MORE ICT at my placement SCHOOL

A minor note:
Well, as it turns out you don't really need to have blinds to see the projected screen, it sure helps on a sunny day but you can make do, we have a board in the artroom leaning up over the window which blocks out a bit of light so that does help. Worst case scenario you could just bluetak up some white paper over the windows closest to the screen, this would still let light in but provide some shelter for better projection clarity.

IT in the class room - Year 10 Visual Communications
The kids in this class are 50 percent on task, 50 percent off task. The set project mimcs the year 11 Vis Comm project in that it follows the design process and is very student directed. The students have longer on the tasks than the year 11's would and at the stge they are up to (Research/Idea Generation) there is less technical drawing. The task is to design a magazine cover design for the school magazine and they must use a variety of materials to work their ideas up.
In most of my observations more than half will get out computers and work on photoshop to do this. They work from ideas out of their head and have no thumbnail sketches or prep drawings as reference, which i personally think is best practice because it holds focus when using computer design tools and makes it easier to reach a set goal. I can see the value of experimentation of course, but from my experience at high school years ago, i remeber how easy it is to just get lost when computer aided desiging without thought to the idea first.
The students work at varying levels and without much instruction as to photoshop tools. I have observed peer teaching and students finding tutorials on the web. I go around in my observations and help where asked, one student was having trouble with a selection tool not working. I had a look at his screen and noticed the file size was 12.7GB (a bit big for a plain photoshop file) opening the image size window revelled it was 10 meters x 10 meters big!!! So i showed him through dpi and file size etc. The selection tool worked much better after that.

The teacher of the class noticed that the students did need some instructionn in this area and the next class gave them a bit of a tutorial on creating a file, layers, selection and basic text uses. They were given a handout for reference with screen shots on it. I think this was a good starting point. I wonder though if this is enough? Some of these kids obviously want to create amazing effects and are finding online tutorials to this effect but are struggling a bit through it. In this class where it is quite open and student directed i think there is a difficulty in juggling each students requirements. On questioning the teacher about the unit design for this class, he said, it is worth doing it this way rather than a more prescriptive unit where each lesson is more ctructured as by the time they get to year 11 they are totally up to speed on the design process and how to navigate it. I remarked that also it may serve a purpose in sorting out the stronger students from the weaker ones in terms of the self direction needed for VCE Vis Comm.