ICT on Teaching Rounds

During my teaching rounds I used an interactive whiteboard practically every day. I was glad about this because I didn't get the opportunity to use one during my first teaching round.

I used Microsoft Powerpoint a few times to present parts of my lessons. Microsoft Excel was used regularly for graphing as that was our main maths focus while I was teaching. As a class we created column, line and pie graphs. Once confident with excel, students created their own graphs.

I directed them to websites like http://www.melbournewater.com.au/ and http://www.bom.gov.au/. These websites are great for current weather statistics and water storage and water use statistics. Students also had the opportunity to experiment with other types of graphs on Excel.

A major focus for my last two weeks of teaching rounds was The Commonwealth Games. We kept track of the medal tally according to sport type. As a class we graphed Australia's Medal Tally at that time. Below is the table we created as a class. This involved looking up the medal tally at http://www.thecgf.com/games/tally_cat_results.asp and sorting medals into the categories of Individual Sport, Track Events, Field Events, Aquatics and Team Sports (team doesn't appear on this graph because the team events had not commenced at that stage).

Mathletics was an educational program that was used a great deal during my teaching rounds. The students loved it. However, I noticed that a lot of the students were using it to compete online against students from other schools. They would remain on low levels in order to keep their high scores rather than challenging themselves by going to the next level.

I was lucky enough to attend a Mathletics PD session in which the instructor discussed ways of keeping track of what students are doing on Mathletics. It allows you to set a level for each child in your class preventing them from staying on a level that is to easy for them and not providing enough of a challenge. It also gives you the option of setting specific tasks.

I introduced my students to the Dust Echoes website. They loved it although some of them found the stories a bit brutal. There was a quiz linked to each story so the students took the quiz once they finished each story. The quiz contained comprehension questions relating to the story. The students struggled with the quizzes that linked to the stories with no words. The discussions that followed were quite interesting. The students could also make their own version of the story.

I directed my students to the following website on a number of occasions. https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/primary/pages/Default.aspx. The website contains educational activities linking to all aspects of the VELS domains. Some of the topics covered include sports, arts, science, countries, maths, environment, news, Australia, music, health....the list goes on. Students can attempt to make a movie, animate, create, experiment.... I would definitely recommend this website.

At the end of my teaching rounds I prepared a slide show for my students to say thanks for having me. I used photos that I had taken throughout my rounds. I was able to add captions to the photos and also added music. The students loved it and were very appreciative. To do this I used a free program called Picasa 3. Here is a link to a youtube video outlining what Picasa 3 can do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskC6c_5L1M. Due to privacy issues I have not placed a link to the slideshow.