The (ICT and Professional Experience) challenge is REAL!

Yesterday I had a meeting with my mentor teacher for my upcoming prac placement. She was lovely and is so organised. I am sure to learn a lot from her. Unfortunately, the meeting didn’t calm any nerves I had about this upcoming placement, if anything it made me more worried than I was before…

Why? Well, just like Lucy, one of my biggest concerns is how to implement at least 5 ICT rich learning experiences that will amplify or transform the student’s learning. This was already presenting as a challenge to me prior to my meeting yesterday. Now it terrifies me!!! My mentor teacher was great at explaining things that will be happening over the 3 weeks while I am there, I guess sadly in one way week 6 & 7 (my first two weeks) are all assessment. My mentor teacher has already told me there won’t be a huge opportunity for me to teach many lessons during that time although she is working it out so I can do as much as possible. They are having a very intense assessment period – there is even a timetable for it! I am looking for the positives and it will be a great opportunity to collect assessment samples for my portfolio.

Returning to my main concern – the 5 ICT lessons… I had this misconception an Education Queensland school in a fairly high socio-economic society would be fairly well equipped with ICTs. Their Smart Schools website contains a plethora of information regarding the implementation of ICT and digital technologies into Queensland State Schools. This article states that Education Queensland has developed a framework for ICT knowledge and skills which will prepare students to be creative and productive users of technology. Sounds great…. My school / classroom has access to a couple of iPads and a couple of desktop computers (not enough for a small group and all shared with the next door class), they have an older style interactive white board and data projector with very slow internet that may or may not remain active for the duration of a lesson and fairly strict blocking of websites. The class attends the computer lab once a week where they do reading eggs but have very limited experience using them for anything else.

I guess it sounds like there are opportunities there, and thankfully my Mentor teacher is willing to be creative with me to achieve my goal of 5 ICT rich experiences for her class, I guess I just panicked when she said “that’s going to be tough here”…. She then explained that she came from a school that was very rich in ICT resources so she finds it a challenge herself.

Never one to back down from a challenge, I will tackle this the best way I know how…..determination to do well, organization and some creativity using some of the ideas gained in this course. I am very grateful I have a couple of weeks to prepare.