Some of my examples of my positive use of ICT whilst on my placement:

I used both Photoshop and Illustrator in the making of my exercise handouts for the teaching of this software. I also used the snipping tool to create the screen grabs and screen shots. This was new to me as I have only worked with macs for years however for my placement I had to familiarise myself and work with the Windows OS, which took a little getting used to.

I was able to introduce the some new ICT into the module I was teaching such as requiring the students to hand their work in digitally on a flash drive. Until last year you had to print it all out, as I had had to, and stick it in sketchbook. This both cost a lot and seemed counterintuitive to the concept of working digitally. This also made it easier to mark as the work could be seen as it was designed plus everything including all their additional workings could be easily submitted and taken in to account as well as not being effected by the issues of bad printing.

I suggested they use PowerPoint as a means to hand in a series of images in a specific running order that could be viewed easily for assessment. They weren’t required to submit it in a formal PowerPoint style presentation but as they were not very computer literate at this point it seemed like an acceptable option. I intend to continue to investigate some other ways they could submit their digital work. Obviously they could use applications such as Pinterest etc. but as this was the first significant experiment with using this digital method I didn’t want to overload them with demands to get their heads around programs they don’t know or haven’t heard of and can be resistant to. I felt a softly softly approach would be better to get them on board.

When I do a similar program with the first year next term, as they are a little younger and more confident I think I will be able to be a little more adventurous with the ICT. As it was the group this term though initially slightly resistant and out of their comfort zone initially they all did well with some particular surprises. The conclusion I came to, was that they were very capable they just needed to be introduced to the software and encouraged in a certain way.

Another positive use was the fact that this past term I was unable to interact with Moodle as I should be able to next term. As such I couldn’t provide digital copies of the handouts to the students as I wished to so as a workaround I used Wetransfer.com to send the files to the students. This was great as unlike Dropbox there is no registering, It is very quick and in the free version you can send up to 10GB each time. This meant I didn’t have to compress the files and when I needed to could easily send large Photoshop files that had numerous layers for specific exercises.

In addition to this I set up a specific email account just for this lesson where the pupils could communicate with me as required. I feel the introduction of these ICT methods proved invaluable.