ELPC G1 : Critical Essay

Critical Essay

It was argued that it is difficult to link ICT or technology with music learning because it was claimed that music students, especially those majoring in instrumental performances, are supposed to be physically guided by their tutors. However, arguments have also been made stating that music students will be exposed to a higher degree of creativity and knowledge via the usage of technology, i.e. PowerPoint, audio/video, teleconference etc. In comparison to the traditional way of teaching, real life simulation is made possible with the help of ICT on top of assisting students to possess the techniques and skills required.

Delivery of teaching contents to student has changed enormously during the past few decades. Churchill (2011, Pg 39) stated that most of the students in 18^th century were sent to school by factories or other business stakeholders in order to learn particular skills and knowledge which are related to their work. The purpose of learning was to possess a specific technique and also acquire creativity in the competitive global knowledge economy. Apart from that, they were some hidden curriculum embedded into the teachings, such as punctuality and responsibility. The delivery of such limited contents thus allows the study environment to be more focused on the teacher, blackboard and textbooks. On top of that, classroom interaction and peer discussion were almost non-existing and communication was almost always uni directional- from teachers to students.

Both learning goals and delivery methods have evolved tremendously over the centuries. According to the “Education Access” by Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2000, Pg7), “every child has the right to study and is compulsory to attend school to receive a proper education." With the reinforcement of such human rights virtue, young ones are able to gain more knowledge on different areas such as languages, mathematic, music and science. Students not only have to study the core courses such as English, mathematics, and history, but also have a chance to select elective courses that interested them, e.g. music, drama, and media. On top of that, they will also be able to work on their social skills and problems solving ability. ICT has thus been introduced in today’s classroom to aid in the development of such skills. Interactive whiteboards, laptops and online lectures are among the many which are not anymore foreign to a classroom of this age. The role of the teacher has also changed significantly from being solely a speaker to a coordinator of the classroom, attempting to fit everyone’s needs in his/her lesson planning. 

The innovations of such technology and the change in human’s mentality have shown great impact on education. Students in this new era have a chance to experience various kinds of knowledge and skills delivery due to the introduction of ICT. Traditional methods of teaching are obsolete due to the ongoing pace of the society with higher demands and expectation in education. The introduction of ICT in the classroom provides students more opportunities to get in touch with the outside world and also have a chance to obtain information with ease. They will not only be able to acquire knowledge based on the searched topics but also be reminded of the latest updates to relevant areas of such topics. The other advantage of ICT is that students are able to access them at home with the help of digital cameras, online lectures, and online search engines. Due to the competitive marketing industry, the price of digital gadgets has reduced enormously over the decades. Digital gadgets are thus more affordable and available to most families. 

Although the introduction of ICT into the classroom has undoubtly benefited students’ learning, the disadvantages of ICT shall not be ignored. When using computer in composition and musicology classes, the classroom layout has to be designed carefully to avoid any possibilities for pupils to be distracted by irrelevant contents. (Becta 2001, Pg1) As Julia Davies and Guy Merchant (2009, Pg.108) stated, “this is illustrated some of the student – teacher interviews reported by Burnett (2009):

“[We gave them different websites to go to but because they had so many different topics it’s quite hard and they ended up just looking at music websites and stuff and you’d constantly be checking every single person to check what they were doing cos you couldn’t spend your time with one person. You had to be constantly checking everyone else.]”  

One on one guidance is required most of the time in completing the online tasks and without appropriate supervision of the other students, they may ended up doing something irrelevant to the course-subject, i.e. Facebook or searching information which is irrelavant to their subjects. On top of that, it is very important for students to back up their work from time to time. If they forget to back up their homework and experience some technical issues with data access at a later point in time, they will end up losing their work and risk assignment overdue.  As Justin Reich and Thomsa Daccord(2008, Pg230) stated “in order to introduce ICT in the classroom, you need to have enough computers for all your students, security measures to make sure that each student is doing his or her own work, an IT staff member around to make sure things will work, and backup computers in case machines fail.” 

Margaret Cox, Christina Preston and Kate Cox (1999) have summered up the advantages and disadvantages of using ICT in the classroom:

Positive factors	Negative factors
Makes my lessons more interesting	Makes my lessons more difficult
Makes my lessons more diverse	Makes my lessons less fun
Has improved the presentation of materials for my lessons	Reduces pupil’s motivation
Gives me more prestige	Impairs pupils’ learning
Makes my administration more efficient	Restricts the contents of the lessons
Gives me more confidence	Is not enjoyable
Makes the lessons more fun	Takes up too much time
Enhances my career prospects	Is counter-productive due to insufficient technical resources
Helps me to discuss teaching ideas

It is a good idea to introduce ICT in the classroom due to its benefits for the students and teachers. Nevertheless, teachers need to put in more efforts in their teachings and provide guidance to students in the usage of ICT in order to avoid any misbehaviour in classroom. All in all, ICT in itself is a double-edge sword in the realm of education. However with appropriate guidance of its usage, I am certain the undesired end of this sword will appear significantly blunter than the desired counterpart.

References:

1)      Churchill R., Ferguson P., Godinho S., Johnson N.F., Keddie A., Letts W., Mackay J., McGill M., Moss J., Nagel M.C., Nicholson P., Vick M. (2011), Teaching Making a Difference, John Wiley & Sons, Australia. Pg. 31-42

2)      Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2000), Education Access, NetPrint Pty Ltd., Sydney. Pg. 1-4

http://www.hreoc.gov.au/pdf/human_rights/rural_remote/Access_final.pdf

3)      Becta (2001), What are the advantages and disadvantages of different classroom layouts?

http://www.ict-tutors.co.uk/documents/BMgtActivity1.pdf

4)      Davies J. and Merchant G. (2009), Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation, Peter Lang, USA. Pg. 108 – 109

5)      Reich J. and Daccord T. (2008), Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Teachers, M.E.Sharpe, New York. Pg. 230 – 262

6)      Cox M., Preston C. Cox K. (1999), What Factors Support or Prevent Teachers from Using ICT in their Classrooms,

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001304.htm

The usage of ICT in different contexts: 5th entry

5^th entry

ICT and Sports

Nowadays, ICT has been widely used in sport’s area. Some people might think that the usage of ICT is more common in communication area or scientific area and feeling doubtful for the relationship between ICT and sports. Nevertheless, if we think about the purpose that lies behind the surface we will soon realize that ICT is very important for sport. There are some examples below showing the relationship between ICT and sports. 

• Sport clothing and design: Uniform that represents a group is very important because it shows the unity and co-operative of each members of the group. On top of that, when a group represents a community such as their class, school or country with uniform for any kind of competition, it will gives pressure on the component as every single members of the group are inseparable. Hence, a well-design of sport clothing is very important as it has to comprise symbols of the team and the school or national, lucky colours and etc. Each team members could design for their favourite uniform patterns by using computer, a template of the kit and a painting package. After they finished design the uniform they could print it out and choose one of the most suitable uniform patterns that could represent the team amongst all of the designs. If the team members were not designed by themselves, they could use internet to find a professional designer to design. 
• Testing tools for sport and fitness: Testing fitness machine by using computer is far more efficient than human being. It is because computer could provide the most accurate and most reliable information about the particular machine in just a second of time. By using the internet, we would be able to compare different machines all over the world and supply the most suitable machines for customers.
• ICT in sport could be also used as an investigation tool to evaluate the physical capacities of the athletics. It could be used as a recording to record athletics’ program training in short, medium and long period and also their performance during the practice. By doing the recording, they would know their weakness and try to improve for the next training.
• Wii and Xbox: Nowadays, even some video games consoles such as Wii and Xbox has provided some sports games such as yoga, aerobic, tennis, rolling boat and etc. On top of that, these games even added a webcam in order to give the player an opportunity to adjust their posture in a proper way. These video games consoles provide consumers a digital instructor and also make the sports funnier. Players can enjoy their favourite sports wherever has provided these video games consoles.

In a nutshell: 

ICT supports learner in their efforts to acquire skills in different sports branches. Thus it will be possible:

1. To increase the capacity of selecting and applying the acquired skills, tactics, solutions and choreography ideas;
2. To diversify subjects’ roles and responsibilities in physical education, sports and corporal expression activities.

http://bscw.ssai.valahia.ro/pub/nj_bscw.cgi/d257219/Paper10_V_Grigore_82_86.pdf

The usage of ICT in different contexts: 4th entry

4^th entry

ICT v.s. e-finance

Despite of the impact on social community, education, and human lifestyle, ICT has also shown massive influences for the financial sector and economic growth. By using ICT for business used, it helps to reduce the cost of the products and cover other expenses, provide a higher technology of advertisements, offer a more efficiency communication between buyers and sellers, gives more opportunities to introduce their goods all around the worlds, and easier payment methods for buyers. Furthermore, e-finance has also provided some services such as internet banking, insurance, registration, and other related services via internet or public networks. Anybody could access these e-financial services anytime as long as they are able to connecting to the internet via wifi, broadband, 3G or modem. 

Nowadays, many people using social network such as facebook or eBay to do business. They create a web-page and post picture of their goods to attract others and to promote themselves. All of the transactions from ordering to fulfill the payment will be done via internet. This kind of internet transaction has raised the desire of the consumers and leads the marketing into another stage as I called it e-stage. 

According to Allen et al. (2001), by the end of the 1990s, e-finance technologies had affected all aspects of business of banking and financial intermediation. Depository institutions have been using electronic information technologies, for example, to make credit decisions to consumers since 1980s. As a matter of fact, there is a substantial evidence to suggest that financial institutions in developed and emerging markets embrace e-banking. 

http://st.free-lance.ru/users/Sergserge/upload/f_494a46711c72e.pdf

Consistent with the statement above, it showed that e-finance technologies had been used since the end of the 1990s. I believe that the e-finance technologies will show more impact on social community in the future because of the high speed of technology, convenience used of internet, and the ICT that have been widely used by human beings nowadays.

The usage of ICT in different contexts: 3rd entry

3^rd entry

ICT v.s. social community

According to the excellent pace of new technology, ICT has shown its great impact on human society and the social community. In the social community, ICT not only used for personal usage such as sending email or paying the electronic bill but also used by corporation and even by the government. Below are some examples on how ICT used globally:

1)      Communication: By using the internet, human beings could be able to contact with their relatives, peers, and business partners all over the world without limited by the geographical factor. Internet provides the high speed data to allow people to discuss, searching information, and complete transactions. There are numerous social networks such as Facebook, MSN, and Skype that allow people to interact with family members or old school mates and most of the time these devices give us an opportunity to minimize the distances between each other. 

2)      Transaction: Nowadays, people could pay their electronic or phone bill via internet. Unlike the past, we had to apply leave and go all the way to post office just to pay the bill; now we could pay it through internet. On top of that, we could request to send the e-bill to our email address instead of receiving paper letter from the particular department. This could reduce the waste of paper and decrease the green house effect that is harness to our Earth. 

3)      Tourism: We could now book the bus/airline ticket, hotel, renting a car, find a travel agency via internet. Furthermore, we could also find the information of the cities or countries we would like to visit such as attracting places to visit in the particular country, amazing food that we have to try or some scenery we could not miss. These make our travel more pleasant and more convenient.

4)      Renting/buying a house: Searching information for houses via internet before going to the inspection could make people feel more convenience and confidence. People could search the site that containing pictures of the inner or outer side of the houses, buildings and the transportation that surrounded the area. We could then go for inspection for the houses we desire instead of inspect the houses one by one. 

5)      Library: Even the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) have provided the public access to do the research, gaining more knowledge in order to help country to improved social and economic outcomes. 

Trust in the use of ICT is built in public libraries with their clear internet usage policies, staff skills in training and technical support, and perception of being a 'safe' environment physically and virtually. At the organisational level there are physical and ICT resources, information resources, ICT expertise, recognised community services, and sustainability of people and technical resources.

http://www.alia.org.au/advocacy/submissions/ict.community.role.html

The paragraph above clearly stated the environment on how the ICT built in public libraries and how the libraries provide the resources for the public.

The usage of ICT in different contexts: 2nd entry

2^nd entry

ICT v.s. Pedagogy

ICT, which stands for information and communications technology. Due to the evolution of web 2.0, most teachers have introduced ICT in their classroom and hopefully their students would share their thoughts and exchange academic ideas with their peers by using blogger, wikispace or any other online tools.  Other than that, teachers also provide opportunity for students to access internet to collect data and information for their specific subject. In order to introduce ICT to the classroom and helping students to possess this new technology, teachers have to lead them step by step and give a brief description of their perspective on how and what could their students do when using internet.  By giving the depiction, it could reduce the chance of misleading to some sexual or violent webpage that are harmful to young children. On top of that, the benefit for teachers introduce ICT to their students is helping them to lay on their foundation base and hopefully via ICT could help them to get used to the new technology and gaining knowledge with the specific technique that request by their jobs in the future. The list below is the example which shows the most successful pedagogical practices in science from the selected countries:

Examples of most-satisfying pedagogical practices in science from countries participating in the international option.

Using ICT in teaching and learning about the digestive system. Students had to study diseases in the digestive system. They searched a variety of resources and did a survey among people in the community. They presented their finding via a website and produced a leaflet using PowerPoint.                                                                                                                   Science, Thailand

“Look into the past from the school laboratory” was an integrated project that combined history, chemistry and literature. Students used digital video cameras as well as the internet to collect data. As a result the motivation (interest) to study these subjects has increased.                                                                                                                   Science, Moscow, Russian Federation

With the use of “Crocodile” software it is possible to demonstrate chemical reactions using various substances which are not used during lessons or which are not available. We aim at solidifying the pupil’s knowledge about chemical ware and tools, metals and non-metals, changes in chemical reaction, etc.                                                                                            Science, Lithuania

A research project on climate change was carried out as a synthesis of the themes concerning atmosphere, hydrosphere, and the planet Earth. Students were organized in cooperative working groups to search and use internet data. Word processing and multimedia have been used.                                                                                                                     Science, Catalonia, Spain

Sex education project in science. Students searched for information on the internet about the consequences of sexual intercourse [and] made graphs with Excel about the probability of getting venereal diseases in genetics.                                                                                                                                                                                                          Science, Italy

The learners were asked to do research from the library or an internet café about the population of the country. The response was overwhelming. Learners did the research although some did not have money to use the internet café.                                                                                                                                                                                                       Science, South Africa

We participated in an environmental project “Baltic week”, which linked 7 countries around the Baltic sea. We used spreadsheets to gather and process data.                                                                                                                    Science, Estonia

Project work in science on diseases. The pupils used the internet to gather information, used PowerPoint for presentation, and word processing and digital photos for their written presentation.                                                                                                                    Science, Norway

Simulation software was used to show the diurnal motion of the sun and the stars on the screen in the class. It was more effective than showing still images.                                                                                                                      Science, Japan

Students prepared a project on a chosen topic (e.g., weather, air, a well-known physicist), they used internet to search for information and a text editor for writing the project.                                                                                                                      Science, Slovenia

Nancy Law, Willem J. Pelgrum, Tjeerd Plomp(2006), Pedagogy and ICT Use in Schools Around the World, Pg 228

http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=urCHH10HK_0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR17&dq=ict+and+pedagogy&ots=m7NDRK7Esj&sig=jMQY3e6Mrnu_2rtXc3suMyn_ZSs#v=onepage&q&f=false

The usage of ICT in different contexts : 1st entry

1^st entry

Search engine and human’s lifestyle

Due to the ever accelerated digital technology and advancement of the lifestyle, human beings are mostly surrounded by technology such as internet and computer or laptop, television and DVD player, and household electronic materials. As the innovation of the internet, we all can access it by using modem, broadband and wifi. This provide us an opportunity to search for the information we would like to know about by just one click on the keyboard and will be able to get the information we are looking for in just a minute. On top of that, it has also minimizes our distance between countries and people. Furthermore, by using the internet could also assist us to get the latest update from the company and the first hand data. 

The statistic below is about the percentage of Australian who accesses internet for basic use and the way they access internet in between the year 2006 and 2007: 

According to Australian Bureau of Statistics’ recent findings (2006-2007), 64% of Australian
homes had Internet access and about 73% of the residents had access to a home PC. As compared to the previous year, the proportion of households with Internet access jumped by four percentage points and the proportion of households with access to a PC increased by three percentage points.

Out of 5.1 million households with home Internet access about 31% had dial-up access and 68% had broadband access ; with broadband Internet connections increasing from 2.3 million to over 3.5 million households. About 72% of the people accessing the Internet at home used a broadband connection.

http://www.roi.com.au/index.php/internet_marketing/how_australians_use_the_internet_-_latest_market_data.html

The statistic below shows the percentage of level income and their access to the internet:

Rates of access continue to vary significantly with income. Based on equivalised household incomes, individuals living in households with equivalised income of $2000 or more per week are three times more likely to have Broadband access compared with persons with less than $600 per week income. The results are in line with recent related ABS surveys such as 2005-06 Household Use of Information Technology (HUIT), in which 22% of households in the bottom two equivalised income quintiles stated high cost as the main reason for not having Internet access, and only 34% of people in the bottom income quintile households had home Internet access, compared to 77% in the top income quintile.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8146.0.55.001

The statistic below shows the percentage of Australian access internet and their purpose of online:

61% of Australians now using the Internet to make purchases online.

Of the approximate 11.3 million people accessing Internet from any location, 61% used it to purchase or order goods of services for private purposes. Not surprisingly a higher percentage of people from more isolated locations such as Tasmania and the Northern Territory used the Internet to purchase / order goods or services for private purposes.

http://www.roi.com.au/index.php/internet_marketing/how_australians_use_the_internet_-_latest_market_data.html

According to these statistics, it shown that the percentage of Australian access to internet has significant increased compare to the year 2006. It is because in this modern society, people are encouraged to use computer for learning and even doing business. There are numerous internet resources which are very useful for learning such as Jstor, google scholar, and ena.com and normally people would like to search for general information via google or yahoo. On top of that, web 2.0 is the one provided people to get in touch with the social community through online such as facebook, live messenger, and skype whilst ebay is a site for trading purpose. Internet access also provided people to have a chance to discuss issues or to express their own feeling in their space such as blogger, wikispace, tumblr, and myspace. By using the internet, people not only can search for the information or share their points of view, but also can share their interest of music or mass media with others. It is very convenience for human being to access internet for education and doing business as it provided a high efficiency of searching tools and also reduce the waste of paper.