Sunday, November 20, 2011

If only (part 2)..

Having lamented the decline of ICT in UK schools, I spent the rest of the afternoon bugging Mrs RNG who was preparing for an interview tomorrow. One of her tasks is to teach crumple zones and she wanted to have a nice, simple way to demonstrate this effect (yes, I know there is loads of stuff like this on the interwebs but time and resources where somewhat limited). After much head scratching, it was decided to drop an egg onto (a) a plastic tray and then (b) the same tray covered in cling film (to simulate a deforming crumple zone) and so it was. We headed into the grounds of Chateau RNG armed with a clue of eggs, a tray and some cling film.

The iOS bit

Yesterday I finally upgraded my beloved, reliable and well abused iPhone 3G to a spanking new iPhone 4S. My main justification for this was the ability to film and edit high quality video on the go so this seemed like a good time to prove if this was a good enough reason. Armed with said iPhone and a copy of iMovie, I set about filming and editing our little experiment and ten minutes later, the results where loaded to my You Tube channel. Sweet, you can see the results below:


Now, this got me thinking (oh oh, here we go)

What if

What if we allowed the students to use there own ICT in class? What if we actually encouraged them to use the same communication methods they use to arrange a mob to smash up a phone box* and then post the results up to You Tube? What if, rather than write up an experiment, they filmed it, recorded there spoken conclusion rather than wrote it down? They could post it up to You Tube/Soundcloud etc and then share the link with you, kind of like modern ICT usage, the so of stuff we adults do.

This reminded me of one of my lesson last week, we where doing a worksheet about volcanoes and I saw an iPod Touch out on a desk. I approached the student and had a look to see which lame social networking site they where on. Up on the screen was a Wikipedia page about igneous rock!

If only...

*phone box, a kind of kiosk that may or may not contain a working telephone. Originally designed as a way for people without home telephones to communicate with others on the phone network. Now mostly used as toilets.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Mashary Rashed Mp3 said...
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