Supporting Community Cohesion Through ICT

Before reading Supporting community cohesion through ICT I was unsure on how FRONTER and other online learning resources can be used within schools to create collaborative learning. I understood that the web can be used for children to access homework and school information at home but I have not had the chance to see FRONTER being used in schools. However, I have seen other virtual learning environments like Class Dojo and Mathletics in use in both a year 3 and 5 class which I found were extremely valuable resources. I really enjoyed seeing Class Dojo being used in schools. It was a fun and interactive way to get children engaged and also worked brilliantly as a behaviour management tool. I particularly liked that Class Dojo isn’t just for the teacher and student but also the parents, so the children’s progress and behaviour can be monitored easily.

In the article, it is discussed how a university student can help a teacher become more confident in their use of ICT and technology within the classroom. Many teachers know there are many ways in which they can make the classroom experience more virtual and collaborative but they just don’t have the confidence to do this and this lack of confidence prevents them from fully engaging with the resource. Platt in When One Person’s Tech Treasure is Another’s Trash mentions how there are now so many different options of technology available to teachers that it can become bewildering to sort through and work out which software is worth using in the classroom and which others are not worth using at all. This is another factor which can affect a teacher’s confidence in using technology like FRONTER in the classroom, how do we know that it is going to be effective and worthwhile?

The program explained in the article worked with a partner school to create a platform for collaboration using FRONTER.  The article shows how through working with a university student the teacher’s individual confidence in using FRONTER increased significantly which helped to create a better collaboration with the partner school. It is also mentioned how teachers who did not have any assistance from a university student wished they had of had someone to support their learning.

I personally feel that this is a great program and that we as university students have a great wealth of technology based knowledge which some current teachers do not feel entirely confident in. We should be using this to assist and help these teachers in becoming more confident in order to be able to create online and collaborative learning environments through using sites like FRONTER. Both my mum and older sister are teachers and I often find myself helping them with technical problems they are having. I know and have seen how that from showing them something just once or twice they can then go on to create more interactive and often fun lessons through using technology in their classrooms.

Others may argue that technology should not be taking over the classroom as it distracts children from what is really being taught making everything a sort of game with immediate gratification. In my opinion, I feel that children benefit greatly from having this immediate gratification and feedback as it can help the child to feel a greater sense of achievement and reward for completing something. This can be more difficult to carry out in a classroom without any use of technology or an online learning resource as there may be 30 different children all seeking immediate feedback. I am not suggesting that the role of the teacher should be completely replaced by virtual learning environments but I do feel that some engagement with these resources will benefit not only the teacher but also the students by giving them a new resource to learn and explore with. Also as discussed in the article, the use of technology like FRONTER can help to create links with other schools. Something which may be more difficult and costly to do without the use of technology.

Berners-Lee, Answers for Young People & my personal experience of The Web.

Being born in 1996 means I cannot remember a time before the World Wide Web (WWW). I have always known that if I want to find something out I can Google it or to watch a video I can just go to YouTube. I have to say that I had never really read into the invention of the WWW or how it was created and before reading Berners-Lee, Answers for Young People I was slightly confused at the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). I had never given much thought to it but since reading I now realise that the WWW is just one part of the internet. There are many different components which make up the internet, the WWW being just one of those. I also found it very interesting when Berners-Lee discusses that before the WWW different information was on different computers and to access the information from another computer you would have to log onto that particular computer to get it. Having the WWW makes it so much easier to be able to share documents and files. Whether it be through the networking of different computers, email or something which in recent years has become extremely popular, the cloud.

My personal experience of using the web in relation to learning started in primary school. We would use the web mainly for research purposes, for a topic like the Egyptians for example. In partners we would be given an area to research and then after a certain amount of time we would meet on the carpet and share the information we had found. This is something that I find would be executed completely differently if it were to be carried out in a primary school classroom today. As the teacher I may ask the children to create a class Google Slide presentation collaboratively. With each pair working together to create a slide on their specific area from the research they have completed. The final outcome would be a presentation made up of work from all class members on the different areas they were researching.

During secondary school, my school pushed the use of Moodle. Moodle allowed students to upload homework and draft coursework onto the site and be able to receive comments from their teacher. This was a way for me to easily access feedback on my homework without having to being at school. I found it very useful as I could quickly find out what parts of my work were good, or which bits needed looking over again. We also had multiple forum discussions where if we had any queries with any piece of work we could use the forum to ask other people in the class or the teacher. Using both the forums and submission links helped to create a virtual learning environment between students and teachers which I found was extremely effective.

These days, as well than using the web for general browsing and social media, I use it as a learning resource. Mainly looking for recipes or for watching videos on how to do something. Over the summer I used YouTube to learn how to hang wallpaper. Before selecting which video I wanted to watch I looked at the amount of views it had and the amount of thumbs up it had been given. This helped me to choose which video would be a good source to learn from.

YouTube also allows viewers to comment on videos, this is something which I found really helpful as I had a question about part of the technique needed to hang the wallpaper, but through reading the comments I found that somebody else had asked the same question and another user had given a reply.