I completed my third year of placement at Eltham High school. At Eltham High I was given the opportunity to teach my 2 strands I was majoring in, physical education and information technology. I was lucky enough to have two mentor teachers, one for ICT and the other for Physical Education and gained experiences that I will take with me for the rest of my teaching career. My ICT mentor taught me about student learning and what I could do as a teacher to improve not only the students education by my own and engaging the students with issues that are interesting to them and relating it to ICT. This would assist me as a teacher to get the best out of the students.
While at my placement school, Eltham High school, I constructed and implemented a unit of work for year 9\10 ICT students. At the time the class was focusing on environmental issues. I decided to create a unit of work where the students would develop an environmental poster using Photoshop, which made other students around the school aware of the environmental issues around the world and in the school.
As an introduction I asked students what makes a good poster and recorded all their answers. I used their answers to create a criteria sheet. This would be the standard students would need to work off when creating a poster. The criteria was a way for students to understand that creating a fantastic poster would not get you full marks but the areas that must be focused on, one being planning. There needed to be a great deal of planning involved. Their plans needed to include creating their own slogan, where they would place photos, take their own photos, creating a theme for the poster, finding relevant facts related to their theme. They are to combine that criteria and use the skills I have shown them during class time to produce an environmental poster.
I used the first half an hour of every class to teach students how to perform certain skills on Photoshop. These tasks would ultimately assist them to create the best environmental poster they could. Students seemed to really enjoy these lessons. They were learning new skills and were using Photoshop; a program they were really interested it. During the 2-week unit I really wanted to use their imagination when creating their environmental poster.
This unit really encouraged and focused on creativity, planning and seemed to engage the students as they didn’t feel restricted with the work their work. Many students believed that ICT was a subject that was boring and all you did was play games and use Facebook. My aim was to change that belief and show that it can be a fun and interesting subject by using real life issues and relating in to ICT. During the 2 weeks they had to complete the project, some outstanding work was produced.