ICT Guy

I’ve been working in Murrayville the past two days with staff and students. It has been really enjoyable! We’ve been using blogs, wikis and Moodle. I especially enjoyed blogging with the grade 3/4’s and the grade 5/6’s. It was a lot fun, and the students picked it up really quickly. The grade 3/4 students even corrected any wrong URL’s I typed! Some even had their own personal emails … times have changed!! The digital natives are in all our classrooms.

Their blogs are here if you want to take a look:
Murrayville Grade 5/6 Bloggers

Murrayville Grade 3/4 Bloggers

Robotics is one of the many technological activities that one can undertake which caters for a wide range of abilities and aptitudes. Students can work both on and off the computer; programming, debugging, building, solving problems, refining ideas, and working in teams. It is engaging on a number of levels and is constructivist in nature. Constructivism can be described as a learning theory where:

“Learners learn by experimentation, and not by being told what will happen. They are left to make their own inferences, discoveries and conclusions. It also emphasizes that learning is not an “all or nothing” process but that students learn the new information that is presented to them by building upon knowledge that they already possess.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28learning_theory%29

I recently had the opportunity to work with a group of students at Ranfurly primary school over a number of weeks during term 3. It was interesting to see students tackle and solve problems and follow their interests and strengths. Some students where engaged by the building of robots, others by the programming, or a combination of both. The whole process focused on solving problems and was opened ended in that students had many different approaches to set problems.

This image shows a screenshot of a typical robotics program. Robotics, much like Microworlds is what Semour Papert termed “Hard Fun”. It is both intellectually challenging and engaging.

I can only hope that more and more schools take advantage of these materials and technologies to engage their students.