Week One

We have now come to the end of the first week of our ICT elective. In the first session, we were told exactly what we would be doing over the weeks. This includes keeping a reflective blog, taking part in a 'Voices of the World' project, a bear journey, creating movie animations, as well as working with some of our peers taking the Modern Languages Elective to create our own movies and having IWB training. We were also introduced to the idea of keeping a reflective blog where we are able to reflect on our experiences and the work we have done in class.

I am looking forward to what is to come over this semester. From the ICT Elective, I am hoping to gain a better insight into the different ideas and tools I can implement into my lessons in the primary classroom. At the moment I feel fairly confident about using ICT in my lessons, however, at the end of this Elective, I hope that I am much more comfortable and can take away some of the ideas and use these with my own class.

In the second session, to begin with we discussed communities of practice. In order to help us understand this term, we took part in an activity where certainvwords were read out and we had to write down the first word that came to our minds. We then folded over our paper and passed it on for the next person to write something and so on. The point of this exercise was that we ended up with a piece of paper with words written on that simplifies the meaning of communities of practice. I ended up with words such as together, collaborate and group. The following quote was taken from Learning Communities in Practice by Anastasia P. Samaras, Anne R. Freese, Clare Kosnik (page 151): "Wenger et al. (2002) define communities of practice as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (p. 4). Close proximity is not a requirement but passion is."

We were then organised into groups in which we worked on our bear projects. We will be putting together a package including a teddy bear and some other items, perhaps a letter to send abroad. In return we will receive a bear which we will all be able to take home in turn. My group has not managed to come to a decision as of yet in terms of what we are sending, however, I am looking forward to meeting with everyone to bring our ideas together and get organised for sending our bear off on Thursday!

In the first session of our second week, we are creating movie animations similar to those we made in BEd 1. I have read over the instructions for the workshop and am looking forward to see what we are able to create. Here is the movie animation my group created last year: