Jon Hoff’s Teaching ICT (PGCE year)

Wow, well I get home from a hard days slog at the gulag (well, observing Year 10s and Year 7s mainly) only to find my humble delicious slideshow is being shared around the interweb by some of the UKs premier ICT bloggers! Happy days…a basement room presentation to 15 people one day, a world wide web phenomenon the next day.

How did this happen I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a perfect example of the learning and sharing environment that Web 2.0 can provide for us. After writing the post below which explains the context for the presentation. I then posted the link to the blog to my twitter network, still a modest 40 followers. I got a comment from John Sutton of Creative ICT fame (an excellent blog). He read it, good enough I think. John then sees Mr Doug Belshaw post onto Twitter that he is doing an elearnr session on delicious. My slideshow gets thrown into the bargin. Thanks to the power of Slideshare Mr Belshaw can then embed my presentation into his presentation on elearnr. Slideshare tells me that so far 77 people have viewed my slideshow, 3 have favourited it and 2 have downloaded it. So, I am thinking to myself, it must be useful…

All this is not for the sake of showing off. It is an example of Web 2.0 POWER! Blog. Twitter. Share presentations with slideshare, embed, blog again. You love it don’t you. I do…

Thanks John and Doug.

It was in late August 2007 when I was first offered a position teaching ICT. With three years previous experience of classroom teaching, a first degree in the right field and hobbies which involved blogging, web design and photography, I thought I could make the leap without too much fuss. My brief was simple : create a cirriculumn. Whilst other subjects in this young International School all had their swanky new text books, I salvaged a few photocopied chapters from an Office 2003 tutorial book.  Proceeding through the year I had my kids set up their own blogs here.

Seeing as the school was in Vietnam,  issues such as horrible connection speeds and regular power cuts affected my classes, along with the usual network nightmares and an I.T department insistant on change at all the wrong times. Through the year, I taught photoshop skills using Photoshop Elements, short video projects with Adobe Premiere Elements,  HTML and CSS coding, MSW Logo, Pencil, along with two collaborative projects with the Language Arts department.  Oh yeah, and Office apps. 

September 2008 and I am starting a PGCE ICT at Southampton University School of Education. Having spent today having a look around the ICT blogosphere, I’m wondering how much of the wonderful Web 2.0 resources I can work into my teaching units, if it will be applicable, or even possible.  

I am already excited about the prospect of doing some Voice Threads, a perfect example of using technology to teach not only technical skills but also literacy.  

I’ve already linked up to some of the best sites I have found so far, including Effective ICT (check out the presentation on the home page), Kim Cofino’s site (who is currently working in Bangkok) and ICT in my Classroom which has loads of great ideas of how to use Google Docs in the classroom (based on a primary classroom) and just posted about ‘cloud based computing’. 

I hope in the coming weeks and months to post about my experiences as a trainee PGCE student in the ICT field starting with five days observation in a primary school tomorrow.