Monday, May 26, 2014

Day Fifteen

It is such a great opportunity to be in a school that is leading the way of incorporating ICT into learning within New Zealand. One of my goals whilst at this school is to gain understanding of how ICT is used and managed. Today and over this past week I have seen a couple issues around using ICT every day in the class and how these can be handled. A tool that was actually established at this school and is now worldwide with its base in the States with Google is Teacher Dashboard. This program allows the teacher to see what each student has open on their netbook and each student’s emails, drive, files, blog and activity. At anytime during the day the teacher is able to access this information from their personal laptop. One day earlier in the week one teacher who actually was away from the class for the day viewed the class and discovered that one student had a number of gaming tabs open. After a quick email to my AT the information was delivered allowing the teacher to deal with the situation. This resulted in the student losing his laptop for the day and having to complete work during lunch. Then again today my AT was away and emailed me during the day to say that he had just seen one of my students had a couple of youtube tabs open. These two experiences highlighted a major issue that comes with personal students netbooks. How can teachers be sure that students are focused, completing their work and not accessing anything inappropriate? This is also where teacher pedagogy has to change in order to align with this way of learning. I have found myself having to wander around the students all day ensuring that they are working and not distracted on their netbooks. This therefore means that the teacher has to teach but also ensure that students don’t get distracted. With tools like Teacher Dashboard, strong class rules and consequences I think the classroom teacher can be well equipped to deal with this issue.

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