What is Literacy in this day and age.....

So, after conducting a mini research project, well I my be exaggerating a little, by posing a few questions to my family members, for example what does literacy mean to them, it was interesting to here their perspective.
My husbands answer was quite deep and thoughtful for the type of answer I would normally receive if a posed a question like this to him! "Literacy is all about Communication and all the ways in which we communicate," he responded. I agreed with him and left it at that, because although that is a great response, from my reading on the definitions of literacy I now know there is so much more to literacy.
My mother and father in law were a bit more responsive in their answer. Their response was that literacy was about reading, writing, speaking, grammar. This answer is very much in line with the generation they were bought up in that to be literate you needed to be skilled in these main areas.
What would be interesting is to get a perspective on what my 6 year old would define literacy as. Unfortunately he is in bed so I cannot find out right now but will fill you in on his response in my next posting. I'm sure it will have more to do with being computer and internet literate.
Stay Tuned....

QR Codes

40interestingwaystouseqrcodesinthecla 110724032613-phpapp02 from Amy Slefendorfas

My QR Code for my wiki, I created this using KAYWA QR Code

 

ipads in the classroom

iPads, ipods and iphones are very rapidly becoming a successfull and popular ICT tool for classrooms. Beyond the immediate benefit of engaging students, iPads can improve education efficiency and standards.

I believe, if iPads are used correctly in the classroom by teachers they can develop children's creativity. It is vital that teachers know what skills the iPad can be developed, otherwise it's use in the classroom could be wasted. Technology now needs to be central to children's learning in the classroom with creative well planned teaching. The list below explains some great ways the ipad is being used in schools today.

NURTURE CREATIVITY WITH STORYTELLING PLATFORMS
Educators at Ringwood North Primary School in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, created the Epic Citadel Challenge to foster storytelling, creative collaboration and individual initiative. Students used their experiences in the virtual landscape to tell a story in the medium of their choosing.
CONVERTS WORDS INTO RAPS
The Holy Family School in Ashland, Ky., is taking advantage of teacher and student-friendly apps that convert educational texts into engaging material for students. For example, AutoRap will take your words and turn them into a rap and Strip Designer enables the creation of comic strips.
GO PAPERLESS
Jackson Christian School in Jackson, Tenn., has virtually paperless classrooms. Students no longer carry binders and textbooks, while teachers administer tests on their iPads.
ENGAGE THE DISENGAGED
Educators at Manor Lakes P-12 Specialist School in Wyndham Vale, Victoria, Australia, found that the iPads were most effective in prompting their most disconnected students to interact in the classroom and have fun while learning. For example, the iBooks and Marvel Comics apps were used to engage students in reading.
ENHANCE PHYSICAL EDUCATION
SPARK, a health and physical education program, has an app for PE classes. PE teachers at Eastlake Middle School in Chula Vista, California use SPARK to record student’s physical activity and show them how to refine their movements.
GRAPH DATA
Julie Garcia, a teacher at Innovation Middle School in San Diego, California, uses the iPad to show students how to graph data and look for correlations.
TURN IN ASSIGNMENTS
Leslie Langham, a seventh-grade English teacher, uses Dropbox, a free file sharing app, to post homework assignments. Students turn them in using the app and she then grades and returns them all on Dropbox.
TAKE NOTES
Christina Weltmer, a science teacher at Garden City High School, was actually taught by one of her students on how to use Notability, the iPad app that enables the user to take notes, record lectures and annotate PDFs.
ASSIST SPECIAL NEEDS LEARNING
Warringa Park School, a special needs institution in Hopper’s Crossing, Victoria, Australia, has a list of apps which have been particularly successful in teaching students who have special learning needs. Proloquo2Go aids students who have trouble speaking. Mad Addition, Mad Subtraction and Mad Multiplication help students learn math and have fun while doing it. Red Fish 4 Kids assisted students in learning how to spell.
Similarly, First Words Animals aids with letter and word identification. Jack and the Beanstalk Children’s Interactive Storybook helps keep students engaged as they learn how to read. Whizzit 123 and Toddler Counting helped students with numeracy. Likewise, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia allows teachers to maintain a group learning environment even with students who cannot leave their hospital beds and do not have fine motor skills.
DECREASE EXPENSES
While iPads are often seen as a luxury, a study by Oklahoma State University reported that iPad implementation actually decreased costs for students and schools because they reduced the need for physical textbooks.

References

D. Savenije, "18 Ways ipads are being used in the classromm right now" 2011 retieved from website
http://edudemic.com/2012/11/18-ways-ipads-are-being-used-in-classrooms-right-now/

Group 4 Technologies Reflection

Museumbox

SWOT Analysis

Strengths ·         Easy to learn and navigate ·         Bright and colourful ·         Allows you to add links, images, video’s and text ·         Searchable database of images and sounds	Weaknesses   ·         Found that pictures, video’s and file must be uploaded, they can’t simply be linked. ·         It would not let me access the program without paying a subscription fee
Opportunities   ·         Would be a great tool if it was free ·         Can be used for research and it would be great for your visual and auditory learners. When a student submits a box, a teacher can look over it, make edits, and return it to the student for further editing.	Threats   Time consuming

Google Earth

SWOT Analysis

Strengths ·         Google Earth is completely free to download and use. ·         Google Earth allows a user to zoom and see images of the planet in great detail. ·         Numerous layers of data are available to enhance the Google Earth experience. ·         Google Earth is updated on an ongoing basis over the Internet, so it is generally up to date information ·         The Google Earth community is constantly adding fascinating new and free content to Google Earth.

Weaknesses   ·         Google Earth has so much data, you need a high speed Internet connection to use it effectively. ·         If you view many layers at once on Google Earth, your view as you zoom may be jumbled. ·         The side bar has many choices and can be somewhat cumbersome to use.

Opportunities   ·         One of the main features I liked from Google earth was its ability to bring places and things in text books alive, and make them real to my students. ·         The program is capable of covering a fast array of topics for your students and many great lesson plans can be found online. ·         Helps to create global citizenship amongst your learners

Threats   ·         Some of the user-added Google Earth points of interest are useless or incorrect. ·         Some areas of the planet are not available on Google Earth in high resolution or high detail. ·         If appropriate scaffolding is not used, I feel that students may get lost and too time consumed with other great features of this program.

Online Concept Mapping

Concept maps can also be used to make student thinking visible. When students construct and submit their understanding of key concepts and their linkages through a concept map, it becomes clear whether in fact the students understand the conceptual framework around a topic of study.
SWOT Analysis

Strengths     Concept maps help students focus on the "big picture", enabling them to devote more of their time to conceptual understanding rather than rote learning   Concept maps encourage students to make valid connections among concepts   They enable students to represent graphically their knowledge, and to share it with the teacher and other students   They shift the emphasis from isolated facts to theoretical frameworks of related concepts

Weaknesses     Comparisons among students are more difficult because concept maps tend to reveal the idiosyncratic way that students view a scientific explanation, as a result...   Evaluation can become more time-consuming for the instructor, especially in large classes, unless some variation (such as Select & Fill-in) is adopted   If you score maps, you must use a consistent (and tested) scheme

Opportunities   In addition to their role as assessment tools, concept maps offer a useful way to help students "learn how to learn"; they also serve as useful vehicles for course development and as graphic organisers.

Threats   Students who have developed a strong facility for rote learning of verbal knowledge sometimes find concept maps intimidating   Constructing concept maps is a demanding cognitive task that requires training

This is my unfinished (purposely unfinished for my students to expand on) Bubbl.us concept map.

An Audio lightbulb moment.

Audio source: Shimmering - music composed for movie "Wszystko Płynie/Flowing"

After reading Jackie Russell's blog on audio files I followed her link to the creative commons website to get some help and inspiration for my audio files I could use without breaching copyright laws. I absolutely love this site, and it has been a light bulb moment for me with the amazing audio I can incorporate into my web presentations. I will be highly recommending my students to use this site when creating presentations as it does not breach any copyright laws as the music is covered under the creative commons agreement.

My Space Glog!!

Taa daa, here it is! Love, love love this web tool, I can see it is going to be very useful in my teaching in both a teaching centred approach and more importantly to allow my students to take control of their learning using this fun and interactive web tool. My favourite aspect of using glogster was how quick and easy it was to create am informative lesson and to add files and worksheets for further learning for my students. My frustrations over the past 2 days with the other web tools we have engaged with has been mainly due to the time consuming effort of getting to know what I can and can't do with the program. Glogster in comparison seemed so easy to understand and it did every function I needed it too!! It even copies the right sized embed file to embed it into your wiki or your blog, some of the other programs seem near impossible to do this. My above Glog, which I have created for my grade 5 class on the Moon and Space was so simple to create, the you tube videos are accessible directly through the program so it saves time on copying and pasting embedding files. The only main limitation with this program is its audio function, it would be great if we could grab files straight from our itunes library to make it more time friendly.

The learning benefits of using globster are endless. The main benefit I found in using globster is that it allows a student centred approach to learning. Your students can take control of their presentations and can also do the learning activities that you may have attached to your glob at their own leisure, so the fast learners will be able to move onto activities without boredom. It also allows for learning to occur through many different mediums to cater for the various learning styles in your classroom.

•  audio for your learners who learn best through listening to the information being presented.
• visual for your graphic learners.
• video which combines the previous two learning styles together.
• hands on approach where you can attach worksheets for your learners to open and complete, and
• best of all you can allow your students to create their own glogs on research topics in the area your are studying.

Another great benefit of using glogster is that it gives you access to a huge library full of other teachers glogsters all made public to you. These can be edited to suit your students knowledge on the topic. You can then embed the glogster into your blog or wiki like I have done here with this fantastic glob on the topic of fractions posted to my wiki.

So what are you waiting for check it out here!!

Learning with PowerPoint

So I didn't think this week would be too difficult, all we had to do was learn and explore with PowerPoint. Finally a tool that I was familiar with, as I had made many PowerPoint slide in my high school and undergrad uni days. Whilst it was still very user friendly and set up the same as my ancient PowerPoint, I was happily surprised to see many great templates and features added to PowerPoint. Unfortunately for me that meant relearning what I thought I knew and more time and effort was put into making a PowerPoint on fractions for my grade 5 class. I'm sure they will appreciate the colours, images sounds and motion I have embedded into what could have been a pretty boring fractions lesson.

Check out my fractions PowerPoint on my wiki.

On my search to to make the best PowerPoint possible i come across some great sites for future PowerPoint presentations. heck them out here.

Our second Engagement Activity was scaffolding our learning by introducing interactive ways of using PowerPoint. I really enjoyed the use of the organisation chart to help our ideas on the topic flow which in turn would help the flow of our PowerPoint slides. Check out my chart in wiki which I have created in preparation for my slide show on Geometry.

Then I converted my outline from my word document into a Powerpoint. This I just loved as it was a much quicker way of inserting the text into my Slides. Check it out here in its basic form.