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.

Moviemaker experience....

I finally got this posted to my blog at 11:15pm on Saturday night, couldn't think of anything better to be doing on a Saturday night!! This weeks web tools I found to be very challenging. Especially the final task of creating a movie in moviemaker. The most time consuming task was getting audio onto my movie as I did not have any audio files suitable for my movie. I had a great deal of difficulty trying to use itunes music for my music in moviemaker, as the files where not compatible. I eventually overcame this by using my sound recorder on the computer to record my music from itunes, which I though was pretty creative on my behalf!! Once I had my movie made this process to post it to my blog, wiki and web page was very quick and easy for me, and I really like the fact my students will be able to upload their work onto the web with such ease and quickness for my assessment. (No more excuses of I left the CD at home or saved it to my home computer.)

For the purpose of these task I used my 5 year old son who is in prep to help with the making of the movie and to see if he could use and understand the movie making process. He absolutely loved the process and especially the finished product which he watches over and over again with pride, as he created it. This would be a great project for many learning areas and many grade levels. My task for my grade 2 class would be to loan an ipad and take photo's of their pets at home (if no pets then they can make pet rocks or find pictures of pets they would like). They would then add the photo's to movie maker. Next step is to find background music for their movie and add it to the movie. The focus and learning outcome of the project is poetry and rhyming poetry. My students would then use the pictures to inspire them to come up with rhyming poetry to add to the slides of their pets. I would then get the students to add their movie to our class wiki page to view others work and ideas on the project. This project using moviemaker is a great example of using student centred learning as the students are creating their own learning based on their interests and ideas, relevant to them . By sharing their work on the wiki and watching other classmates movies they are learning about different concepts that the other children have created.

Other great ways of using video for learning include digital storytelling, other forms of poetry, maths- geometric shapes, campaign ads, project based learning and social studies. This website readwritethink has some great ways of using moviemaker in the classroom for great learning. It also goes through the processes for children of using moviemaker to gauge what they are capable of doing with the software. A great slide show that explains the learning benefits of video in the classroom can be found here.

Video allows our students to be creative in a way that pen and paper cannot do alone. By the use of audio and visual we are using sensory modalities and  catering for our digital learners to understand in a higher order processing way the material that is being taught. If we use a sound pedagogy with instructions for the use of creating movies for learning it should allow our students to summarise their findings and then evaluate the videos of there own and also importantly others video material.
Video seems to be a good example of constructivism model of learning.  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 learners move beyond what is already known through the support of others. By allowing our students access to fellow classmates movies on a wikispace they are able to learn as a social network using one another findings in their videos to enhance their own learning and understanding of the topics.

References

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

My first podcast!

My first podcast!

Learning with Podcasts....

So now I am confidently able to embed images from flickr and my desktop, its time to analyse my findings of podcasts and their use in the classroom. After going on a massive podcast hunt through itunes and other podcast sites, I would have to say I'm not a huge fan yet!! Unless I am just unlucky with the podcast I choose to listen to, I found them to be time wasters with a lot of unnecessary chat at the introduction to each podcast. I do hope that the more research I do, I will find the appropriate podcast to assist my learners in the classroom. From my knowledge of learning process, I do see and understand how beneficial this learning tool would be for auditory learners. They give your students another voice to listen and learn from rather than your voice day in day out. Even though myself personally cannot switch on to a voice without visuals (my brain just wanders to other places) I can see the benefits of this tool for my learners. I would only use podcast with an slide show or animation as I feel it could get mundane for my learners and they could possibly switch off also.
One podcast that I have embedded below would be a great idea to help engage children into interesting stories in lower primary levels. By the use of this podcast the enthusiasm of the readers voice would help to engage the student in the reading experience. It also allows for each child in the classroom to have different podcasts read to them at the same time and this would cater for children's different interests in books.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/the-little-engine-that-could/id207671602?i=13740166&mt=2

This next podcast I found would suit my pedagogy in that it has a visual aspect whilst the students demonstrates his findings in mathematics fractions. These podcasts could be used as a great way for my learners to find relevance to the maths they are learning as most of the podcast are real life problem based questions. They also have children the same age as my learners answering the questions which makes the learning more student centred.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/math-4.1.2.1-representing/id513361084?i=136009208&mt=2

Creating my own podcasts and allowing my learners to create podcasts for each other is a great tool to allow student centred learning. It is a great resource that can be used in a huge array of learning areas and it allows our students to act as they teacher, which we know from past research helps with their own understanding of the information. Student created podcasts would definitely be used to help learning within my classroom!!

Here is a podcast I created with audioboo

listen to ‘My first boo hoo!!’ on Audioboo

Podcasts can either be student create; working independently or in a small, collaborative groups; or a finished project which students can engage with, reinforcing learning whether at school or at home.  I feel podcasting can be tailored to any learning area. Some of the learning areas that are most often associated with it are: ICT, citizenship, languages speaking and listening objectives ands communication. I would use podcasting in my classroom as a tool for reluctant writers or those with reading difficulties as it allows activities to be tailored to individual children's requirements.

There are a number of sites that have 'podsafe' music which can be used without infringing copyright. These are two examples put here are many more available www.podshow.com and www.soundrangers.com.  AS with other technology it is important to protect the identity of our students who use podcasts. I would inform my students to only reveal one piece of personal information about themselves in a podcast to help protect heir identity.  After much searching of the web I finally found a great website that showed me 50 great ways of using podcasts in the classroom check it out here.