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I don’t think there is any doubt that using digital technology in the classroom enhances children’s learning. It not only provides fun opportunities to practice what they learn but is an integral part of the teaching and learning process. It makes learning more interesting for the children by using visual aid and can also be interactive. If we ‘do’, then we remember. Technology can be used across all subject areas. I think teachers need to be aware of school self- evaluation, to inform their teaching. The whole concept behind SSE is to improve the quality of education for the children. It allows schools to take ownership and work on an area specific to them. As teachers we are on the ground level of learning so we are the ones implementing the plan of action. The whole point of me doing this course was to improve my knowledge of digital technology so I can bring it to the classroom in September. Children are so tech savvy these days, that we need to be at least on the same level as them, if not a step ahead! I would hope that I could share my knowledge to the wider school community in this coming year.
I chose ‘skilled communication’ as my 21st century skill. It is vital for children to be able to communicate effectively in order to function in society. I recently had a conversation with a 3rd level lecturer on this topic. She lectures 1st and 2nd year students and was commenting on their inability to communicate face-to-face. Her office door is always open for any queries or problems but they rarely take her up on it. Their preferred method to contact her, unsurprisingly is via email. This in itself is another issue as they expect the emails to act as two way conversation similar to text messaging. I do think the lockdowns have contributed to this situation, as these teenagers weren’t interacting with people and only communicating online for a long time. Having said that, we can all picture children in our classes that spend more of their free time online than they do interacting in the ‘real world’ so I would think this is an important focus across the board. I normally start off the school year with a ‘Find someone who’ game. Children move around the room and find someone who e.g. has a sister, plays football, went on holidays etc. They record as they go along. They are finding things out about each other that they may not have already known and it creates opportunity for conversations about their answers. Going forward, I could develop this task further by grouping some of the people who play football together to chat about who they play for, their position on the team, what club they support etc. They could then present what they have found out about someone else back to the class. Some children are not comfortable speaking in front of the whole class so similar tasks could be undertaken in a small group situation. This can be made possible during team teaching lessons with the SET.
I like the way you can organise your lessons with OneNote. In the example that we worked with the user had organised lessons by subject and then chapters within these. The teacher can choose their style, for example organising by week or by term. The resource also allows to add in pictures, links and videos to back up the lesson being taught. Also, the teacher can type and handwrite notes, as in the example with the microscope. I like the fact that once you have created the notes, they can be called upon again and again and also new content can be added easily. You can keep your notebook private or share it. This allows for teacher collaboration and also work can be shared with students so they can access it at home. I am looking forward to experimenting with OneNote as this is the only way to become au fait and confident bringing it into the classroom as a resource.
I had never used Teams and my only knowledge of it was that it could be used to host and attend meetings, as an alternative to zoom. Over lockdown, like many others we opted to use seesaw as our online learning platform. It is still being used on a smaller scale to show pictures of what the children did in school or to assign homework, however has its limitations. Teams seems to be one stop shop for live lessons, assignments, quizes and a lot more that I haven’t yet discovered. I like the fact that you can use other apps within Teams also. It is a fantastic way of tracking student progress by having information available at a glance. Staff can also share lesson plans. Of course it is always going to be a challenge to get staff to ‘buy into’ a new way of doing things and I definitely think some Croke Park hours should be assigned to this area.
I have to admit, I am completely out of my comfort zone with this course. I had noticed the application ‘onedrive’ on my laptop but had no idea that how it could be used, so even logging into it today and having a look around, I felt I had made a bit of progress! We recently got new state of the art interactive whiteboards in the classroom (where the whiteboard itself can be used the same as a tablet or computer), but I feel I am sticking to what I know and not using it to its full capacity. Hence, why I enrolled on the course. I will be teaching 4th class in September and feel I need to be more current and tech savvy when it comes to resources. Sway could be used with almost any curricular area. I particularly like creating PowerPoints to support my SESE lessons and can envisage using sway to create digital stories as an alternative. Online quizzes with Form would be a fun way of eliciting prior knowledge on a topic or as an assessment tool. The children could answer the questions on school tablets. Using Forms to collect assessment data would be very valuable in relation to the School Self Evaluation process also.
