It has only been the last 4 years where my students have regularly used computers. Previous to that my school only had 1 PC per classroom and there was no computer lab. In recent years the IT situation has greatly improved. There is now a lab of 20 PCs and up to 3 PCs in each classroom and the school is networked with individual email accounts for the students.
When I taught stage 2, I was very structured when the students were using the internet. I had decided what sites I wanted them to enter and what information I wanted them to obtain. Most of the other time spent on the PC’s was for word processing, graphing, slide shows and using various learning software.
When I taught years 5 and 6 I was more flexible. My stage partner and I set up 2 online units on Moodle; Antarctica and Global Connections. Before the students started the online unit we had put in the ground work by establishing the relevant website to list on the unit. This task was extremely arduous and laborious. Only recently have I begun to understand the techniques used to evaluate the websites quickly. If only I had known some of these simple quick questions, I could have saved myself being taken on ‘Merry Go Rounds’ – websites which take you no where!
Previously, I was fed up with wasting hours and hours searching for relevant sites so subsequently I had only a few sites which I allowed my students to explore. I was also adamant that the students were under no circumstance allowed to freely search the net for information as I felt it was either a time-waster or they would find inappropriate material. The students did however complete ‘Treasure hunts’ where they had to find unit based information by visiting pre approved sites.
Since reading about the different techniques on evaluating web pages I feel more confident to show the staff and students some simple techniques to help them critically analyse sites. It might even be a viable option to print some of these techniques on to A4, laminate them and stick one next to every PC.
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What an excellent summing up of the Web 2.0 technologies! Matt, are your computers in the classroom or lab networked? You comment that children can only store their PowerPoints on the local computer. Do you not have a shared folder for student's work?
I'm intrigued by your idea of using a wiki as a discussion forum. I suspect it might be easier for students to have a "proper" forum, so that they can reply to a posting and keep the thread running.
Were some of these technologies new to you?
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