Last thoughts on ICT in the class room...

Well I reckon I would be lost with out the use of ICT in the class room! It is such a useful and easy way to get so many things done, from research to record keeping.

We are now living in a world where the use of ICT has gotten to the point that it plays a major role in our every day lives that we actually have a responsibility to incorporate it into our teaching practice. We need to be able to teach our students not only to be same on the web but also how to be savvy.

I think that one of the most important things that, as a history teacher, I will ever teach my students is how to conduct meaningful research. I want my students to be able jump online and have the ability to sort through the crap that is online and be able to make informed judgement and opinions about the data and information they find.

I can imagine that with in every discipline there is a need to incorporated ICT. It is exciting (and a little daunting) to think that even what we are teaching now, and think is cutting edge will be out dated and remade into something better by the time our students enter the work force.

ICT is the way if the future, we need to embrace it!

Autism and ICT

Autism and ICT

While on my last placement I had, what turned out to me the amazing opportunity to teach a boy with autism. At first it was somewhat of a daunting challenge to come up with strategies that included him in the lessons and enabled him to use his particular skills. For the purpose of this post lets call him Steve. Steve was a very talented drawer, and he love to redesign characters out of his favorite video games. In the English class that I taught him he often spent a lot of time drawing and working on ICT projects.

Below are some of the sketches that Steve did of video characters.

This got me thinking, what are the possibilities after school for students like Steve? Steve's father came to the parent teacher interview and I was able to talk to him about what he though Steve might do after school. His dad told me how talented he was with computers, which I already knew, and the he saw that there would probably be potential for him to work in the ICT industry, perhaps designing games and especially coming up with the graphics and characters.
I thought that this would be a fantastic possibility for Steve.

Then I got to further thinking about the how we teach students with Autism across the board. I think it is safe to say that some schools get it right and other are a little lost with what to do. With this in mind I went and visited the Autistic School in Mansfield to find out how best to facilitate students with autusisms learning. What I found was that across the board the higher functioning students loved activities that involved ICT. They were able to pick it up relatively fast and were good at learning programs and that it was a fantastic way to get them to learn. The school provided me with some great ideas of things that I could get Steve to try. It was with these ideas that I went back to the class room to see what I could get Steve to do.

For a unit of horror in english I suggested that as Steve knew a lot about editing movies he team up with one of the groups that were doing a movie for their project and offer to do the editing. This was a great success and the movie turned out really well.

All of the research that I found was positive towards the inclusion of ICT in the classroom with autistic students as it was a way to bridge gaps and help them to become included as well as giving them some practical skills to take with them after school.

Below is a website that I found particularly useful.
http://www.senteacher.org/Links/

I took this

Link to VELS post

Below is the link to my comment on a VELS post.

http://rodgersruralrampage.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/vels-ict-task/#comment-2