Teaching ICT

This year I've been putting my ETL323 skill into practice teaching ICT to a 4/5 class. I began by using the Cybersafety course from Google. http://www.google.com/educators/digitalliteracy.html

I found the set-up of the activities better than ACMA Cybersmart. The Google videos, for example, go very quickly but the students do catch on. This works better than the text dialogue boxes on the ACMA site (which have a sound version, which gets very noisy).

However, when the videos stop on YouTube a page comes up which includes some less-than-helpful images that are almost examples of the very things the video has said to avoid. I shall be contacting Google or YouTube (who host the videos) about this. The Google site has presenter aids (images and text) and workbooks. In the end, I took bits and pieces from these that would work with my age group and left out the sections which were for older learners.

I did use the Cybersmart Quiz at the end and issued the successful students with a Cybersafety licence and a letter that reminds of the consequences of breaching the guidelines that they have learnt.

This term, I'm using ideas from the Student Blog Challenge to use with the students setting up their own blogs through kidsblog.

http://studentchallenge.edublogs.org

In future I would finish Cybersafety earlier and enrol my group into the March session of the challenge.