ICT A1 part II: How to help students who have lower lietracy and research competence with ICT tools

Story

I have been feeling sorry for two of my students who were in my last year placement school. They were in my Year 10 History class. Both showed much lower literacy and academic achievement compared to their peers and rarely handed in assignments in the previous lessons. One of them (Student A) also misbehaved severely, notorious among teachers. I taught this class for 7 lessons (9 periods) in 2 weeks and the topic for the unit was Napoleon Wars. To help the students have more comprehensive understanding of the varied Napoleon Wars and practice historical inquiring skills, I designed a research and presentation project which was prescribed the research content (a summary of one of the Napoleon’s Wars composed of when, where, who, why, how; significance(s) of the chosen war; and an open small research report related to the war such as the used military strategies or weapons, the enemy, the effects or consequences, etc.). I also prescribe the product form as “oral” presentation and mentioned to the students that neither the quality of their writing nor the fancy ICT skills shown in their product would affect the marking as long as the information and concepts were demonstrated clearly. By doing so, I believed that the two lower literacy students could be encouraged to submit this assignment so gained some score for their final grade.

Under the tutoring and monitoring from my supervising teacher[1], they did show more engaged in this task and presented their work in the end. Student A made a Powerpoint work and student B was wrote a speech script to read it out loud as his oral presentation. However, having made all students presented in one double lesson, I realized how less considerate I was so that the two students might feel humiliated when seeing other students show their skilled ICT techniques e.g. containing images, sounds, animation, etc into their PPT. Student A rejected to present in front of his classmates at first and then messed up his presentation time when he had to complete that anyway. Student B embarrassingly read his speech as planned but I found that paper thrown in the rubbish bin after that lesson.

Reflection

I have never had another chance to teach them since then but have been thinking how to improve their learning experience at times. I believe successful teaching/learning should make the learners feel fulfilled and meaningful so that they will be motivated to continue their learning. It was obvious that the learning experience for those two students in my class were neither fulfilled nor meaningful. (To feel humiliated is definitely not the meaning of education!)

Through reading and making sense the ICT section of VELS, I surprisingly realized that all the curriculum teachers share the responsibility of cultivating students’ ICT using ability and ICT is not only about the skills concerning operating the computer but more in regards to the proper communication in a broad sense. (Therefore there is no teacher should have excuse to say he/she is not IT professional!) I also find some possible solutions (particularly the dimensions of “ICT for visualizing thinking” and “ICT for creating”), which I could have applied to avoid the embarrassing situation for the students.

Solutions

The learning project I designed was Bloom’s creating level[2] and required but not limited ICT forms of the product. In the description of the “ICT for creating” dimension in the VELS ICT domain, it says that “through the selection and application of appropriate equipment, techniques and procedures, students learn to process data and information to create solutions to problems and information products that demonstrate their knowledge and understandings of the concepts, issues, relationships and processes”. The VELS ICT also suggests some useful ICT tools to help achieve “Designing solutions and information products” and “Producing solutions and information products”, the two of the key concepts and skills under the "ICT fro creating" dmension [3], which I could have used to scaffold the class to achieve better creating result, for example, except for the powerpoint, students could also make a website or film to present their research. Furthermore, imitation of forms and comprehensive thinking are two of the critical foundations for creating. Before creating, students not only are required to acquire the skills for the comminucation media such as words, ppt, but also the competence of planning and implementing research, locating and retrieving information, as well as classifying and organizing found ideas. Several ICT tools are suggested in the “ICT for visualising thinking” dimension in the ICT Domain[4], which are significantly useful to scaffold the students having lower literacy and ICT competence to conduct a creating-level task .

These are the ICT tools I find useful to help those two students if the situation happens again.

On Researching

Introduce students to use the “Complex search strategies”.[5]

On visual thinking

Introduce students to use the various Graphic organisers.

- Spidermaps organiser used to help students understand the task and plan their research.

- Episode event organiser or flow chart used to help students summarize the chosen war (event).

- T-char/ Memory Meaning Nodes & Concept Pattern / Concept Frame organiser used to help students present their free topic

- Tree diagram/ Spidermaps/ Genalisation & Principle Pattern/ Concept Pattern organiser used to help students identify the significance of the chosen war (event)

On Producing the task (creating)

Introduce students to use ICT conventions and techniques such as Spellchecker and proofreading to improve the format and accuracy of their task product.

I imagine if I would have engaged my poor student A and B to use above ICT tools to help develop their understanding of the research and ask them copy and paste all of them into a Powerpoint. They might gain more confidence and motivation of learning because the presentation would look pretty “cool”!

In a nutshell, I believe the best teaching essentially depends on how the teacher integrates the resources (include herself/himself) with the faith that every student deserves to be help to learn better. ICT tools are one of the resources which is worthy for all curriculum teachers to put efforts on so that the most suitable way of applying in each specific subject can be developed and widely used in the most appropriate situation.

[1] My supervising teacher kindly thought these two students were too tricky to ask a student teacher to handle so she suggested and arranged me to only focus on the rest of the class while she was tutoring the two using my designed material.

[2] My favorite resource to understand the Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Tarlinton ,D. (2003). Bloom's Revised Taxonomy PowerPoint Presentation. July 14, 2003, from http://www.kurwongbss.eq.edu.au/thinking/Bloom/blooms.htm

[3] The 7 key concepts and skills of ICT for creating are “Designing solutions and information products”, “Producing solutions and information products”, “Evaluating solutions and information products”, “Managing files”, “Creating digital portfolios”, “Using safe work practices, and “Ethical and legal obligations”..

[4] See “Approaches to Information and Communications Technology” (http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/approaches.html#show_hide1)

[5] Ibid. VELS Level 5 in “ICT for communication” dimension: Use complex search strategies, such as Boolean, to refine their searches.

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