Bringing ICT Into the Drama Classroom

This week I am bringing ICT into the drama classroom!

I have been placed at Trinity Grammar School for my second placement of the year and noticed from day dot how ingrained ICT is within the school culture. Each student has a personal laptop and all of the essential school systems are accessed online. Jumping on board this trend and taking advantage of the accessibility for all students, I have decided that this is the perfect opportunity to experiment with incorporating ICT into drama pedagogy. You drama teachers reading this will know full well that drama pedagogy is underpinned by processes of embodied learning. This is the crux of the subject and is defended passionately by its practitioners. I have not sought to eliminate this aspect of the subject area, but merely to enhance it, especially in the engagement and building knowledge stages of the learning and teaching cycle. 

In order to integrate ICT into the drama classroom I have created blogs for each of the classes I am taking at www.kidblog.org. These blogs will be used to pose reflective questions after each class as well as to prepare students for upcoming topics. Rather than giving students slabs of information from their text book to read through on the upcoming genre of theatre to be studied, I'm aiming to encourage students through these interactive blogs, to become active participants in their own learning. By posing questions that encourage students to seek information using a digital platform, my hope is to make learning relevant and engaging. This will hopefully be useful when it comes to assessments, as students will be able to relate the content knowledge to a broader context outside of the subject, thus reaching extended abstract levels of thinking as discussed in Briggs's SOLO Taxonomy. 

Here's an example from my year 10 class blog:

When students click on the links they will be directed to external websites for further clarification such as The Australian Curriculum for a definition of dramatic elements, and some Google Docs worksheets I have created explaining other parts of the task. 

You may have noticed that I am using the Australian Curriculum and not AusVELS. I would like to briefly explain why:

We were lucky enough to have the curriculum manager of Performing Arts at the VCAA, come in and speak to our Drama class at the University of Melbourne this year and give us the low-down on the recent curriculum changes as well as where Drama is heading in the near future. She recommended for us graduates to begin using ACARA immediately as this is the direction that schools are heading in, and it is almost identical with the current AusVELS). 

Online discussion forums give students the ability to navigate and take control over their own learning environment, providing a wider platform for students to exchange information and ideas. Margerison explains:

"The participatory culture [of online blogs] involves multiple communication directions within which students and teachers can interact and create new knowledge. (Figure 4) This environment also contrasts with the liner-based interaction patter (Figure 5) that has typically defined the relationship between student and teacher and educational constructs." 

- (Margerison, 2013)

(Margerison, 2013)

In relation to privacy settings, I currently have this blog set to "public" which means that anybody can view it, but only those with given access can log in and post to it, or leave comments. To ensure that students privacy is protected their full names are not disclosed and I have review settings enabled which means that I will have to approve posts and comments before they appear on the site. This is an initial experiment in order to elicit the students' best work, however I am contemplating making the blog private to only class users in the future if there are any concerns raised about privacy.

I hope that encouraging a nature of sharing information between students, and students and teachers, partnered with the incorporation of personal interests, will result in richer and more meaningful learning and change the way in which students interact, allowing for autonomous learning and greater levels of engagement.



References

Margerison, J. (2013). Online discussion forums in the classroom: Can the principles of social media benefit literacy and enhance engagement with learning?. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 21(2), 19.