Dissertation!
The proposal date for our dissertations is looming, and as good BEd3 Students we are all completely on top of it and know exactly what we are doing... or not!

I know that i want to do something on the use of ICT in the classroom, however I dont want to to be tied to my practice during my Fourth Year placement as I feel that I will have more than enough work to be getting on with during that placement. I think I will do something along the lines of 'Using ICT to aid cross-curricular integration'.

In it I will be hoping to look at what ICT is, what the benefits are, if there are any health risks, and then go on to give examples of cross curricular ICT work in the early years, infant classroom and middle/upper years. There may be a slight focus on blogs and the use of blogs to aid learning as blogs are becoming more and more popular (my dad even has a blog now!!) I don't think i will focus the whole thing on blogs as i think that would be quite restricting! Im now off to find some more books, articles etc to put into my proposal form!

Garageband!
At one of our Computers and Education classes we spent some time using the Apple Package called Garageband. It's basically a programme where you can use the samples, provided on the package, to make up your own songs. You can also link a Midi keyboard or other instruments to the computer to make up your own samples. When mixing to make a song you can repeat the samples and add your voice on top. It was a very straightforward programme to use and children (of all ages!) would have a great time playing with it. Here it is on Apple's website.

A friend of mine, Alastair, has used Garageband to make up his own song. The Fajita Song includes drum samples made using Garageband, and a recorded voice over the mix of samples.