Digital Tool 5: Podcasts

I have been going through some different podcasts using Itunes.. they are very easy to access and quite enjoyable to listen too.  There are a large number of podcasts specifically designed for educational purposes and I have chosen to evaluate one that reads childrens storys.  This podcast, I would presume, would be particularly useful in the early childhood years as something that could play while the children were to act out the words...

Digital Took 6: Digital Video

 The more I learn about what you can do with blogs, the more I am convinced that they make a wonderful learning tool.  Until recently I had not realised that you could include videos/movies on a blog.  What a fantastic way to hook the children into a topic, it would really be a way to get children engaged. 

There are so many programs learners can use to create videos! The one that I have uploaded is an example one that I had made for an arts subject I took earlier in the year, in a program called PhotoStory.  Photostory is very user friendly and would be great for students of all ages. 

Another program that I experimented with during this activity was Windows Live Movie Maker.  I found it to be very similar PhotoStory and equally as easy to use.  I can definitely see me introducing these programs to my students as a way to incorporate ICT's in their learning.


What fun we can have while learning!!

Digital Tool 4: Images

Digital Tool 4: Images

Images are an incredible digital tool!! and WOW! What fun you can have with them!!  This weeks tasks asked me to use a website, Piknik http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/welcome, to manipulate an image.  It was a really good website that was very easy to use... It it definitely a website that students would enjoy to use.  I hopped on, planning on just doing a 2 second job, so that I could upload it to my blog and be done, but once I'd started I was hooked and spent at least a good hour exploring the site.

Images open up a large window of opportunity for learning within a classroom.  Students can be taught to read images, to be able to understand them and interpret them.  They can go into details like what emotions do certain colours evoke?  Do you think that this is why this image has a lot of this colour?  What do the hard lines represent as opposed to the soft curvy lines?  Depending on the grade of the students images such as political comics or posters advertising the war could be analysed.  Through using images in education there is a strive for students to develop Visual Literacy.  "Visual literacy is the ability to see, to understand, and ultimately to think, create and communicate graphically (Thibault, M., & Walbert, D. 2003) " Through analysing images students are developing their creative and critical thinking skills

Another activity that you could do with the students using images would be to gather images from different eras.  Say your topic is How women are portrayed... The students would be able to compare and analyse the images to find out about previous generations as apposed to now.





Sites that I found both interesting and useful:

1.  This website offers some great ways to incorporate images in the classroom context: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/practical-ways-to-use-digital-images-in-teaching-and-learning/

2.   Thinking Routines for Visual Thinking: Questions you can use to help students think visually.
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/vt/visibleThinking_html_files/03_ThinkingRoutines/03c_Core_routines/SeeThinkWonder/SeeThinkWonder_Routine.html



Reference

Thibault, M., & Walbert, D. (2003).  Reading images: An introduction to visual literacy.  Retrieved from http://www.learning.org/lp/pages/675 

Blogs....

The more I use and read about blogs, I am convinced of their potential within a classroom.  In a teaching context, blogs can be used for assignments, keeping parents updated while on school camps/excursions and for learning about Information Communication and Technologys (ICT's) in the classroom. 

It intrigues me that blogs can offer so much to students and teachers within a classroom context.  "A blog can be defined as an online personal journal made up of chronological entries that can be archived over time" (Kajder, S., & Bull, G. 2003.).  While reading up on blogs and how they can be used to further education I came across this website from the Department of Education: http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/weblogs/
It  is a wonderful website to look at and gives real classroom examples where blogs can be incorporated into the lesson/unit plans.

This was, of course, not the only website that I came across... When I typed into Google, "How can blogs be used in education?" I was answered with approximately 455 million websites.  It appears that many people are aware of the value technology, and in particular blogs, can play in learning and education. 

Blogs don't have to be just text.. Within a blog you can 'upload' images and videos as well.  This is why I feel that blogs can be such an asset for the classroom.  It allows the students who aren't as strong with their English skills to communicate without having to use only text.

Blogs would make a wonderful way to complete an assessment task as the dates that the posts were added on are recorded and can be checked by the teacher.  The teacher also has the option to comment on the students' posts as they go.  Giving feedback throughout the assessment that the students can easily refer back to.




Refences:

Kajder, S., & Bull, G. (2003)  Scaffolding for stuggling students: Reading and writing with blogs.            retreieved from googlescholar.com

Mobile Phones - Wiki

To me a wiki, similar to Wikipedia, is a site that can be edited by anyone.  It is a digital learning tool that gives you the opportunity to make the pages private (so only a select group can see and edit), or public (giving access to everyone on the net.  This week I explored the benefits of using and contributing to a group wiki.  This wiki used 'De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats' (see http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm for more information) to gather and sort information about  mobile devices in education.  The 6 Thinking Hats encourages looking at particular topic in 6 different ways, or with 6 different thinking hats on.  These include:

•   Negative - Why something may not work 

•  Process - used to manage the thinking process

•  Creative - Possibilities and new ideas

•  Intuitive - feelings/ hunches 

•  Positive - Optimism 

•  Objective - information known or needed.

After exploring the wiki it was evident what a wonderful learning tool it makes, especially in the opportunities it creates for collaborative learning.  Everyone is able to add to the page with their own opinions and/or information they have found and this makes the page very interesting to read.  I might have come to the wiki with set ideas about mobile learning, how it can be positive and how, at the same time, it can have negative attributes as well.  However, after reading so many different opinions, that I hadn't even considered I was amazed at how many different positive and negative implications it could have. 

I found the forum to be particularly reflective of the learning theories, constructivism and connectivism.  Constructivism, according to McInerney & McInerney (2006. p.572), is "Piaget's view that children construct their own understanding through interaction with their environment.  In learning, constructivism should emphasise the active role of the learner in building understanding.  Constuctivist programs emphasize individual initiative and creative thinking in learning."  Connectivism is learning theory for the digital age, emphasising that learning occurs in a number of ways, and that knowledge can be gained from many areas. Because of this, I feel that the forum was reflective of both constructivism and connectivism as knowledge and understanding was gained through interaction with the wiki. 

I really enjoyed being involved in the wiki, it opened me up to some new ideas and allowed me the share my opinions with everyone else. I believe that wiki would make an amazing tool for student learning as it would be a way that they could discuss and work on group assignments in a digital way that is able to be monitored by the teacher.  One of the best things about students being able to use Wiki's  to work on their assessment tasks is that the input of each group member can be monitored, and so the teacher is able to make sure that everyone is pulling their own weight and contributing to the group.  At the same time, this would be a drawback for students without internet access at home, as they will not have the same opportunities to work on the tasks as other students.

'De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats' provided a great scaffold to  support a collection of perspectives.  As it didn't focus on one particular view on mobile learning, but rather forced the participants to think about different aspects of Mobile Learning as well.

Reference: 

McInerney, D, M., & McInerney, V. (2006). Educational psychology constructing learning ed . Pearson Australia: Frenchs Forest. NSW

Finally getting my head around it all..

When I heard about the course "Managing E-Learning" I must admit I felt quite confident, considering myself to be quite capable with technology.  However, as soon as wiki's and blogs were mentioned I got lost.  In all honesty, I hadn't even heard of these things and had nooo idea what to do with them.  I suppose one of the things that I found most confronting was that everything online seems so public and I suddenly got very conscious of every word I was putting down...  With all of this said, I hope I am finally headed on the right track!!

While I was reading through the readings listed for week one, I found I was drawn to the fact that so much has changed, and how much technology is used.  How incredible is it to think that teachers are preparing students for jobs that don't even exist yet!  Technology is truly amazing, I find that it makes working from home so much easier because if I get stuck on a question I can just jump online or text a friend. Personally, I use technology as often as I can, and I often think about how heavy my school bag always seemed at the beginning of the school year and imagine how light they will soon become when all the students need are an iPad or a laptop and maybe a pencil case.  There won't be the need for all of the heavy textbooks, the dictionary or the bible... it seems that everything is available digitally these days. So with all of this running through my head I began looking on youtube, finding videos that stated how much technology has grown over time, how much of our population use mobile devices, how many texts are sent per minute, and so on.  The numbers of course were far bigger than I could ever have imagined.  It was a reminder to me of how important it is to include technology in education, because not only does it appear to be the present, but these sites show what a big part it will play in the future.

I think it is wonderful to have a course like this, to remind us of how important technology is in education and to encourage us to explore it as well!!!

Week One

Hi All,

This all seems to have taken me a ridiculously long time to get started with but I'm hoping that now I am finally starting to get my head around everything and that I am headed on the right track...