Year 5 History & ICT
Welcome parents
This semester 6M is setting off on a mission - to make our learning more fun through the use of ICT.
As parents I'm sure you are interested to learn more, so please see below.
Children are accustomed to first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty and as mentioned in the video above using video games can increase students' engagement and get them having fun whilst learning.
We have already discussed amongst us that Call of Duty will be an acceptable resource for our topic of reasons for migration with world war II. The excellent thing about this video game is although it has a mature rating, it can be toned down in settings.
We will be using this so the students can have an interactive and engaging way to see for themselves the conditions that most migrants had to be in before relocating to Australia.
Another teacher has used minecraft for many of his lessons, and has seen children engaging and really connecting with the resources they were given. You can read more about him here
Fun & Motivational
Real life skills
Big opportunities
Students aren't usually allowed to bring their personal devices into school, though children really do need to be bringing the technology they are familiar with into class to use them in an educational context. We are also lucky to have wireless internet connection which i'd like to make use of.
The picture to the left is an example another teacher has created on their blog in which they placed QR codes around the room and allowed the students up to a week to complete the challenges around their school work.
It was an excellent way for the children to practice using the technology they were familiar with whilst still participating in school work and incorporating new technology that isn't currently used in the mainstream.
For the history unit students will be allowed to bring in a chosen device for the day, and I will be sending them through the school to find clues which I will use to introduce the topic of history for this uni.
The screen grab next to this conversation bubble shows students in a year 5 Australian classoom taking tours of the National Museum of Australia in the ACT.
I understand it may be completely out of the question to actually get students to visit this museum in person given our location but this tourbot tour is just as engaging as being there in real life.
I want to make use of our schools webcams by connecting each of your children up to one during the tour, and this will allow them to ask questions via videochat to the tour guide.
In this video children were excited, and happy to have the opportunity to see real world history artefacts, they are also able to click on the parts of the exhibit that they find most interesting.
You can see more of the example here & read about robot tours here