Welcome Parents & Caregivers
Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century
Presentation Speech
Welcome parents to Thenasa State School’s year 3 information evening. I am going to give you someinformation on what your child will be learning this year and how you can support them at home. In particular, this presentation will be about ICTs.
You’re thinking icey-teas? What have they got to do with this…I’ve tried Liptons and peach flavoured is my favourite? Well, let me introduce you to a different type of ICTs. Information & Communication Technologies. They are tools that teachers can utilise in our classroom to assist with your child’s learning in the 21st century.
You’re probably aware of your own child’s strengths and weaknesses with their learning. But let me introduce you to 3U. Your student is in a class of 25 students, 11 girls and 14 boys. We are lucky enough to have 5 of these boys play for our local football club. We are also very fortunate enough to have a student who has recently moved from France, and so speaks English as their Second Language. All of the children typically vary over their academic levels, some with special needs but all with their own gifts & talents.
In case you have never been to our classroom, I would like to draw a picture in your mind of what it looks like. In our class we have our own 4 computers. Our school also has access to a computer lab of 25 computers for an hour each week. We have a smart board, a class set of iPads and every student has their own calculator. We also have teacher aides assist in our classroom for a total of 4 hours per week. Our school highly encourages use of the new Australian Curriculum where possible.
Did you know your child belongs to the generation who have been dubbed ‘the net generation’ or ‘digital natives’? This means they are separated from previous generations as they have been raised in an era of affluence aligned with expansive & pervasive technological change. Conservative estimates suggest that by the age of 21 these students will have spent at least 10,000 hours playing video games, sent more than 200,000 emails, watched 20,000 hours of television and spent 10,000 hours on a mobile phone.
Because of these phenomenal facts, I integrate ICTs into my classroom as much as possible. But I also do this because I love to! ICTs make learning fun (and they make my job easier).
For example, the smartboard in my class offers a range of uses. You can write on it like a traditional black board or whiteboard. But you can use it to play videos, to enhance learning content. You can use it for interactive educational games. The possibilities are endless and chances are students will be more engaged than if they were simply copying from a white board.
According to an englishteacher.com.au, because of its interactive and dynamic nature, ICT has the potential to meet the needs of individual students by providing opportunities to direct their learning and to pursue information, or complete tasks, in ways which meet their own interests and needs.
You’re not convinced?
Let me give you a couple of examples. Homework. We all know it has the potential to cause stress and anxiety to students and there may well be a good reason for this. No matter how much parental support your child receives at home with their homework, they may still feel like they can’t do it. Unfortunately parents like you can relate to these emotions as they sometimes experience hopelessness in assisting their child with their homework because processes and ideas have changed since they were at school.
This is where Augmented Reality comes in handy. Augmented reality enables the real world to be combined with the virtual world. This is simply done with the help of a tablet computer. For students, they are able to scan a ‘trigger image’ from their homework sheet, which brings up a video on their tablet of their teacher explaining and reminding them how to complete that problem. Feel free to visit the ‘Useful Links’ page to find out more about Augmented Reality, or see me personally for a demonstration and which app you will need to enable your child to have access to this.
Secondly, there are an abundance of ICT tools for integration in teaching English. You may think it is unnecessary for students to use computers and other technologies for their English work. You’re thinking back to your day, when writing a story consisted of pencil & paper, or the like. However, ICT enables students to organise and present information in a variety of forms and compose their own work more easily and professionally. Word-processing software allows them to access tools professional editors use, and to manipulate text in ways that previously were difficult or unmanageable.
A particular example of using ICT as a tool to learn English is Make Beliefs Comix. I have used this tool as a way for the students to plan their narrative writing more thoroughly. Traditionally I may have got them a blank template worksheet, to fill in their individual ideas for the beginning, the complication and the resolution of their narrative. However, with this online Comic strip tool, the students are able to illustrate their ideas with images of their characters and their settings in an easy way. I have found that they find this more enjoyable as it is not simply just writing on paper, which these ‘digital natives’ find dull and unexciting. Ultimately, this leaves more time for your child to draft their writing with much more detail – ending in a better academic result.
I hope that by this part of the presentation you are beginning to understand that technologies themselves have little impact on learning in schools, but what is crucial is how the technologies are used. The Australian Curriculum identifies ICT as a ‘capability’ that students must learn. Let’s look at maths now. The Australian Curriculum outlines that in mathematics “Students employ their ICT capability to perform calculations, draw graphs, collect, manage, analyse and interpret data; share and exchange information and ideas and investigate and model concepts and relationships.”
I love to use is Mathletics - a program designed for the teaching of mathematics. Again, this technology is used on a computer. However, don’t let this mislead you; I am a maths lover myself, and value authentic, hands-on experiences where the students are able to discover new maths ideas with the use of many resources. We move from using concrete materials, to using the correct terms and then the correct symbols. This is a timely process however with mathletics I am able to set particular lessons for the topic they are learning about, which gives illustrations, instructions, quizzes and games for the student to practice the concept or skill. At the end, I am able to set a ‘test’ which collates the students’ results and is accessible for me to monitor their individual understandings. And here’s what the kids love about it: they are able to ‘play’ in real-time against other students not just in their class or school, but in a different country entirely.
This brings my presentation to an end. I anticipate that it was informative & interesting and has given you reason to believe that information & communication technologies bring a wide range of tools that assist your child in becoming an informed citizen of the 21st century. The Melbourne Declaration on the Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008) recognises that in a digital age, and with rapid and continuing changes in the ways that people share, use, develop and communicate with ICT, young people need to be highly skilled in its use. I firmly believe that children who know how to use ICTs are empowered young people.
