Analysis of applications used during the ICT Module

Whilst undertaking the ICT module I have come across many different applications which can aid my teaching experience and help to plan and deliver a lesson.

The most obvious application which I have regularly used in the past and most certainly will continue to use is Microsoft PowerPoint. I find Microsoft PowerPoint a great application to use whilst delivering a lesson as I believe it is the easiest and most proficient way to create and present a lesson to the class.

I find Microsoft PowerPoint really easy to use, to input text, data, pictures and videos it’s just a simple click of a few buttons. I believe you can cover a number of learning styles just through PowerPoint.

As I teach low ability students in Sport Coaching it is very easy to input pictures and videos into my presentation, the students are able to learn in a better way rather from reading from handouts or other visual aids. Also certain modules I teach are very practical, so I find by using Microsoft PowerPoint it is easy to show video clips with description on the techniques needed for certain aspects in different sports before the students perform the activity themselves.

Another application I have come across is Prezi. Prezi is a similar version to Microsoft PowerPoint, however it is done online, so you do not have access to the internet you will not be able to use it. Prezi is very similar to PowerPoint, as in the way you present your lesson but I find it very fiddley and more time consuming to use. I feel Microsoft PowerPoint is much more user friendly and I will continue to use PowerPoint over Prezi.

Hot Potatoes is another application which I will not be using. This application helps teachers to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises. As I teach college students I feel this application is very simplistic and will be more suited to primary and secondary school students.

Socrative is an online application which I would use. This application allows you to create a questionnaire relating to the lesson taught and gather results instantly. So as a teacher you can evaluate and assess the students and see if they have understood the lesson through a form of question and answer. Through the use of real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visualisation, teachers have instant insight into levels of understanding.

Wordle is another online application where it generates a word of clouds from a text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. This application will be not be used a lot during my time as a teacher, but I will consider giving handouts to the students for preparation for exams, with reminders of the key words to use whilst revising for an assessment or an exam.