BENEFITS

Accessing and storing resources

Text, pictures/diagrams, video clips, audio clips and web links are all examples of digital teaching resources. Using standard presentation software, teachers can now gather all the resources required for a lesson in one place. These can all be triggered from a single screen at the click of a button. The resources can be stored on the hard drive of a teachers' computer, external drives (such as a USB stick, a school network/intranet and increasingly the internet using sites such as Google docs and the one explored in this resource - NUMU.

Communication - teacher to teacher

An example from teaching music website on 'transition'

Communication - student to teacher

An example from the NUMU website. [Note how students will often more willingly engage in dialogue if we use their preferred means of communication.]

Literacy and self esteem

These examples from students' blogs and profiles [again from NUMU] highlight examples of these benefits:

Assessment and reporting

Students and their teachers can also upload examples of students' work on to the site using digital formats including text, audio and video.

This provides a rich 'evidence resource' for reporting and assessment. Using an mp3 recorder or a digital camcorder, capturing students' work can be done relatively easily during a lesson with minimum disruption, which in turn can make for easier and more accurate assessment and reporting.

Homework

Because we are working in a web-based environment, these materials are available for use in the classroom and out of school hours. It gives students the opportunity to retrieve, refine and store their work, and communicate or collaborate online.

What we are discussing here is changing the way that time and space are used in schools. The internet opens up new possibilities for transforming how and when teaching and learning takes place. ICT gives us opportunities for podcast lectures, blogging and wikis, online forums, anytime-anywhere access to digital learning resources and learning tasks which are structured online.

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