Week 5 - Concluding Remarks

During my practicum I took every opportunity to use technology to enhance my teaching and learning and as result I feel confident that I can do so in my own classroom next year. I found that using Interactive Whiteboard activities at the start of my lessons stimulated whole class discussion and helped me ensure that students were actively involved in the learning process.

Firstly, I used the education software I worked on at Pearson as the starting point for many of my literacy lessons. For example:

• The activities on Pearson Places Handwriting came in useful as a means of reinforcing students' knowledge about letter formation and placement.

• The A Sound Way Interactive Whiteboard CD activities worked well as a means of testing and reinforcing students' knowledge of long and short vowel sounds.

Secondly, I adapted the M&Ms activity from the Week 4 workshop for use in the numeracy unit on collecting data. I used Clinkers for the activity rather than M&Ms and as a class we recorded how many of each colour there were in the packet. Having collected the data we then created a bar chart and discussed what which colour was most common, least common etc. Unfortunately due to limited access to computers I wasn't able to teach the students how to create their own bar charts using Excel, but this activity was a fantastic and engaging way to introduce bar charts in a Prep class.

Finally, I used activities that I had created using the Quia software which allowed me to customize them to fit my integrated lessons. For example, as part of the Integrated Unit on Pets and the Farm the class had living eggs in the classroom which then hatched and therefore having looked at a PowerPoint about the lifecycle of a chicken I used a Quia quiz and hangman activity to test students knowledge and understanding. These activities can be viewed at the following links:

• Hatching eggs quiz: http://www.quia.com/quiz/2683189.html?AP_rand=126135913

• Hatching Eggs Hangman: http://www.quia.com/hm/696825.html

Overall, the technology workshops have opened my eyes to the range of resources that are freely available and the educational value of integrating these into my lessons as teaching and learning tools. I look forward to putting more of the ideas we have explored into practice next year and to discovering other sites and programs that can be used to effectively integrate ICT into every day teaching and learning.