Since embarking on this journey to becoming a secondary teacher ICT has been the one area of my learning that has posed a problem. How do you incorporate ICT into the drama room or music classroom, especially with limited resources? In my time so far at melbourne uni this has been a contentious issue in both my drama and music classes. So I decided that in my block placement I would start my own little ICT experiment.
Second week of the block and I'm yet to see ICT used in either of my drama or music classes with everything being creatively controlled by my mentors and I. My year 8 drama shakespeare class is a cacophony of old world literature and "new age hippy" physical theatre while my year 11 and 12 music performance kids would probably actually prefer to be stuck in front of a DVD of the Sound of Music than continue to participate in my "Solfeg" (do,re,me,fa etc using hand signals and sight singing) version of it.
Now although my year 8 shakespeare class is an elective it seems to be a double edged sword for students who are not normally the drama-enthused. Students MUST choose one drama and one music elective in both year 7 and year 8. Elective being the opporutive word as they will end up participating in the arts no matter what. Having said that though my class did seem to be quite interested in Shakespeare. I can happily report they loved all the activities and games that related to the themes of the Shakespeare works that we were looking at, but it was the actual introducing of the text that was proving to be the most frustrating.
When stating that we would be starting a new text there seemed to be a slight groan at the thought of simply reading through the play (or selected scenes). Aha! Technology would be a perfect way to introduce the literature in a way that the students could get excited about. "To talk about children's literature, in the normal
restricted sense of children's novels, poems and picture-books, is to ignore the multi-media expertise of our children." (Mackey, M.1994)
Using VELS as a guide to using ICT in the drama room "manipulate media, materials and technologies such as the acting space, the use of stimulus and other resource materials and technologies (including theatre
technologies and ICT) to support drama processes, production and presentation" (VELS 2009) I devised an activity (borrowing ideas from a micro lesson shown during that weeks drama tute) to introduce "The Merchant of Venice" using projected images and sound. Students were asked to close their eyes and listen to what was around them (I played a sound scape of noises from a casino) and then when they opened their eyes they saw a slideshow of images of the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. The class continued with also providing an article from BBC's 60 second Shakespeare (a website which provides synopsis' of his plays as breaking news articles).
The response to the visual and audio cues used throughout the class was extroadinary. With the lights and the atmosphere created the students were eager to begin reading the text. It was almost as simple as translating it into their facetwittermybook language and boom they wanted to get their hands dirty.
As Shakespeare is so rich and dense, giving the students the option to use technology to help dissect it, it allows them to "experiment and take risks developing new understanding." (VELS 2009) I look forward to further exploring technology and ICT in my own classroom in the future.
References:
Mackey, M. 1994. The new basics: Learning to read in a multimedia world. Children’s
Literature in Education, 28(1):9-19.
Approaches to Learning and Teaching – The Arts, Victorian Essential Learning Standards 2007
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) - Standards, Victorian Essential Learning Standards 2009
