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Beginning to use ICTs to enhance learning

Video Help

Duration: 2:9

Teacher Liz Dench and a student, from Hillcrest High School, discuss accessing how using technologies expands learning. Students can search the web for information and bring content alive watching video clips.

Liz Dench:
I think using ICT has really made a difference to the students. They’ve enjoyed the lessons far more, it’s given me and them a wider scope. I think I’ve used a much wider range of interesting clips, a wider range of ideas than I’ve ever used before. I think it’s expanded my world and so it’s expanded their world of learning.

In English we’re studying Schindler's List, it’s a film, and it’s about World War II. One of the themes happens to be the horror of the Holocaust. We were discussing that in class and then we realised we didn’t actually know what Holocaust meant. So she looked up the definition of Holocaust on Google through the data projector and we realised that it literally meant death, or sacrifice by fire.

So it was literally (that) they were being burnt.

Liz Dench:
And so that combination with me talking about the ovens and then the actual term sparked an amazing discussion with the students about sacrifice by fire and that true definition of what the Holocaust is, and that really ignited a discussion about the whole impact of Schindler's List, the genocide, the Jewish situation.

We do a lot of research in English, and we do a lot of society links and societal links. This is a key for us. We could Google London riots straight away and the students could see clips of London riots and that would inform their work on Handmaid’s Tale at Level 3 for instance... but even books we do at Level 1. So we could use these, the technology, to enhance our literature teaching, especially for society links and for the author’s purpose in crafting these works. The message for us and our society, well that’s what we need to find out, and the students are often not aware of what’s going on in society so we can lead them.

In Classical Studies the teacher used video of an American lecturer talking about one of Plato’s dialogues about Socrates, because that’s what we’re studying.

So that was really good just to get wider ideas from other people, not just his own opinions and the ones that we conjure up in class.

Tags: English, Multimedia – video, Secondary, Student inquiry, Literacy, Student agency, Classroom practice, Upper secondary