaching strategies used by the assigned Pre-graduate Teacher.
The very first thing I have noticed was the frequent use of computers as "Mindtools" (Jonassen, 2000) in class activities to stimulate students' learning.
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| Year 5 recount on the class display wall |
students’ understanding of news recount concept, its importance and structure. This activity definitely made a lesson attractive and students’ engagement clearly increased as all of them were very enthusiastic in sharing their thoughts and transferring them onto the paper. The use of "Mindtools" is a very useful way of grabbing students’ attention; however is it as effective when it comes to improving literacy skills? I could see that “Digital Natives” (M. Prensky, 2001) spelling abilities were clearly limited. Year 5 had a clear trouble with spelling, punctuation and capital letters. Increased use of computers evidently affects writing skills of students. "Digital Natives" rely heavily on spell check on PC.
Although the internet is a great source of information, it is not always helpful for all of the students, especially low-learners. Selecting the right information can be difficult. I could observe that during the second computer activity, where students were asked to research the information about a religious character. The website content was overwhelming and some of the pupils had trouble with choosing the right content. It could have been supported by closer guidance from the trainee teacher, who left students to do their own exploration.
Another downside was the lack of sufficient number of resources, also mentioned in the "Transforming Learning with ICT" chapter (2007), which eventually caused lots of interruption and confusion in the class. As school does not provide adequate numbers of computers students were sharing them between classes. Those constant disturbances had definitely an impact on the quality of teaching which caused distraction especially for low – learners.
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| "Digital Native and the Mindtool" |
References:
Finger, G., Russell, G., Jamieson - Proctor, R. & Russell, N. (2007).
Transforming learning with ICT: Making IT happen. French Forest:
Pearson Education Australia.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. 9 (5).
Image "Digital Native and the Mindtool" retrieved from
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~cc254907/images/computersearch2.gif
on 11.10.10
Finger, G., Russell, G., Jamieson - Proctor, R. & Russell, N. (2007).
Transforming learning with ICT: Making IT happen. French Forest:
Pearson Education Australia.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. 9 (5).
