There's a huge range of options for using ICT in Humanities. Many of my lessons with my Year 8 SOSE class involve a trip to the computer rooms or the library as I'm very much in favour of student-driven inquiry learning. I have just started teaching them about natural disasters and in our first lesson they were split into pairs to research a natural disaster. The only directions I gave them was that they had to find at least 10 interesting facts about their natural disaster and they ran with it. We were in one of the computer rooms and they were using the Internet to do their research, visiting websites like Wikipedia and a host of disaster-specific pages. After a gentle prompt, students were rushing to YouTube to incorporate a clip into the presentations they'd have to do about their natural disaster and were enthralled by the sights and sounds of the natural disaster footage.
They were using MS Word to collate and organise their information, and some were also asking if they could create a PowerPoint presentation. These are features of the VELS Level 5 Standards for ICT, in particular "ICT for creating" and "ICT for communicating" as students were independently selecting which websites to go to, and conducting searches on search engines to find the information they required to complete the task. The activity was entirely learner-centred and the students required very little, if any, direction from me, except to monitor the noise level as they excitedly showed off and discussed their findings with each other, and to confirm the order of the presentations as every pair wanted to go first!
I'm personally excited about the upcoming activities in this particular class as we'll be using an online game that was introduced to me by one of the students. It's called Stop Disaster, and in it, students are able to select a scenario where a natural disaster is about to hit. Each natural disaster is linked to a specific geographical location (eg. bush fire in Central Australia or tsunami in South East Asia) and students have about a certain amount of time (depending on the difficulty level) to prepare the town for the impending disaster by reinforcing existing structures, building a hospital and a school and putting in place defences to help minimise the damage. The site and the game are brilliant and give students the chance to explore and experiment (and certainly take risks) with the possible outcomes, proving that learning can definitely be fun!
