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ICT Milestone Information and Communications Technology |
What it means |
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| Operates the computer with more than one program open at a time, 'multi-tasking' between one and the other. |
This milestone is about multi-tasking. I remember a
year two student (seven years old) who showed me what she was doing to
gather information on Dinosaurs. She typed the word 'dinosaur' (copied
from the board) into the 'Google' search engine and came up with a page of
internet links which she proceeded to explore until she found the picture
she wanted. She then copied the picture to the clipboard and pasted it
into her word document which was already open on her desktop. She then
resized it until she was happy with its position on her page, and proceeded
to label her picture. She then navigated back to the internet
site and read about the dinosaur, selected an important line of text and
copied it before switching back to her word processor to paste it in under
her picture.
I was about to tell her that she shouldn't copy text like that when her teacher addressed the class and told everyone about stealing other people's words, and the need to put the information into your own words. Every child in that class was able to find dinosaur information on the Internet and work between MS Internet Explorer and MS Word to create a sheet of facts. They then printed out their work for others to read. If anyone is any doubt about the value of computers for teaching children I remind them that 20 years ago this was an appropriate research task for Year 7's but they were using books. |