Session 1.4 - ICTs in interactive teaching
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
Learning intentions and objectives.
In this session you will learn about:
- ICT and how it can be used to support interactive teaching,
- the principles of interactive teaching as a reminder of what we are trying to achieve with this programme,
- the kinds of resources (ICT and non ICT) needed for interactive teaching,
- what seating arrangements work best when using ICT, and
- making effective use of non ICT resources during groupwork with computers.
Success criteria.
To meet the learning intentions you will:
- identify collaborative and independent ICT use both inside and outside the classroom from videos and photos,
- be mindful of the principles of interactive teaching when designing activities,
- consider using a wide range of materials ranging from sticks to sophisticated software to support interactive teaching,
- arrange students/desks into groups when doing ICT activities, and
- plan and teach a second digital image/slideshow activity focusing on effective use of mini blackboards by groups of students.
ICT components.
The ICT components you will focus on are
- GeoGebra
- Typing practice
- Email (optional)
Classroom based activities (with your students, after this session):
- you will repeat an image classification activity with your students.
Review of follow-up activities from last session
Brainstorm on ICT
Whole class brainstorm (5 min) on ICT Consider the following questions:
- What does ICT mean to you?
- What different types of ICTs have you heard of?
- What ICTs have you used?
- Which ICTs would you like to use in the classroom?
Using ICT to support interactive teaching
Whole class dialogue (15 min): Whole group discussion on the role of ICT in the kinds of teaching this programme has been introducing. Think about the role that ICT plays in the following video clips and be prepared to discuss your ideas with the rest of the group. What is similar and what is different about the ICT use in each clip?
VIDEO
Teacher gives detailed help
Teacher gives detailed help to group: shows ICT use. ("I've never seen a Zebra.")
Video/Eness vertebrates 5.mp4, https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/Video/Eness_vertebrates_5.mp4,This video is available on your memory stick in the video/Eness Vertebrates folder. Duration: 4:04 watch on YouTube, local play / download options / download from dropbox)(Series: Eness Vertebrates, episode 05)
VIDEO
Geogebra group work
A group of students jointly progress on their task to investigate the relationship between area and perimeter of rectangles.
Video/Geogebra-group-interaction.m4v, https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/Video/Geogebra-group-interaction.m4v,This video is available on your memory stick in the video/Abel rectangles folder. Duration: 2:03 watch on YouTube, local play / download options / download from dropbox)(Series: Abel rectangles, episode 06)
Illustrations of ICT use:
Look at these photographs from other lessons to see more examples of interactive teaching and ICT use and think about the discussion questions that follow:
Whole class dialogue (5 min): Discussion on images of ICT use. Share your thoughts with the rest of the group :
- When is it appropriate to use ICT?
- What uses can you think of that promote and enhance interactive teaching and learning?
Background text: Principles of interactive teaching
Individual activity (5 min): Reading the principles of interactive teaching.
What is interactive teaching?
The principles of interactive teaching include
- recognising children as individuals actively engaged in interacting with the world, rather than passive recipients of knowledge,
- assessing learning needs and tailoring teaching to the child’s current level of knowledge and understanding (“scaffolding” or “child-centred” approach,
- “multimodal” interaction and expression – using different modes of presenting material and expressing ideas (drawing, video, audio as well as conventional texts) to engage learners,
- higher-order thinking – encouraging skills like analysis, synthesis, evaluation, sorting and categorising,
- improvable ideas – providing an environment where ideas can be critiqued and refined,
- diversity of ideas – exploring ideas and related/contrasting ideas, encouraging different ideas,
- building directly on others’ ideas to create joint knowledge products,
- democracy in knowledge building – everybody participates and is a legitimate contributor to knowledge, and
- learner agency and peer support – encouraging students to take responsibility for their own and one another’s learning.
You can print this content on a separate sheet here: OER4Schools/Principles of interactive teaching.
Resources
What resources are needed for interactive teaching – in general? Where do they come from?
ICTs are one resource but non-digital tools can be powerful too. Examples of resources include:
- mini-blackboards,
- measuring tapes or sticks,
- counters or stones,
- calculators,
- digital camera,
- class set of netbooks (there are logistical issues to be resolved here including charging, security, rota for use etc.),
- digital learning resources;
- this includes media (such as images, audio, and video, as well as animations), and using these requires searching for appropriate resources, saving them for re-use with students;
- this also includes files (such as text files, spreadsheets, presentations);
- this also includes applications themselves (such as OpenOffice, GeoGebra).
- e-book readers (Kindle, Wikireader), and
- etc.
Same-task group work (5 min): Pair work on using resources to support interactive teaching. Think about some of the resources you might like to use in your forthcoming lessons and discuss them – with teachers of the same grade if possible – or with a small group of other participants. It may be that you need to start gathering resources in advance. What things might you begin collecting? Where will you store them? How might you use them?
Let's move the discussion on to thinking about what resources lend themselves well to working alongside ICT. You can either stay in your pairs or join another pair to continue the discussion.
Same-task group work (5 min): Small group discussion on the role of mini blackboards in groupwork with and without computers. Drawing on your previous experience of using mini-blackboards, how can they be used to support interactive teaching? How can mini-blackboards support groupwork with computers? What other non-ICT resources can you think of, which can be used with computers? How?
Whole class dialogue (10 min): Whole group discussion on the role of non-ICT resources during groupwork with computers. Share your ideas on resources with the rest of the group and keep a note of any suggestions that other participants make that may be useful to you in the future.
Reflection
Whole class dialogue (5 min): Whole group reflection on what these interactive teaching methods can contribute to your teaching. Talk to the person next to you and/or collectively brainstorm - what can these interactive methods contribute to your teaching, especially over the next few weeks?
ICT practice
GeoGebra is a free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that integrates geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus in one powerful yet easy-to-use package. It has received several educational software awards in Europe and the USA and is used all over the world. The software is being downloaded more than 500,000 times a month, globally.
Practical activity (30 min) using GeoGebra to draw polygons. Working in small groups of three to four participants, complete the following activity: Draw 10 different shaped polygons using GeoGebra. As you draw, think about what is the same and what is different between those polygons, and how you could classify them into different groups.
You may like to refer to this YouTube clip if you are not certain about how to make use of GeoGebra:
VIDEO
Simple Polygons in GeoGebra
Simple Polygons in GeoGebra
Video/Simple Polygons in Geogebra.mp4, https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/Video/Simple_Polygons_in_Geogebra.mp4,This video is available on your memory stick in the video/Video from other organisations folder. Duration: 03:12 watch on YouTube, local play / download options / download from dropbox)(Series: Video from other organisations, episode N/A)
Take some time to look at the different polygons you have drawn and try to find similar characteristics in some or all of the polygons. Try to group these polygons together and classify them with some sort of descriptor. For instance, some of them may look symmetrical, some may look like regular polygons, or some may have right angles. Be prepared to discuss with your group participants how you have classified them.
This activity will orientate you to make use of GeoGebra to create basic polygons. You will need to access a computer/laptop/netbook and internet. Access a web-browser and navigate to this page: http://mathandmultimedia.com/geogebra/
We will suggest that you go through the exercises in the page in this order:
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 1 – Constructing an Equilateral Triangle
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 2 – Constructing an Isosceles Triangle
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 3 – Constructing a Right Triangle
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 4 – Constructing a Square
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 5 – Constructing a Rectangle
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 6 - Constructing a Parallelogram
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 7 – Constructing a Rhombus
- GeoGebra Basic Construction 9 – Constructing a Kite
You can print this content on a separate sheet here: OER4Schools/Geogebra exercises.
Groupwork with computers: Seating arrangements
Whole class dialogue (10 min): Group discussion on computer lab layout. Read the following background text, look at the photos and discuss any issues that arise.
Mobile computing technologies (such as netbooks or tablets) are very versatile and can be used as and when needed. By contrast, computer labs are now becoming outdated in schools as they remove technology from subject teaching and learning and from the normal classroom environment and teaching aids. Many do not even have a blackboard. Some of the issues are:
- Moving a class into the computer room is disruptive to teaching (especially in primary).
- Computer labs can enforce a rigid seating pattern if benches are fixed.
- If you have a computer lab with desktop machines, can it be re-arranged to support groupwork?
- If machines are located around the perimeter (learners have backs to each other and teacher), or in rows, this is not conducive to collaborative learning.
- Some computer rooms even partition off machines so learners cannot interact.
The seating arrangement. Sometimes labs are arranged in a certain way, because of certain concerns. For instance, if the school administration is worried about off-task behaviour, computers are arranged in rows. However, this isn’t a good solution, as it interferes with groupwork. Instead, if a teacher is worried about off-task behaviour, they can cruise around the room!
Experience shows that an island arrangement works best, ideally large hexagonal tables, but large round or square tables are fine too.
Typing practice
Same-task group work (10 min) on typical practie. Split into two groups. One group will first do some typing practice, while the other discusses typing practice in the classroom. After 5 minutes swap round.
Typing practice in the classroom. Last time we did some typing practice. We now want to implement this in the classroom. You only have a limited number of computers. When you start typing practice, you can do this in pairs, so that both students understand how the typing tutor program works, but once students get this, it makes sense to do it as an individual activity. However, students only need to practice for 10 minutes. So if you have, say, 12 netbooks, then take a group of 12 students to do typing practice, while your remaining students (perhaps 20-30 or so) do other tasks (also in group work). After a while, you rotate: Some of the students who were doing other tasks now use the typing tutor, while the students previously using the typing tutor now join in with other group tasks. We will introduce carousel(a)-style group work properly in session 3.2. (For more information, see OER4Schools/Typing practice with students.)
Follow-up activities
Agreeing follow-up activities (5 min).
Part A: Homework in class. Plan and do in one of your classes another digital image slideshow activity. Read through your reflections from the last time you did this activity and try to address any issues that arose in this new trial. Think about how you will arrange the students and how you will manage the resources bearing in mind what you have been learning in this session.
Part B: Homework outside teaching. Plan a simple activity using digital resources in some way to support learning in a lesson you will be teaching after one week’s time; you can either plan to use the netbooks with the pupils, or just use one connected to the projector.
Don’t actually carry out the activity, just plan it using an activity template. Use the teacher lab to search for resources before you come to the next workshop. Bring with you the plan and the link to the resource(s) you have chosen.
Part C: ICT task. In addition to the activity planning, all teachers should do an ICT task, to advance their ICT knowledge. This week you should:
- Log into your email and send an email to the mailing list. You can just say hi, and how you are finding the workshop, or post any question that you have.
- Make sure that you are able to transfer your audio recordings.
- Save a page into the “lessons_resources”.
