Week 2

Activity 2.2
My strengths in terms of subject-area knowledge in my teaching area (teaching IT) are teaching the concept behind why we might do something, and the procedures with which we do it. I am always happy to explain what we do, how we do and why we do so. It helps people to know what to do, but also understand why we do something a certain way. The theories behind technology are much harder for me... I don't know the theories that established the technology, and often neither the history of it.

My challenge is to be able to teach, and get the students to understand, with some knowledge of my target area, but not to know all. No one can know everything it IT - but another challenge for me is to learn more... as there is always more to learn.

There are plenty of IT organisations to learn from - Microsoft stands out as a main one. It teaches knowledge as it sees it, however, whilst they have their own "standard", I don't believe it is always the correct one, and can be out of date. It is something that needs to be looked at, interpreted by the individual, and then used as required, not always in the way that they recommend.


My strengths in teaching knowledge... need to be better. I have a base level understanding that can be communicated and I have a large pool of knowledge with which to teach, but as there is so much to know in ICT, it's very difficult to know everything, or even a lot!

My challenge is to form a clearer path of what I teach, and to think of ways to help the student learn, but to encourage more constructivist thinking and collaboration.


My strengths in learning and adapting to digital technologies are my ICT skills - my logical step-by-step approach to learning new things (or troubleshooting problems) and my existing ICT knowlege (how things work, or technology that is similar).

My challenges to learning and adapting is the fact that I don't always embrace change. Even though I work and learn in a technology environment every single day, I am often unsure in new technologies, and as such, don't get in to them right away, or put them off, as I feel uncomfortable about using something new and unknown. The challenge there is to recognise my behaviour, and adapt it accordingly.


Activity 2.1
We need to establish far more processes and put far more effort in to schools, VET, Universities and workplaces to allow workers to be more responsive, creative, critical thinking and entrepreneurial qualities. Our current system of teach with fact and listen, then parrot it back does not teach our students to think for themselves. We need to bring in learning methods to teach the students to think for themselves, and give them opportunities to do so.

Collaborative work, thinking outside the box exercises and helping the students to think from different perspectives in different ways needs to be established from an early age, and then fostered throughout schooling and then in to the workforce. This is the only way that students will be able to keep up with our digital world, and to be able to use the tools that we have available in the best creative way possible.