Evaluation

=Trial of web based project =  For my web based project I chose to have the students undertake an Inquiry and use Web 2.0 tools to record their learning journey.

The project was conducted in my classroom of 28 Year 7 and 8 students. I had initially considered restricting the project to my higher ability students, but felt that for the project to be truly successful, it should be accessible to all students. The students worked in groups of three, with one group of four, that were student selected. The students have a range of both learning styles and abilities with the majoirity being capable of working independently, but others requiring a lot of support. In terms of using I.C.T. resources, I have been very fortunate with access to both computers and the physical classroom environment in which I teach. Prior to this year, my classroom had been a storage room, but before that it was an I.C.T. suite. Within the classroom, there are six desktop computers as well as my own computer and a student laptop provided by Assistive Technology. In addition, I have access to 10 laptops that I book for approximately 40 percent of the week. In my class, 16 students have individual timetables so on Monday of each week we review what they are doing for the week and then they decide when they will use either a desktop computer or use the laptop booking calendar to determine when they will have access to a laptop. The students were initially hooked by the use of Glogster. I had chosen this because I knew the students would enjoy creating glogs and that the glog could provide links to the pages on our wiki where they were recording their learning. I also knew that all the students could have success in their learning using Glogster whereas they would have struggled had it been too text based. The students also reported that they liked that they were able to choose what they were studying, although this had to relate to the school's umbrella topic of globalisation.
 * Student Details **
 * Computer/Classroom Setup **
 * What actually happened? **

The students remained on task for the first 3-4 sessions, but were so absorbed with their glogs that it was difficult to re-direct them back to locating information and focusing on answering their essential question and sub-questions. In the end it became necessary to get the students to write their questions on a piece of paper and transfer these into the wiki because they could not resist the urge to continue with their glogs. The boys were also often distracted by Dragon Fable and Adventure Quest.

Overall, I do not believe the Inquiry was a success and I know I needed to have spent more time at the on-set, helping the students develop their essential questions and sub-questions. In the following weeks, the students learnt a lot about using wikis, sharing resources, managing their time and most are now experts in using Glogster. Another teacher at our school recently called on six students from my class to be peer-tutors to teach her own class how to use Glogster and reported back that they were expert tutors and that they were able to clearly explain how to use Glogster and ask questions to start the other students thinking about what they were trying to achieve. The students were initially very engaged in their learning, but as they realised there was more to their Inquiry than using Glogster to make it look nice, their interest started to trail off. The students appreciated that the Internet gave them a much greater choice in what they could learn about and that this could open up many possibilities as they went down the many pathways finding interesting information as they went.
 * Student Learning and Engagement **

The school I am employed at is part of an ICT cluster group. Approximately four weeks ago, some students from my class presented their thoughts to about 20 teachers. I think their presentation, as shown in the slide share presentation below, encapsulates my students' thoughts about the use of computers and digital technologies much better than I ever could.

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