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Teachers will  have to do more than simply learn to use currently available tools; they also will have to learn new techniques and skills as current technologies become obsolete.                 (Punya Mishra, Matthew J. Koehler. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Michigan Sate University. p.1023)

We chose to create a wiki ( Came A Hot Friday) for transactional writing because this type of writing is used in daily life in a myriad of ways. It is important that students develop a sense of confidence in their ability to write transactionally. Furthermore we chose the genre of film review because we felt that this area would engage students through allowing for individual choice when it came to the watching of the film and therefore, the writing of the review. That is, students could choose to review a film they felt particularly strongly about and even have the choice to pitch it to any sort of audience. Film Review as a technique has wide parameters and provides for the degree of choice and freedom that we felt was integral means to engaging the students. This being said, Came A Hot Friday adheres strictly to the New Curriculum and we have a page devoted to the Achievement Objectives and Indicators.

In the learning-technology-by-design approach, emphasis is placed on learning by doing, and less so on overt lecturing and traditional teaching. (Punya. p.1035)

As a wiki Came A Hot Friday especially lends itself to a unit in which students will be reviewing different films. If this unit was designed as a non digital resource it would be too difficult to allow the students to review films of their choice. The actual physicality of thirty different reviews of up to thirty different films would make it difficult to ensure the students had the forum required to provide them and their work with the scaffolding of feedback and feedforward.

We feel that Came A Hot Friday conflates student needs with up to date Web 2 tools in a manner that enhances the learning process and ensures an engaged learning community.

“Schools are still using materials developed to teach the students of decades ago, but today’s students are actually very different in the way they think and work.”.

My last (and first) placement was at a Decile 9 school which had a computer network and a few Smart Boards but Shakespeare is still Shakespeare. Or is it? The school I was at was as innovative as it needed to be, it seems to me, and no student was especially bored due to the lack of technical expertise by the teachers. To some extent learning never changes in its content only in its process and application.

The Horizon Report addresses “questions we all face in K-12 education, [ones] that transcend regional boundaries.”. Which is another way of saying, ICT is an international language. It bombards with buzzwords- “Cloud Computing” and is at first impenetrable.  However, on a second or third reading it appears obvious that the purpose of the report is to remind educators that, “Technology is increasingly a means for empowering students, a method for communication and socializing, and a ubiquitous, transparent part of their lives.”.

It is at this point that the Report becomes accessible, and its intentions are exposed as essentially being “good”. That is, it wants educators to become as sophisticated as they can so that the entire learning experience will be as relevant for the students as it can be.

I loved the Smart Board tutorial today, though quite frankly I was furious and embarrassed by the incessant talking from other members of the class. God knows how these training teachers are going to survive in a world where courtesy to others is an essential component of effective school life. I could only hesitate to suggest that they really already do know it all.

Anyway, the Smart Board excited me in much the same way my first Etch-a-Sketch set did when I was a child. As I’ve only just been properly introduced to them I am still unsure as to how they would be most effectively used. As with Power Points I will need to practice before I arrive in the classroom.

One thing I learned on Teaching Practice is that the classroom is not the place to perfect one’s IT skills- five minutes spent swearing under one’s breath while trying to hook the data projector up is a long time.

The first Power Point I presented I had proudly put in some animation scheme and then when it came to presenting it the timing was all wrong so the slides all flicked over way too quickly. It was then that I decided I would use my second block at College to master tools like Power Point. All my other Power Points on section were very simple as a result. Interestingly enough, as they were so simple I had to really engage with them orally and pull the class into doing so as well.

I saw a Smart Board but didn’t use it, and I think very few of the teachers used it either, though they all used their laptops in every class as every class had a data projector.

Well, it’s been an experience, as they say, the last four weeks of blogging. Though I reckon of all the ict learning we’ve been doing the blog has been the least useful to my future as an english teacher.  The wiki was great as it made me appreciate how essentially simple that sort of co operative online task can be. Also I loved Delicious and will probably keep up the account.

So thanks for all the enlightening web time.

I couldn’t work out why the baseball was getting bigger and bigger

                                                  – And then it hit me

Kathy Acker wrote a book called Blood and Guts in High School that was on the Master’s English Programme at Auckland University until the early nineties when the Chief Censor banned the book. I daren’t put into words why the book was banned as I’m sick of being moderated. Suffice it to say, there was a few pencil drawings of a female anatomy and the word c**t was used in the actual text. It was a real indictment of the censorship process at the time as obvioously X rated material was making it into the sleazy bookstores all around the country. It begs the question that if some of that material had been on the reading list of English at Master’s level whether it would have been banned too.

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