Ken Teaches 2015: Reflection 5; Week 6

A Reflection on the use of Miscellaneous ICT Tools

This week the cohort has been tasked with reflecting on the use of some miscellaneous ICT tools. To begin this last reflective blog I’ll start with this video (4 mins),

Today the ICT Tools I have looked at and used were mind mapping tools, google tools, and Excel. The mind mapping websites I used were http://www.bubbl.us and http://www.text2mindmap.com. These are great tools for writing down the start of a project. I myself, after my first placement day, have been given the task of teaching an information technology class cascading style sheets in two days. So I used the mind mapping tools to write down all the relevant information that I thought I should use and then generated the mind map.

The two mind maps I used were,

from bubbl.us, and

from text2mindmap.

Of the two I personally thought that text2mindmap was the easier of the two, it allows for text in a box which you can easily change without fiddling around with bubbles and the text delete by enter, which I did a few times on bubbl.us. However bubbl.us has a slightly better aesthetic with strong areas of focus. I can see myself using these tools in class in my teaching career.

The second lot of tools are tools that I use every day. With google there is a range of tools out there, from e-mail (gmail) to video streaming services (youtube). However for me the most important tool is the google.docs function. Google docs allows for multiple users to access the documents that you want to be accessed. This is great for group assessment activities, however I understand that many schools choose not to use this ICT tool because they are government schools with their own intranet system. However as a rule of thumb, if you are teaching a class that is going to have a group assessment that is primarily written you might consider using google docs as it is very secure since the owner of the google docs page must give you permission. This is a tool for those who seek to go to university, since many universities do not have an intranet for students, it is the best way of equipping students seeking to go into the tertiary system.

Probably the most powerful tool on any computer is Microsoft Excel. Excel is a program that can start at the most basic functionality and go into some of the craziest functions that I personally haven’t wrapped my head around. My own personal use of Excel for the majority of the time is timetabling and finance. As a university student I would distil my timetable into a readable one page document. However for a term that I do not have set classes such as this term, in the graduate diploma of learning and teaching, I have laid out the entire term. On days that are important, such as assessment due days or collaborative classes I have inserted a comment. A comment is a pop-up bubble that one could edit with more information that a single cell might contain, much like an extendable sticky note on a calendar. Here is a snipped image from my calendar for this term.

The other functionality would be to use it in a mathematics class teaching statistics or data gathering. This information a class could collate into a spreadsheet and then pull the most relevant information with such tools such as the filter tool, or the group tool. I would suggest for many teachers who are teaching a topic such as maths, science or even graphics do not discount excel as a tool for the classes.