Week 1

Week 1 – Introduction to Learning Technologies

In our first lecture Greg talked about how important ICT is to prepare children for the 21st century workforce. By teachers implementing innovative technologies, as additional interdisciplinary learning methods, children will begin to build up a host of skills. Those who leave school without having developed these skills will sadly struggle in any professional world they become faced with.

Personally I am mostly a visual learner, especially when learning new material. I can therefore agree 100% that visually managing and organizing information can help to strengthen problem-solving skills. From working as an Engineer I observed how innovative thinking is highly rewarded because it brings about improved productivity. Competition within industry is centralized around who is the fastest and more proficient in completing the same task. No project operates without networking, whether via email or Intranets it encourages collaborative working environments. ICT is crucial to understanding the 21st century workforce.

During our workshop Greg helped us set up our own blog page and introduced us to Inspiration, a resource that is useful for creating more interesting posts. To tell the truth, I was very lost as the start… so many new things! This is my first time blogging so I’m learning at every step.

Inspiration has a wide range of applications that allow you to create a graphic that you can then export into your post. We started off by making a simple graphic where we each picked a theme and used a variety of images to discuss it visually. Inspiration has a bank of images you can use or you can be more creative and search the web for images. Ideas can also be elaborated by using hyperlinks to relevant web pages. We also played with Paint and learnt how to crop images from the web. Lastly we explored the Inspiration’s mind-mapping tool, expanding a central idea into several branches.

I can see a huge potential for using Inspiration, or programs like it, in my primary school classroom from as early as grade 1. I think mind mapping delves deep into the heart if visual learning and can help children to understand complex concepts by synthesizing fundamental ideas. Using digital tools to draw mind maps could be applied right across the curriculum.

I also like the idea of getting students to have their own blog pages. They can be used to develop personal learning networks with other students, in their own school as well as other schools overseas or interstate, and really broaden their learning environment. They could post questions on areas they are finding difficult or comment on activities they have enjoyed. This was there is an ongoing link to the classroom, whether at home or school. Parents can also access their children’s blogs to see what exactly they are working on and how they are going.

I am looking forward to learning more and more ways of using ICT in the classroom.