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Saturday 22 November 2014

Report of ICT used in the school I did the intership

I did the intership in the Public School Cardenal Ilundain, from Pamplona. That school was very interested in new technologies and they were implemented in every task or activity. The most usual devices that teachers used were: the interactive whiteboard, youtube videos and songs, powerpoint slices and word processors (excel, word...). My tutor didn't use the traditional blackboard for any activity (unless the whiteboard doesn't work) because it was more useful for activity corrections, explanations and, of course, because it was more visual and easy to use. There, she played youtube videos or songs that were suitable for complementing the grammar structures or the vocabulary she wanted to work with. Slide presentations helped her to make the content more visual for the students. 

Outside classroom, the tutor used a webpage shared with the rest of the teachers (Wikispaces) of the same grade, where they uploaded the week programmations in order to make clear what they were going to see in the following days and to record the activities they did for the following years. She searched on the Internet some materials to present to the classroom (EslEnglishEnglish Council webpageMes-English...) such as: worksheets, certificates, games, listening/reading activities... She also used Gmail, Google Docs and the wiki to be in contact with the school's staff and the students' families.


She used Google Docs and word processors for organizational purposes. Google Docs (Google Drive) is a good tool for saving school's data (assessment, tasks that she wanted to do, assignments, circulars...) the week by week programming, and a calendar with special events. That programme includes its own word processors, it has an automatic data saving and it also liberates teachers for bringing to class all of these folders full of papers and that mountain of sheets and notebooks in the office. Teachers are accessible to that information just in one click. 



Sometimes, my tutor got stuck when she couldn't find one video that worked with a specific content she wanted to introduce to the students because it wasn't subtitled or the lyrics didn't appear. That problem could be deleted, for example, by the usage of video and music editors like moviemaker, a programme where you can subtitle a video you have downloaded. Personally, I would recommend her to use online subtitlers as amaraopensubtitlesdotsub, etc. Dotsub is a programme where you can upload a video and edit the subtitles professionally, it helps you to take control of the time of the captations to have a perfect subtitling result. 


According to the Reading about the use of ICT in Spain, since Escuela 2.0 was implemented in schools, some of them have the privilege of couting with one interactive whiteboard and wireless connection in each classroom. It says that ICT are present in the 65% of the curriculum, which means that more than the half of the tasks that have to be done in class should be aimed at acquiring the digital competence. I didn't see that accomplished during my internship period: activities were paper or activity-based, the teacher was the only one who used the smartboard and none of the activities were designed to be done using a computer. Students can reach (in a very limited way) the digital competence by going to the computers room once a week.