Harlem Shake

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQZilpwqkbg permission for publication from Mark Slefendorfas

Images for learning

This week we have been meddling in the world of digital images and how they can be used in a constructive way to establish deep learning. We were introduced to a a great tool that allows us to resize our images to a size that is easily upload able to our web spaces. Mobaphoto is a great free tool that we used this week to resize our images. The image below is one such photo that i resized using Mobaphoto.

This awesome photo was taken by my 5 year old son, who loves Thomas the tank engine, so in order to entice him to the top of Mt Oberon, Bertie came with us and we took some marvellous photo's from the top!! This is a great image to teach students about the concepts of size and how although some things can seem small in some instances, in others they can appear quite large. The use of imagery in teaching this concept is very helpful as the concept can be seen and understand visually much easier than it can be understood in written text.

Reflection on my experience of creating a website

I must say I really enjoyed making the website, it was my fav out of the 3 tools we have used and evaluated this week. For me it won out over the others because of two reason, firstly the amazing amount of multimedia you can put in the page and secondly a more personal reason was that it was just "my" site and no one can edit it without my permission, not even comments! Being a very organised and neat person, I found the website design process complimented my teaching style, as opposed to the mess a wiki can become.

THIS PMI Chart will show my reflection in a neat, organised way.

Plus	Minus	Implications
Content and structure belong to me and nobody else can edit or add to it.	Not interactive so students cannot add work to it, only the one author can.	Can be frustrating if don’t have full access to all multimedia available on weebly
Can use your website to link students to the world	Need to upgrade with $$ to get all the benefits of creating in Weebly	Students have no contribution to their learning so it is not very student centred
Using a site like weebly makes it very easy to design by allowing you to insert place holders.	No pedagogy used if just asking students  basic questions and not doing anything with the content
A huge amount of multimedia can be added to you site, which allows for an array of learning designs to be established.	Depending on the scaffolding used it can have limited success on teaching the learning outcomes
Will enhance communication between yourself and students	Links can get outdated

I feel that to  create a "significant" web site, one that will ultimately benefit students, a great deal of thought and time is required. Like any effective teaching plan requiring time and resourcefulness, it is no different when you create a web site for your students to access. However, if you have an extensive, well organised plan, the computing part is easy and getting easier everyday as I found with weebly. If you are looking for a great website that explains what is needed to have a successful and interactive web page for your learners click here.

Reflection on my wiki experience

So the next part of this weeks e-learning journey required us to create a wiki and deck it out as best we could . I believe I accidentally made my wiki whilst participating in last week wiki activity as I mistakenly thought we needed a wiki account to participate in this!! Turned out to be a bonus as I had already done the boring part of setting up the wiki space, the fun part was left which was to decorate my space with my own content.

Anyway back to the point of this blog posting which is to explain my findings and understandings on the learning potential of a wiki. One issue I had with this weeks activity in setting up the wiki was the scaffolding seemed very broad and was not very specific as to what content was needed in our wiki. I could now ramble on about all the issues (and the wonderful thing) I encountered while using the wiki in boring essay format, or use some of the wonderful analytical tools we have learnt about this week. (I choose to do the later!!)

A SWOT analysis will help lay out my findings on my wiki experience:

Strengths Very easy to use. Anyone can edit. Great tool to share ideas, information and knowledge amongst students. Supports group collaboration effectively.	Weaknesses Students can abuse trust of using a wiki by deleting others contributions or adding inappropriate material Cannot accommodate multiple, concurrent users .
Opportunities Classroom resource for students to look back on when they wish. Creates an online community encouraging student relationships. Motivates students to participate and collaborate together. Students learning from each other.	Threats Copyright and plagiarism. Anyone can view content. Threat of spam or vandalism. Erased content.

It is extremely important to ensure that when working in a wiki are students are working safely , ethically and legally. When using Wiki's with my learners it is my responsibility to teach my students the correct behaviours in respect to ethics and legallacy. Even as a primary teacher my students would need to learn how to link information the have posted into the wiki back to the original source. If implementing a wiki activity, one of my most important instructions would be explaining the importance of trust amongst students in the Wiki.

It is important as teachers to educate ourselves about the challenges and risk of using Wiki's in the classroom. Smart copying http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go is a website dedicated to educating people about copyright in all Australian schools. It gives as access to the National guidelines, FAQ's and Fact sheets that can be accessed online. The site also contains excellent information about creating ICT's and what is possible within the law.


Cyber smart http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/ is the Australian Governments Cyber Safety program providing. It provides “activities, resources and practical advice to help young kids, kids, teens and parents safely enjoy the online world.”.
Ethical safe and responsible practises when working with ICT’s along with operating efficiently and safely is also covered across every year juncture in the Student ICT Expectations Document. Click on this link for more information. http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/strategy/dp/studentict.html

Wiki's illustrate that this is the future of education and the goal of producing digitally literate students is high on the agenda from an early age. We should however be educated about those risks and challenges and we should also educate our students about how and why they should take these issues seriously.

At all times we should model ethical and legal guidelines to our students and encourage them to do the same. The opportunities ICT’s in eLearning can provide far outweigh the risks, and it is my opinion that those risks can be dealt with through information and education.

In comparison to my first wiki experience the setting up of my wiki this week was a tad more difficult. I believe the main reason for my difficultly this week was the lack of scaffolding around the design of the Wiki. Only when reading the least question posed to us in Engagement Activity 3 which ask us 'to consider in our reflection that it is not just you, but more importantly your students, who will be working in the wiki space' was I able to figure what was and was not appropriate for my Wiki space.

With this new insight, I went back to my SWOT analysis and looked over the opportunities I could create in my Wiki for my students. Then I was able to edit (a great strength of the wiki) and put some of the great learning opportunities into my Wiki.

References

Education Queensland. (2011) Student ICT expectations. Smart classrooms. Department of Education and

Training. Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/strategy/dp/studentict.html

Smartcopying. (2008) The official guide to copyright issues for Australian schools

Cybersmart (2009) Australian Communications and Media Authority. Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved
from http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/

Reflection on my experience with Blogs

Over the past 3 weeks (this may sound melodramatic!!) a whole new world has opened to me on my computer all thanks to Blogs. My husband and kids have been neglected as scroll, read and comment on a vast array of others Blogs. The use of Blogs as a teaching aid has so many potential benefits for our learners if we use the correct pedagogy with this tool. From my readings and research into Blog use, I have found that one of the main benefits of using blogs for learning is its ability to encourage students to write for a broad audience and that it has a positive impact on the learners' writing fluency. Another great benefit of the blog is that it offer students an opportunity to interact with peers and to learn from each other. Because they enable readers to post comments to blog postings, they offer a forum for discussion, a great example of constructivist learning.


By listing some of the great benefits and also some of the limitations of blogs I can now use this to scaffold how I could use blogs in my teaching context. A great scaffolding tool that can be used in your pedagogy with ICT is the PMI Chart. Below is an example of a PMI chart I have completed to demonstrate how an analyse can be conducted to show the dangers and benefits of using blogs in schools.

PLUS	MINUS	INTERESTING FACTS
Students can comment on each others’ blog posts outside the classroom. This contributes to creating a sense of community, and takes learning and peer interaction outside the confines of the classroom.	Many blogs are very much opinion based and not factual	The majority of minuses are purely based on the pedagogy and scaffolding tools used by the teacher.
Blogs are often used as a tool for reflection	without effective scaffolding proper reflection will most likely not occur
Used as a way to get students to produce a multimedia portfolio	with the adequate level of ICT knowledge students will be left behind in terms of multimedia
Blogs are an excellent source of up to date reading material: encourage your students to find a blog they really enjoy and subscribe to it.	Blogs can be time consuming and eat into other important learning areas
encourage students to write for a broad audience and that it has a positive impact on the learners' writing fluency	If not assessed can lead to bad habits forming in punctuation and grammar

 

Blogs and their potential for education fit within a social constructivist approach to learning where blogs play a role in both internal processing of the material by the student (reflection) and the external communication (comments, peer review) about it.

Bruns and Humphreys (2005) suggest that the pedagogical models need to change from the traditional linear learning paradigms to a social constructivist pedagogical model which includes problem solving in a collaborative environment that requires students to enact knowledge through a process of shared understanding. (Minocha & Thomas, 2007: 190)

When I enter the field as a primary school teacher I feel that to not give my learners access to Blogs and the potional they offer would seriously hinder their learning progress.  As part of my literacy teaching I feel it would be a wonderful tool to allow free thinking/writing. As we are very time limited in what we teach our learners the use of ICT and blogs in particular, cover so many learning areas at the one time. For example I could give my students the task of learning about rainforest's. For me to use a blog in the teaching of rainforest's I would have to carefully scaffold with analytical tools what the students where required to post on their blogs about rainforest's. I have selected the KWL strategy.  Now my learners know what basic information I require initially on their blog I would then require them to research using the Internet the information gaps they were wanting to know about rainforest's. My scaffolding questions would form the first part of the assessment as I would ask them (in comments on the blog) to show on their blog, maps of where rainforest's are located around the world. Furthermore I would then move them onto to create outcomes with the knowledge they have formed on rainforest's.

From this one assignment on rainforest's, by using a blog we have covered learning area of writing, reading (literacy), geography, problem solving, multimedia to name a few. By commenting on the blogs I as the teacher are continually assessing the students works and allowing the student to redraft and add to what they know. Allowing the students to to determine what they want to learn about rainforest's through the scaffolding tool KWL allowed the learning to be student-centred. Also by letting them find the research via the Internet is another example of student centred learning.

Refernces

A. Bruns, and S. Humphreys, "Wikis in teaching and assesment: the M/Cyslopedia project" 2005

S. Minocha, and P.G.Thomas, "Collaborative Learning in a Wiki Environement: Experiences from a software engineering course" 2007 p190

 

 

 

Reflection on my first Wiki experince

Lets just say confusing is an understatement!! This Wiki spaces thing really needs some time put into it to grasp the concepts and to get the full benefits from it (Which may I say are really great benefits!!)

This blog posting is going to hopefully enlighten you (and hopefully me by rehashing what I have learnt!!) on the pros and cons of using wiki spaces for learning and how this applies to the theories of learning.

My experience form this week’s wiki forum demonstrates to me that this method of learning is grounded in both the constructivist and connectivism theories. It was a great example of networked nature of learning with computers and the internet. In relation to our Wiki topic which was ‘should mobile phone be used in schools’ the wiki space demonstrated how with a topic that has so many avenues to explore it would be impossible for a single individual to fully explore every aspect in this topic. By using the wiki we could get a broader understanding of others concepts and opinions on this topic. This is the very nature of the theory of connectivism as it proposes that learning can reside outside one selves (within an organisation or database) is focused on connecting specialized information set, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than are current state of knowing. (Siemens 2005).

I also feel that that the forum demonstrates the theory of social constructivism. Social Constructivist Vygotsky (1962) explains that social interaction has a large influence on learning, and that individuals learn within a zone of close proximal development. He suggests that learner move beyond what is already known through the support of others. By using the wiki we GLTD students as a group were able to learn as a social network using each other’s past experiences and feeling to the topic of mobile phone use in schools.

By using De Bono’s six hats, our teacher had guided and scaffolded out learning and thinking on the topic at hand. It also allowed us to think about this topic using higher order thinking as we went straight into analysing and applying our knowledge into the wiki. This higher order thinking technique demonstrates Blooms cognitive taxonomy in that it is not intended as a linear process rather it is a process of introducing student held knowledge, analysing this knowledge, deriving and strengthening knowledge and theory from this analysis, and then moving towards evaluation of the knowledge which was cleverly done in the scaffold of de bono thinking hats technique.

I have a limited knowledge of how much mobile phones are used in schools at present. I am also very time restricted in my study with a busy family life, but by using the wiki and group work I was able to use other learner’s knowledge and research on this topic to help with my learning and understanding of the topic. By using the wiki space were we as students able to analyse one others idea on this topic and identify the strengths and weaknesses of our fellow students responses to the questions presented.  This show that we are using our analysis and evaluation which form the most important part of Blooms taxonomy and which in turns shows this learning pedagogy was requiring us to learn using higher order thinking.

In Regards to the TPACK framework I feel that the wiki activity failed to deliver all three of the concepts of this framework. The Three concepts in summary are you must have the technical skills, you must know your content and you must know how to deliver your content so your students learn effectively.  The content knowledge was evident as we had our fellow learners knowledge available on the wiki, therefore this section of the framework was established. The content was delivered in an effective method by the use of De Bono thinking hats and the use of higher order thinking in the task. The area that failed to deliver for me in this framework was the technical skills of myself and some other members using the wiki. The task was too time consuming for me as I am unfamiliar with writing in wiki spaces and just trying to get my content knowledge on the page was very frustrating for me!! Also other students had edited the wiki and made it unreadable for me. This in turn hindered my ability to read all the content on this subject.

The Wiki activity demonstrated to me how important it is to deliver successfully all three aspects of the TPACK frame work. If one section of the framework is lacking it can significantly hinder the learning of our students. I also found how great technology can be (once we fully understand it) with higher order thinking and more specifically Blooms taxonomy. The use of the wiki clearly demonstrated how learning as a social constructivist enhances our learning and forces us to analysis and evaluate others opinions. By scaffolding our work in the wiki through the questions raised using De Bono’s thinking hat we were able to go through the process of Blooms taxonomy by first stating our knowledge on the topic and then progressing through the stages of the taxonomy to getting to the more important stages of learning in analysing and evaluation. The only limitation I feel in this activity was we were unable to create any changes with our knowledge and analysis on the topic. But I’m sure our amazing teacher would have a follow on activity to allow us to demonstrate the creative stage of Blooms taxonomy!!

 

Reference

 

G. Siemens, "Connectivism A Learning Theory for the Digital Age" 2005 retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

 

L. Vygotsky, "Social Development Theory" 1962 retrieved from http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development.html

What is TPACK?

TPACK stands for Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge, in order to understand this framework it is best broken down into meaning of each word in the acronym.

1. Technological refers to the Technology (ICT) that are available for classroom use. The technology is designed and used for specific use.

2. Pedagogical refers to art of being a teacher, so it is how we deliver our knowledge to our learners.

3. Content Knowledge refers to what we know about the particular topic.

In order to have a successful TPACK we must use all three of the above to successfully deliver a meaningful lesson to our learners. If one of the above elements is left out learners will suffer and possibly not grasp the content of the topic.

TPACK is framework for successful e-learning. Firstly the content needs to be chosen, and then decisions about appropriate technologies that can transform learning are selected. Finally pedagogies that support the best possible learning are established.

The video below is a great example of using all 3 elements to teach a topic and shows a great visual diagram of the concept.

 

 

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0wGpSaTzW58