Week 4

This week the lecture examined ICT tools in the classroom. In an objectivist approach ICT is integrated to help students remedy their skills, improve recall with drills, and help students’ complete work they have missed (Powell 2010). In contrast, a constructivist approach integrates ICT with an aim of promoting creative thinking, problem solving, metacognition, and to help students understand real world problems and complex concepts through mental models and to be cater for multiple intelligences and mixed abilities (Powell 2010). I found the video ‘The Key Learning Community Cultivating Multiple Intelligences’ (http://www.edutopia.org/key-learning-community) quite refreshing. It was about a school that places less emphasis on standard testing and more on experimentation. The school focuses on Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences arguing every child should develop their multiple intelligences. Students who are about to graduate assemble digital portfolios and students undertake a lot of project work. I intend to try to integrate ICT for skill remedy, fluency and for independent self paced learning but more so for helping students to develop creative thinking, mental models and for catering to student with mixed abilities and multiple intelligences.

Dust Echoes
The Dust Echoes website (http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/) is a very interactive website on dreamtime stories. During the workshop we were required to watch one of the 12 stories and then retell it. This involved copying the still images into paint, then transferring the picture into the program Inspiration 8.0IE and typing a description underneath the picture. Then I linked the pictures with arrows to show the flow of the story. The story I chose was titled ‘The Mimis’. The website is great for students and teachers, with study guides, quizzes, information about what the story means and where it comes from. Whilst I think getting students to retell a story in their own words is good the process of copying the still images into paint was very time consuming.

Graphing M&Ms

The M&M activity involving sorting the chocolate by its colour and then graphing it in Microsoft excel was very engaging. This activity allows students to practice entering data into excel and creating a graph. Through creating the graph students explore formatting features of the program such as changing the colours of the columns in the chart. I liked how each student was given a different handful of M&Ms and students can compare their graph and sample to others. Students can then explore features of their set of data such as the most common colour, the least common colour and discuss why this might be the case.


The Dust Echoes and M&Ms activities cater for inclusion of students of mixed abilities and with multiple intelligences well. They are both stimulating for students, encourage creativity and promote representing information in more than one way fostering understanding.