ICT Applications for educational purposes

Hot Potatoes was one of the first applications we were shown. It enables you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, and gap-fill exercises to use for any purpose or project you like.It can be used as an educational tool and I can see that it would possibly be useful to certain learner groups, however I could not see myself using it with my students. I believe my time would be better spent on demonstrating or assisting in the practical application of sculptural processes, as a student myself I always found there was never enough time to  spend exploring sculptural techniques in the workshops and on reflection I would encourage students to learn as many processes as possible  

                                                           https://hotpot.uvic.ca/ 

As part of the PETLA assignment we were asked, in pairs, to pick a teaching strategy from a lucky dip and then we were asked to go and research that strategy to present our findings to the class. I paired up with Hazel and the teaching strategy that we picked was BRAINSTORMING.

BRAINSTORMING  is a problem solving technique used to generate a number of ideas on a specific subject , within a short time frame. This teaching strategy is a group activity that allows students to contribute key words and ideas without critique. It has many advantages to aid learning and can be used for essay writing and to get ideas onto the page. 

WORDLE is a tool that generates “word clouds” from text that you type into the box provided. These word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear most frequently in the source text. For example if you repeatedly use the word "White apple" then this will be more prominent in the text imagery as can be seen above in the wordle created from the brainstorming exercise we completed in class. You can also change the fonts, layouts, and colour schemes to suit your desired design and the images you create with Wordle can be used in educational applications as well as creative personal ventures. Wordle can be used to create an interesting and informative header for a handout with key words relating to the subject matter or for revision purposes.I could also see my students may want to use this application in the creation of their own personal dictionaries which is part of a second year module to assist in language use to help with written work and ultimately for writing their dissertation.