Week Three

Tutorials & Lectures

The lecture this week was thinking about engaging within a professional community and how educators need to correctly reflect on their own professional practice and pedagogy. The importance of the reflective nature of teaching is apparent throughout all the lectures so far this semester. What was different in this particular one is how we need to be calculating when we are reflecting on things. It is not enough to just sit there and write thoughts, ideas and narrative. Higher order thinking and connections to theory need to be established to achieve proper and useful reflective practice.
Also in the lecture was the discussion of the collaborative nature of an educator within a learning community. Establishing the educator as a ‘key’ to a successful learning community is imperative and this can not be done without educators functioning as professionals.

The workshop for this week was to assist us with researching books, journals, articles, literature and resources for our project. Some useful tips were given by the library staff and the new search engine on the library website is useful.

Project

This week has been a mixture of anxiety and confusion as I had lost track of what my goal was for my project. I was unable to see a clear vision of what I am trying to achieve in the six weeks whilst on my internship. This came about whilst looking for resources in the workshop. I was very happy looking for computer literacy, digital world and ICT in education books online, but it struck me that I was being too vague with my literature research. After asking Sally (lecturer) and having an extended conversation with her, she asked me a question which left me wondering even more. What are you actually researching? I didn’t have an answer. I was stumped. I was also a little scared. If I don’t know at this point in time what I am actually researching surely I am setting myself up to fail. I needed to get some more information and decide to see the course examiner Joan. After explaining my dilemma she helped me to visualise the project and extract the main points I wanted to achieve, thus determining my goal. Listed below are the items discussed:

Computer literacy – This is the over arching theme which I am basing my project on and which the literature I will find will back up the need for computer literacy in schools.

Computer Club – This is the practical application of my project. I am going to put one in place where there isn’t one currently.

Employed teacher to continue work – The main goal is for an established teacher, who works at the school, will recognise the benefits and upon my recommendations continue the work already begun.

That’s it for this week

Cheers

Al