On my second day of the teaching rounds placement, I attended the

curriculum day at Point Cook P-9 College. The day, titled anytime,
anywhere, was organised in order to promote and demonstrate various
methods of incorporating technology with pedagogy for the teachers. The
day began and concluded with presentations from Andrew Douch, a
school-teacher-turned-ICT-wiz, who explained the importance of
technology in contemporary education. He posed the question of what is
important for us to teach students?, the consensus was that
communication and analytical and entrepreneurial skills were viewed as
significantly more important than memorising the times tables or
knowing the periodic table. Douch made the point that students
memorising the entire periodic table or times tables, for example, is
irrelevant in todays society as you can just ask Siri or Google for the
answer. He also suggested that we should move away from having
students hand their work in, but rather publish it by making a website of
their findings or produce music or videos of their knowledge. He also
suggested the use of screencasts or podcasts as a substitute for lecturing
the students on a certain topic, which would in turn free up a teacher
and allow them to focus more on developing activities that apply the
knowledge in class and assisting them directly. The benefits of using
multimedia to teach are endless. This professional development session
developed a sense of excitement among all present. Douch suggested
that using technology and multimedia teacher are able to make the
teaching as exciting as theyd like (by adding sound effects and/or visual
displays) with the added benefit of students being able to keep that class
on file and are able to revisit the content whenever they would like.
The day was split up into three sessions where teachers were able to
select sessions and presentations of their interest. The first session that I
attended was also presented by Douch, it focused on applications that
helped with undertaking a flipped classroom. Douch recommended a
number of applications including Screencast-O-Matic, Tapes and Clyp. I
found this session very helpful and I am very likely to incorporate these
apps and teaching methods in my future classroom.
It makes sense to me and is very beneficial to the students as the learning
can occur, as the sessions title suggests, anytime, anywhere.
My second professional development session was on developing an esmart learning environment. It promoted the use of technology in
education but provided insight into the dangers of it as well, including
privacy issues and cyberbullying. The session also provided insight into
methods of avoiding these issues such as, avoiding social media (despite
its global presence), ensuring all work and classroom web spaces are
secured by passwords, etc. While I was already aware of the dangers of
web spaces in education, the professional development was beneficial in
identifying key methods in avoiding privacy breaches.
My final session for the day was an in-depth introduction into an app
called Explain Everything, which is a screencasting app for iPads which

allows the user to draw, write, point as well as bring up images and
websites to the screen while recording. The session was very useful as I
developed a very strong knowledge of the app and how to operate it.
However, the app is quite dear and as a result I see little value in it
considering other screencasting programs with similar features can be
downloaded and used for free.