the Wonderful World of Jo

I have been a very bad blogger (I’m not sure if anyone is reading this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter – as I’ve been a bad blogger regardless.) I haven’t said anything since last term… or last year, whichever you want to look at it.

There was a little bit of a slow down, or a complete halt on our Redback Project last year, so I stopped blogging. Bad of me, I know. Then of course it was the end of the year, the end of the term and Reporting Writing Time (in capitals of course).

Since I am still (officially) a first year grad, I spent a LOT of time writing my reports and that took my focus, as well as attempting to figure out what on earth I was going to do with the one class I had left.

I will admit that motivation became a problem. When you have a full load, it is much easier to motivate yourself to do things. When you don’t have a full load… well, only one class… it becomes a lot harder to do. I had one class and a lot of free time.

but now I’m back. It’s a new year, I have a new load and I’m 6 months into my first year. Unfortunately the government decided that all teachers had to take all of their curriculum days at the beginning of the year… They’ve been taken and the kids have been at school for 2 days.

Oh dear… my bad blogging is catching up with me. I’ll have to start sticking it in my calendar with a buzzer to remind me to blog. I wrote that at the start of the year… we’ve now had 6 weeks with the darling little kiddies and I have a full load… I kept meaning to blog, but kept forgetting too.

But then I so rarely keep New Year’s Resolutions.

I have been catching up with what means to be a teacher with a full load… and two classes of Year 9 English… Which needless to say, means a lot of fun. I will be blogging more often… hopefully.

This blog hasn’t said very much, except possibly that I’m busy, tired and irritated with year 9s and the delights of being a homegroup teacher to a bunch of year 7s.

Watch this space.

The biggest challenge for using 21^st C tools in the class room is access. Living as we do in an increasing technical world, even though some students don’t understand how to use USBs…, we need to be prepared to integrate the 21^st C tools into the class room for the 21^st C students.

This can be difficult, as even though Mr Rudd has promised computers for every student – there is no way that every student has access in the classroom to this type of hardware. There is also a lack of money to equip schools with Interactive Whiteboards in every classroom or with projects and the like. Therefore occasionally the 21^st C tools have to be used outside of the classroom or in short supply, when access can be arranged through the myriad of timetabling and class swopping.

This places a notable barrier on what students and teachers can access in relation to 21^st C tools in the classroom. But this barrier cannot defeat the knowledge that it is the 21^st C and students are immersed in this culture and we cannot avoid using these tools when we teach them in case we sell them short.

I try to gain access where possible for my students to be able to use 21^st C tools, booking access with different types of hardware and attempting to take parts of their learning onto the internet. I believe that the best way to do things like this would be to build the use of technology and the internet into the curriculum for the class and make using it a vital part of the assessment so that students understand the implications and so do the parents.

This would also give us a better scope for using ICT and make sure that it is clear to the students and parents that they are expected to participate in this – if it was an online Moodle site or a class blog or online e-Portfolios.

 But it remains that until the access improves, it will still be difficult to include the 21st C tools in the classroom.

In this life there are a number of things which are slowly making the transition between paper and electronic. Most newspapers have a number of articles which are published on line and the advent of RSS and RSS readers put a lot of the paper construction of newspapers out of the picture.

There are a few problems with this – some do not have access to the appropriate hardware or software for a complete switch to be possible – others, like myself, have trouble reading online texts for long periods of time.

In similar ways, E-Portfolios cannot completely take the place of the paper based version. In a perfect world you would have to have both – a paper based portfolio for all those things students need to complete by hand, such as art images and such and an E-Portfolio to store all those things which can be digitised.

Unfortunately there is still not enough access to the appropriate hardware to make E-Portfolios always available for ease of use and such things. This can make it more difficult to make an E-Portfolio an easy manner in which to present this kind of information. It does make it easier in that E-Portfolios are available to students both at home and at school and they are not particularly heavy or bulky to carry around, and the display can be changed as the contents of the Portfolio changes without too much trouble.

Paper portfolios can be always available and do not need any particular hardware to create or add to them, however they can then be bulky and heavy to move around and it takes a lot of effort to change the presentation or add a new item to the portfolio.

I would not say that I would use either more than the other or instead of the other, it would have to be based on the class or the situation in question. But for simple ease of use and access, there is not doubt that EPortfolios win over paper ones.