ICTs and Pedagogy

The abstract for this sounds interesting Can popular culture and information communication technologies (ICT) broaden early years' multiliteracies experiences? This paper presents a case study that begins with boys role-playing Star Wars action scenes at the commencement of the school year, and concludes with an end-of-year school community celebration of a new DVD Star Wars movie sequel, designed and performed by the boys. The Children's Star Wars Project was developed in a small Western Australian independent community school committed to the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy. The case study provides an exemplar of the integral relationship between early childhood pedagogy, multiliteracies metalanguage, and multimodal designs of meaning. Implications for educational research are that popular culture and ICT can be readily integrated with early childhood education (ECE) to broaden multiliteracies experiences. As shown in this case study, these experiences facilitate the achievement of The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia outcomes.

A collection of modules and other resources seeking to help Early Childhood educators grapple with the question of integrating digital technologies into their practice.

Article by two Canadian teacher educators about why the education of pre-service teachers is changing and what they are doing about it.

Here's my blog post about my Assignment 2 (which is currently in its infancies).

Reasons for using ICTs.

Fantastic resource for assignment 1. Nice work Angela.

The Week 2 activity in asked What's your pedagogy? got me thinking, I decided that building relationships with my students was extremely important to me. I agree with this article and Elena Aguilar shares a very similar pedagogy, her classroom is not just individual students, it's a community in which everyone belong

Awesome question! I have a number of motto's but I think one stands tall amongst them all. We are all equal and put downs of course are not to be tolerated but I believe more focus on student fear of failure resulting in a lack of effort to succeed. There will be times in our career where we will witness students losing motivation due to ridicule from peers or even self-ridicule. More than once I have heard in a maths classroom a student admitting, "Oh I'm not good at maths", even when I can see that they are quite capable. Effectively the student is giving themself permission to fail. My moto is "THANKS FOR CORRECTING ME!" Too often students fear answering a questions in case they get it wrong, and some students will abuse others for their mistakes. It is a cultural attitude that is in the workplace as well as the classroom. If someone voices that they have discovered a mistake you have made, then that gives you the opportunity to correct yourself. If you cannot see the error, then it is an opportunity for them to teach you something new. It doesn't matter which way you look at it, mistakes should be celebrated as a collaborative learning opportunity, and as teachers we should encourage this. Olympic gold medal winner Adam Kreek talks about happy failure and emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8P7Ni1NwB0

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P41_nyYY3Zg&t=317" This is interesting talk about how ipads affect children. This also provides what we can do about it.

A blog for a Victorian prep class. Found via the Twitter hashtag #classblogs

This is from a modern theorist referenced in the Australian Curriculum. I have not finished the article yet but sharing as it has some great information for assignment 1

Thanks for sharing the resource. It clarifies key stakeholders' perspectives regarding ICT skills and the (in-)assessability of such through current testing options. Although Dede expresses cautious cynicism over the self serving nature behind each stakeholder contribution, it does indicate shared emphasis upon the importance of ICTs for the development of transferrable life skills which are reflected in the Australian Curriculum's General Capabilities. As with anything in the curriculum, interpretation of how these capabilities should be taught and assessed is subjective. Be it an impossible task or not, the key edict seems to be that educators are to provide integrated ICT/core content learning episodes that allow learners to develop universally current skills in personally authentic contexts but to also alert the learner to the transferable use of such skills for a global context.