Test Your Mindset

Do you have a fixed or growth mindset?

Test your mindset

I came out as a growth mindset which I found interesting as often I am resistant to change. I do however believe that when it comes to personal skills you can grow and change. How did you go?

When it comes to ICTs I think I might fall, on occasion, into the reluctant growth mindset. Sometimes I am a little hesitant, okay a lot hesitant, to try out new technologies especially those that don’t seem to make and sense to me or I can’t work out the use. When I first dove into blogging the first post was the hardest but since then it has pretty much been the same recipe with a few tweaks here and there. Post some photos and attach a story or post a story with pretty photos to go with. On occasion there has been the odd link or video and sometimes I even redecorate, it is comfortable and safe because I have experimented with the settings and found out how things work. Well now I am trying out a different blogging platform so it is back to the drawing board, click on this, click on that, see what it does, try and find what makes it do what I want and well 3rd post in, so far, so good. The hardest thing was trying to get the word cloud from the last post on there. I ended up doing a screen shot and inserting it as a picture after some cropping. Now how did I found out how to do that, well I looked it up.

I am always pretty happy to fiddle around with new ICTs unless they are frustrating and don’t make sense but my younger brother, nearly a who generation away in age never hesitates to try things out because he has grown up with the constantly changing technology, way more complicated than the computer we occasionally used pretty much just for word processing and was it DOS games (??) as kids. Technology has changed so much in such a short time, my Great Grandfather helped with installing the first computer in Australia not so many generations ago that took up a whole room and was really just a type writer and now look at us pretty much having technology at our fingertips every hour of every day if we wish, technology that can do almost anything we want. So with all of that around how could I not be open to using it, trying it and learning about it.

So to wrap up this pretty wordy post, sometimes I find new technology a little bit overwhelming and scary but I will usually give anything a go.

How about you, do you think you have a growth mindset when it comes to technology?

ICT???

This blog is supposed to be about ICTs and using them in an Education context but what are ICTs?

ICT stands for Information and Communications Technology which according to wikipedia (which could be classified as an ICT itself) is a more specific term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), computers as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage, and audio-visual systems, which enable users to access, store, transmit, and manipulate information. 

Soooo basically my simplified definition would be that an ICT is any digital technology used for communication, information gathering, information sharing and information storage. Below I have come up with a word cloud created with Wordle (another ICT, which is great fun and kids love it) of some ICTs that I could think of at the time. I am 100% positive there are 100s or 1000s more that could be added. Feel free to comment with some you can think of.

Now I don’t think of myself as a technology junkie or really even someone who has all that much to do with ICTs but when I think harder, well I use them a lot. I may not have many devices to use but I do use a few different programs, sites and what not fairly often, some even with reliance. There are the ones like facebook and skype that I use to communicate and share, there is my other blog, I cannot get by without my camera, I regularly am looking up the local weather or BOM site especially now with cyclones brewing. I google things like there is no tomorrow and love finding things on pinterest with a wedding to plan and great education ideas to find as well. So without me going on and on you can get the gist that I use more than I thought. Below is an illustration that I found while googling ‘ICT’ that I think is a great visual of what ICTs are used for.

http://bit.ly/1ljcRXq

How do you use ICTs in your everyday life?

On a side note, who would have thought that ‘googling’ something or to ‘google it‘ would become an acceptable terms used daily.

The First Step

This is the beginning of a journey, a blogging journey, that will be delving into what I learn, experience and discover about using ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in Education.

There are many others along on this journey starting up their own similar blogs, some diving into the unknown, blogging for the first time (it isn’t that scary, really, I promise) and others, myself included, hoping to extend on what they already have some knowledge of.

Now, I have been out of the learning, well learning in a studious, focused way, zone. I have been off on adventures and learning about different things, some things that amazingly are pretty connected to the topic of this whole blog … technology and education.

So now I have made that first step in my journey, a journey that will hopefully it will be filled with many more steps (all in a forwards direction) that include a lot of thought provoking (hmmm), wordy (ahh), grammatically correct (bit of an ask there) posts that aren’t too boring and are filled with useful … stuff.