Innovations and Excellence Bendigo Secondary Schools' Cluster

Connecting with Classrooms Professional Learning Opportunities

Connecting with Classrooms provides opportunities for Lisa to work with teachers in unit planning, team teaching and to consider the effective use of ICT in to classroom practice.

Digital Portfolios
Use of Digital Portfolios to support ongoing student assessment
Through the use of powerpoint students are able to maintain an ongoing record of work which addressed goal areas as identified by the classroom teacher.  A range of ICT skills are used as part of the development of a Portfolio – hyperlinking, linking pages, inserting documents, moviemaking, sound recordings etc.

Having been involved in writing a report for the eLearning Division of the DoE I have a range of resources to support such a project.

Initially would suggest a class a week for six weeks to  be designated to assist students in getting the Portfolio started.  This can be varied.

Class Portal
To support transdisciplinary studies the possibility of establishing a Class Portal could be investigated.  In summary a Class Portal would be developed around an inquiry learning topic eg How can we stop Global Warming?  Student would work in teams or individually to research  key questions with work being placed on a website for all to share and link to the community.

ICT elements can vary depending on skill level and access to ICT – At basic level would incorporate publishing tools (word, ppt, publisher, webapages) and incorporate multimodal literacies.

This would involve planning time to develop an appropriate project with a range of resources etc to support the unit.  Would need to be done over a 5 week period.

Web 2.0 tools
Wikispaces
Provision of online collaborative learning opportunities for students.  The use of wikispaces enables all students to contribute to a class encyclopaedia on a given unit of work.
Blogging
An online journal that can be used to students to set learning goals, publish work, share ideas.

Above tools require relatively simple pd for teachers. Can work with teachers in setting up the pages and considering how to integrate into classroom practice. Team teaching to occur to assist in working with teachers and students in the classroom.

Photostory
Use of Photostory as a visual presentation tool . Can be used for a variety of learning and teaching approaches: research presentation, self reflection, Current Affairs presentation, report on excursion, explaining via images an experiment.

Integrating the web into the classroom
How can we integrate the web effectively into learning and teaching?  A range of web based formats can be developed to support student learning. 
http://www.bendigoschools.vic.edu.au/china/home.html  This link demonstrates how the web can be linked into a unit of work.  This unit has been developed to support the exhibition of the Great Wall of China.