ICT is becoming increasingly more popular in schools, especially in the learning area of Psychology. There is many ways to incorporate ICT in to a Psychology classroom setting including the use of PowerPoint, Excel, for research, Quizzes, Tests and many more.
Quizzes and Test:
Psychology is unique as it is a subject that students can easily relate to; it is very easy to make the content relate directly to the students and their lives. One way of engaging students in a Psychology classroom is to ask the students to complete online quizzes and tests, this is particularly helpful when studying learning, memory and personality. By asking the students to complete the tests they are able to find out about their own learning styles, their personality or even test their memory. Examples of these tests are:
By using the ICT in this way you are engaging students into the class and providing them with a practical activity in which they are still learning. Teachers need to be careful however in the choice of quiz or test they ask their students to complete, to make sure there is no inappropriate content in the test and to ensure it is from a reliable and valid source. As there are many quizzes and tests online that would be very inappropriate for any school classroom.
Research:
One of the key skills students are expected to develop whilst studying Psychology is research skill. The use of computers allows students access to the internet to quickly and effectively research a variety of topics. The internet has an incredible amount of information that can help extend students knowledge and help them in complete research tasks and assignments. However, prior to setting research tasks teacher should speak with their students about the different websites online and give them advice on which websites to trust and which ones are not so reliable. Such advice might include to only use websites from well known organisations such as:
All these websites provided reliable, valid and timely information that will help students learn and be able to produce high level research assignments. It would also be advisable for teachers to educate their students on how to reference properly and how to put the information into their own words, so there is no issues surrounding plagiarism.
PowerPoint:
PowerPoint has grown in popularity in recent years, especially in secondary schools. Teachers are now working out the advantages of using PowerPoint in a classroom environment. The use of PowerPoint allows teacher to communicate a large amount of information to students in a short period of time that is easily accessed and readable. PowerPoint also allows teachers room to incorporate images and videos into their presentations to help explain different perspectives. This is especially helpful in Psychology, as the VCE study design for psychology is very content driven and there is alot of material for the teachers to cover in a small amount of time, especially during year 12. The use of PowerPoint helps teaches communicate this information in a quick and efficient manner. Another advantage of using PowerPoint is that if any students are missing from your class, it is very easy for those students to catch up as you can simply email them the PowerPoint to read through, in comparison to board notes in which you would need to type up and print off or email to you students.
Excel:
Excel is also becoming increasingly more popular in high schools, as it allows for students and teacher to be able to work with a large amount of data in a simplified way. This is especially helpful in Psychology as it is very common for students to perform experiments within the school environment. Excel offers them a simply way to collate their data and to analyse it. Excel contains such features as been able to graph data, calculate mean for large amount of data and any other formula statistical analysis you wish to run on the given data. As well as been a useful feature to the students Excel offers teacher a great way to track student attendance and performance on class work. Another bonus of Excel is it allows students to compare data between various studies in a much more efficient manner than in the past, as well as presenting the data in a clear and concise way.
As you can see from the information about ICT offers many advantages to both the student and the teacher within the classroom environment. The use of ICT enables teacher to be able to do activities that weren’t possible in the past and give the students a much deeper understanding of the topic. You can easily understand why there is so much interest in ICT and why it is becoming increasingly more popular especially in high schools.
