[Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Dr Paul Chandler
paul.chandler at YVG.vic.edu.au
Fri Jun 9 15:23:46 EST 2006
Dear listers,
Well, I'm pleased that, in the end, I made some sense.
Anyone else feel more informed about what I was suggesting? Enthused? Like to suggest other "concepts"?
Perhaps some of us could band together to come up with some ideas for "concept-based IT" ?!
Regards,
-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Murray O.
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 11:11 AM
To: 'Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List'
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Paul
Yesterday when you posted about the need to teach concepts as well as skills I struggled to think of concepts. Your example about layers makes this a little clearer.
I'm beginning to see an exciting IT concepts course add interpolation & extrapolation (now that's a mouthful). To include excel fills, animation where students create each frame, animation where the software creates the frames.
You could create some type of final assignment with layers (music and
graphic) plus interpolation & extrapolation (animations) to get a multimedia extravaganza ...the students would love it
Regards,
Oliver Murray
Web Developer
Westbourne Grammar School
www.westbournegrammar.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Dr Paul Chandler [mailto:paul.chandler at YVG.vic.edu.au]
Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 11:24 PM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Hi again, folks,
Thanks for the postive feedback, Anne.
A few more thoughts. But first of all, let me cast my vote firmly in support of digital portfolios. I think blogs, wikis, digital portfolios and the like are all terrific, and made even more so when they are used deliberately and productively to support HOTs and metacognitive learning/thinking.
But allow me to relay a story from last year. Year 8s; our Year 8 ICT
program is "partnered" with SOSE, so I get to teach them in blocks, usuually as a prelude to an application in SOSE. So, they were doing some (simplish) PaintShop Pro, building up to a mapping exercise. The "learning task" and the "application" both necessitated layers. Now, I walk around with a metaphorical stack of overhead transparencies in my head most of time, and apply the idea to various situations almost without thinking about it:
powerpoint master slides, drawing in Word, layers in Dreamweaver, layers in PSP, among them. Pretty nearly the whole of the year 8 cohort was stuggling with manipulating layers in PSP, so I used the OHP transparency analogy with them, and you could see the 'lights go on'. So, I'm wondering what sense they make of master slides, vector drawing, layers, etc etc So I wonder: is there not some sort of concept here which is applicable across a variety of software types, and, if learned, actually makes learning new products potentially easier? I'm not trying to pretend that this "concept" is going to take lesson upon lesson to teach, or that it's some grand scheme about how computers and programmed or wired ... but I reckon it's there.
And so, I further wonder whether there are similar "concepts" with applicability across software types which we might be well placed to be a focus of our teaching. THIS is the kind of thing that I mean by "concept approach", but my thinking about it is very much in genesis. This kind of thing gives us an in-road to deal with HOTS related to ICT iself, and not just the use of ICT to support HOTS in another domain. "In what way is OLE like PSP layers"; "how would you design a better interface for ..."; "If I were to tell you that different musical tracks are manipulated just like layers, how would that help you get a handle on use of <as yet un-explored> notation software"
Here's another one ... I recently asked several groups of students how they knew how to find particular menu items in the menu. Some students that I have asked have indicated that they have experienced some logical groupings of the commands, and that helps them. The majority, so far, have "just remembered". My sample size is pretty small, so I'm keen to ask more groups of kids. And one thing that I'll be interested in is whether they find what's in the File menu to be a "logical grouping" - to me, having a working understanding that a program exists within a broader system environment is pretty important (and that the commands to interact with that broader system environment tend to be clustered in the file menu). But that's for the future.
Regards,
-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Anne Baird
Sent: Thu 6/8/2006 5:46 PM
To: 'Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List'
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Wow, what a great group of interesting comments. Thanks Paul, Gordon and Andrew for the most recent posts. This is also something that I have been grappling with as a trained primary teacher, a constant learner and teacher of ICT and thinking and a first time teacher of Year 7's & 8's Information Technology as a formal subject. (the rest of my time is working with
teachers)
Paul in particular raised the issue of moving beyond the knowledge level in IT and this is exactly what is troubling me. How do we embed the skills and knowledge that students need to effectively use the technology as well as ensure that they are using higher order thinking and PBL.
I originally thought that doing some online learning (hotlists to webquests) might be a way to go but of course that may address the HOT but doesn't necessarily address the skills and knowledge that they also have to have or should have in IT.
One thing that I am doing is taking responsibility for the digital portfolio development. In this way I can use PPT for Gr 5/6/7 and Dreamweaver for Yr
8/9 as the vehicle to teach skills and knowledge but also use them as a means of creating opportunities for learning other skills along the way- video, photography, Kahootz, excel, garageband, podcasting, blogging etc etc. But it also means that the content and therefore the HOT is also considered when compiling and developing exactly what goes into the DP's and how they are structured.
BTW we chose to continue with Year 7's using PPT exactly for the same reason that Andrew mentioned-there is so much more to the program. We set it up like a web-page though. Because kids at this age still need to learn lots about effective ways to set up portfolios and navigation so that when they start to do web-designed portfolios a lot of that is already considered and learnt. Not sure if that makes sense and am willing to be convinced otherwise but that's how we are doing it.
Anne Baird
Leading Schools Manager
Wedderburn College
Hospital St
Wedderburn 3518
School 03 54943011 Mobile 0417 340276 Home 03 54911540 My Blog http://wedderburn-college.blogspot.com/
My Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/anne_loves_pink/
My weblinks http://del.icio.us/annieb3525
-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Dr Paul Chandler
Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 2:57 PM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Can I pose a question? What does it mean to "cover in depth"?
Let me tackle the issue from another angle. Consider Bloom's taxonomy, and whatever you think about it, it has its uses. If I'm teaching, say, science, "knowledge", "comprehension", "analysis", "application" and "synthesis" tasks comes to mine easily enough - one sometimes has to work hard to eke out enough curriculum time for evaluation.
The think which has always struck me as odd (and maybe it's me), that when I'm teaching "about IT", I find it _really_ hard to move beyond knowledge.
To do things such as summarize, describe, interpret, apply, demonstrate, calculate, analyze, separate, order, explain, connect, classify, combine, integrate, modify, rearrange, substitute, assess, decide, rank, grade, test, measure, or recommend ... All the "higher order" skills is just so hard.
I'd suggest that this is because we are too bothered with ensuring that the students have "the skills" rather than "the concepts". If we were orientated towards "concepts", then then higher order stuff would come easier.
Often, I think, we have become side-tracked into thinking that using ICT to facilitate higher-order thinking in other subjects is a satisfactory replacement for imbuing "our own subject" with sufficient conceptual depth and higher-order thinking. I'm not yet convinced.
-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Mclean, Rachelle L
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 2:31 PM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
I would still think that Word and Powerpoint should be covered in depth in Primary school, so that you 7-10-ers could move onto more challenging stuff.
-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of fiona at balmoralhs.vic.edu.au
Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 12:54 PM
To: yr7-10it at edulists.com.au
Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
Rachelle
You would be amazed. Many of the year 7's can type up a document and edit but they dont have more refined skills, especially those regarding page layout and the more complex options.
"Mclean, Rachelle L" <Mclean.Rachelle.L at edumail.vic.gov.au> on Thu, 8 Jun
2006 12:42:28 +1000 wrote:
> Although Fiona, I can't understand why the vast majority of students
> wouldn't already know how to use Word at year 7 when I am teaching it
to
> my grade preps and 1s.
>
> Rachelle McLean
> Pakenham Hills Primary School
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
> [mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of
> fiona at balmoralhs.vic.edu.au
> Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 12:13 PM
> To: yr7-10it at edulists.com.au
> Subject: RE: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
>
> I think this is what much of the discussion has been about Debra,
namely
> that IT is not being seen as a discrete subject but to be taught as
part
> of another subject. If I was your elearning co-ord I would go back
and
> tell them to go away (or words to that effect) and then offer pd in
what
> skills they would like to see utilised (as opposed to taught) during a
> particular semester e.g semester 1, English, year 7 - focus on
microsoft
> word and basic editing and formatting and this would coincide with the
> year 7 being taught the correct skills in an IT class.
>
> If you dont discriminate between the subjects then the English class
> will be spent teaching IT skills and, you then have to ask the all
> important question - what are the English teacher's IT skills like -
> does he/she know what tabs are? can she change the rulers using the
side
> margins on the screen? Can he/she explain how the school server works
> and how to save corrently. Now I am going to make a statement
regarding
> English teachers that will probably get me hung, and to all those
> computer literate English teachers out there I humbly apologise but,
in
> my experience, the English teachers have been the ones who have had
the
> most difficulty coming to terms with new technology!
>
> Fiona Bain
> LT Co-ordinator
>
>
> "McDonald, Debra A1" <mcdonald.debra.a1 at edumail.vic.gov.au> on Thu, 8
> Jun 2006 11:43:51 +1000 wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I may be on the outer her as it has been a while since I have read
the
> emails regarding VEL's as I wanted to do so at my leisure instead of
> between classes, but at out school the eLearning coordinator is
> apparently going to hold compulsory PD's that will instruct staff
> (separate PD's for each subject area) what skills they need to be
> teaching each semester and how to do this. now I have no idea on how
she
> is planning to do this and I think that in time she will let us know
as
> I will be having to assist her in instructing the school in part of
this
> because she is not totally proficient in all area's of IT (mainly the
> basics).
> >
> > what are you guys doing in the PD scheme of things for next year??
and
> how are you running it?
> >
> > would love to here what is going on out there.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> >
> > Debra McDonald
> > Network Manager
> > Lyndhurst Secondary College
> > Cranbourne
> > (03) 5996 0144
> >
> >
> >
>
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> fiona at balmoralhs.vic.edu.au
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