AGQTP ICT – ESP+I
What was your project focus?
Incorporating Web 2.0 into the curriculum and teaching practice across Middle School.

• What did you do? Created a wiki page on our Middle School integrated unit ‘Be Different’. For this students had to read and watch various information based around ways that we can be different and not their responses on an assigned wiki page. The topics included illegal downloading, speeding and excessive wastage and looked at how society is portrayed to view these themes and then contrast that to the Bible. Students were required to simply participate and record their thoughts.

Website for activity is:

http://bedifferent.wikispaces.com/

Need to be a member to view however.
livory@covenant.vic.edu.au

Experience

The most helpful thing that I did to change my thinking about integrating ICT into my classroom was to give it a go. When I started this PD there were many aspects that I thought ‘what is the point of that?’ and viewed some aspects as a very time consuming way of doing something that I already did. After having a go of it however I now view many of those tools as just one way of doing something different in my classroom from time to time

To help integrate some aspects of Web 2.0 into the classroom of fellow colleagues I led a brief introduction into some aspects such as Look to Learn activities. I also led a more detailed PD session into wiki pages and created a ‘how to make a wiki page document’ which I distributed to the other staff. Currently 2 staff (one outside our initial target group) have used this document to create (or start to create) their own wiki page.

Many students have responded well to a different way or learning within my classroom. My initial attempts at incorporating wiki pages into lessons was with my own class and worked exceptionally well despite a few initial hiccups. The students really enjoyed entering their responses to activities on-line and the responses were in many ways more in-depth compared to responses using other methods in previous year (with different students though but a comparable class).

Struggles

The main issue I found with my initial wiki page was managing it within the lesson to allow everyone to contribute but ensuring no one was ‘procrastinating’. With my second wiki page for all of middle school the problems I encountered were our school server blocking students’ access to YouTube videos even when they were embedded within the wiki page. Now I have the problem of a slight pause while waiting for the videos to buffer. The main problem I encountered with the Middle School group however was one that I did not encounter with my own class and one that surprised me to the extent that it occurred. This was the phenomenon of ‘stupid technologically ignorant teacher syndrome’ where several of the students (some of them generally ‘good’ students) completely tuned out when I was explaining how to complete the activity and operate the wiki page. ‘Tuning out’ happens in all classes from time to time (especially during instruction) but the extent of this was more extreme. Many students just assumed that as the activity had to do with computers and was on the internet, they didn’t have to listen to me as they would clearly know more about this sort of thing than me and would be easily able to figure it out. Some students still didn’t ask for assistance after deleting the entire contents of a page from my wiki (grrrrrr!  )
I do have to say though that the majority of students did end up doing quite well.

What did you do to overcome or lessen the impact of these?
To overcome these problems I simply told the class off for thinking I knew nothing about computers and instructed them on what to do again. My initial problem of no access to YouTube for students was overcome by contacting all the people who had posted the videos that I wanted to use onto YouTube and asking them for their permission to download them (it is against YouTube’s user policy to download any clips without the posters permission). They all said yes.

So far all the targeted staff have responded really well to incorporating Web 2.0 and seem enthusiastic to do so.

Puzzles

The main question was really how do we integrate Web 2.0 tools in a constructive manner. For me it was mainly how do we do this without simply using Web 2.0 for the sake of doing so. If it is quicker and easier to do it another way, why do it?

+Insight

Overall this has been a constructive time for myself and the target staff at Covenant College for implementing Web 2.0. We started at varying degrees of competency and understanding of ICT and I would say are now all confident in implementing Web 2.0 tools as teaching and learning aids and also allowing our students to both use and create with these same tools.