National Teaching and Learning
Change Programme
Improving teaching and learning in Adult Learning

Video transcript

Voiceover:

After working on the mind maps it's time to feed back.

Tutor:

What activities to do with gardening did you find you could use mind maps for?

Male tutor 1:

Loads, I mean almost every possible application there's something you could use it for, for example the Internet and e-mail's clearly for looking at plant research, looking at suppliers, maybe garden designs, that kind of thing.

Male tutor 2:

Word processing, producing plant labelling, producing correspondence with suppliers or colleagues locally.

Male tutor 1:

And then there's fairly obvious ones like having your seed catalogue and so on on your database and plants and all the rest of it with their Latin names and do a query on a database of when you're supposed to prune them, you know, there's lots of things you can use. So virtually every application we can find some relevance just for a simple topic like gardening.

Tutor:

Good, so what did you decide on then?

Female tutor:

Well we came up with the idea of a local football team and we thought that would be quite a good topic to incorporate lots of different uses within IT, things like fliers and booklets for desktop publishing, we thought about writing for sponsorship deals using the word processor. Newspaper articles, press releases. We could use a database to record results and also we could incorporate digital photos, film and video of the team and then internet and email we put down researching other teams' forms and communicating with members of the teams and also researching kit suppliers — if we can get better deals elsewhere.

Tutor:

Over 90 per cent of people in their lives use IT in their jobs or at home but they tend to use a very narrow part of it, only the bits that they absolutely need so they only use the small bits that they need and what this exercise is doing is trying to broaden out people's appreciation of what it's all about.