my-blog

Blog Seventeen- The final lecture.

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:49:21 +0100

This week was the final lecture and workshop of the unit. Although I feel relieved for classes to be over I also feel nervous about the mark I may have recieved for the assignment three. The lecture this week was about the exam and what we will need to revise. I currently feel quite confident when it comes to the exam but I know that after the study break I will feel sure of myself. Using the information I have learnt this semester will definately prepare me for the future and the many ways that I can be a great teacher using technology. I have found this topic interesting at some points but sometimes I had wished the lectures had gone further into things and therefore provided me with more knowledge. I know that is the next few days Meaningful learning with Technology text book will become my best friend and I'm sure that it contains lots of information that I have missed over the semester.

In the workshop we each had a go at marking our own yola website, in the end i provided myself with a credit. There was still so much that I needed to add to it to make it a professional e-portfolio. I discussed with my sister why I only gave myself and credit and I replied that I needed to make it exciting to read by adding pictures, screenshots and more links to my blog. I also needed to add the latest resources that I have used to the Links and Resources for Teachers page and also add a brief description of them so that the viewer can understand what the website is before clicking on it. She told me that she needed to fix the same things up but also check her spelling on the website as without a spellcheck she easily looks over things.
Jenni then asked the groups to stand up and present the video for their Wikispaces website. My heart sunk and I knew that Jess felt the same. We were the only group members that were there as Kirsty had not shown up and Bianca had left after a few short minutes. We knew for a fact that Bianca had bothered to look at the finished product or the video as she had told us. We hadnt even heard from Kirsty after she had done her bit.

The first group went up and straight away put our work to shame, they had done a really great job and it was obvious that they communicated really well in and out of the classroom. The other groups went up one at a time and showed us what a great job they did. During the presentations Jenni sat with me and Jess and asked us how we worked as a team. We told her the honest truth about the lack of work and communication provided by the other girls and she was able to assure us that she was sure that we did okay. She offered us the chance to not present our video because of lack on quantity and quality and instead me and Jess stood up and told the class the problems we had with the video and the computer in the process of making a wiki. Jess and I were very relieved.

As this is the final assignment it means that this will be my final blog, this has probaly been the most enjoyable part of the unit, a chance to share my frustration, confusion and relief towards assignments. I had never blogged before this and am quite surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I have. Blogging is a great chance to communicate, express feelings and reflect on the way you have learnt which is three things I have done over these last few months.

Blog Sixteen- Yola

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:48:09 +0100

As we are coming to the end of this semester I felt the need to re-blog about Yola once again and how far I have come with it since the first day. to me Yola has become a easier and effective way to talk about my emotions and have a bit of a vent about different things that have happened in the semester.

Truth be told I haven't touch my Home page or Photographs since the first assignment. I have felt no need to update it or add information as nothing about me has changed.Presenting Assignment one, two and three on here have made it so much easier for me to hand in my findings without having to print or reference items continously.

I only recently added the Links and Resources for Teachers as I felt it would be something I can look back on to see what websites I used and how useful they really were.

There are very few things that I did not enjoy about Yola, one was the lack of spellcheck. Not that I am dependant on it fixing my spelling but I have the problem with reading so fast I tend to overlook words that are incorrect. Having spellcheck there has always been a way of not having to read through my work slowly. The other thing was that on this blog sometimes the size of the words and the font change and therefore are different to one another. It takes a lot of patience to go through every blog to make sure the font is the same.

I have definately enjoyed using Yola and would use it again if called for, it has been a helpful and fun way to present assignments and I look forward to using it again.

Please note: clicking on the image will link to the website it was attained from.

Blog Fifteen- Group work

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:57:02 +0100

Working in a group is about collaborating together to form something better than what you could do by yourself. I personally have never really enjoyed working on projects in a group as there is always a person or two that are left to complete the assignment alone. Group work requires cooperation which according to Meaningful Learning with Technology requires conversation among peers. during conversation they can socially negotiate their understanding of the task and the method they can use to finish it.(Jonassen,D. Howland, J. Marra, R and Crismond, D, 2008)

Communication was definately something we lack in this group. After sending numerous text messages and emails to the other girls in the group for assignment three with no reply I begun to feel stressed as it is a group assignment and we all recieve the same mark for the work. I did not want anyones lack of commitment to reflect back on the work that was handed in. Jess and I had asked for the work to be loaded on to Wikispaces by sunday night so that we could make the video and double check that it met the criteria. By Tuesday the Task page and the Teacher Information page had still not been loaded.
On Tuesday night I recieved an email from one of the girls apologizing because she had not done it yet because of personal reasons and would do it that night. On wednesay I woke up to the Task and Teacher Information complete, needless to say Jess and I were very relieved.

We spent the next few hours tweeking things to make sure that every page had the correct information and looked attractive enough before it came time to make the video. We decided to use the program Jing as neither of us had used it before and felt it would be quite interesting to learn to use it. It took a lot of takes before we were finally happy with the results of the video as the microphone we used was a bit old and therefore a bit fuzzy. I tried to upload it to the homepage of Digesting Technology but it had cut half of the screen off and you could not see the whole screen. We recorded it again thinking it was something to do with the way we had positioned the screen but it wasn't and it did the same thing. After much playing around with it, I decided to stretch the screen to see if that solved our problem and it did.

I was so relieved when we had finished the assignment that I couldn't wait to hand it in. To say I was happy with the work that was done would be a lie, I wasn't. With all the breaks in between workshops, group members not showing up and lack of communication and response from other group members I feel it will reflect badly on the marks. Next time I think I will create study sessions in the library when we can all make it so that we are able to actually communicate in person and answer each others questions.

Please note: clicking on the image will link to the website the picture was attained from.

Blog Fourteen- Authentic Learning

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:04:30 +0100

Authentic learning is creating activities that are framed around 'real-life' contexts in which they would be used.

A few weeks ago in class we were asked to show the rest of the students what we had accomplished so far. While standing in front of everyone we were told that our authentic task idea was not authentic enough and had to have a outcome for the students. While feeling embarressed and slightly frustrated I felt the need to look into authentic learning a little bit more so make sure I understood it correctly. After I was able to talk to Bianca, Kirsty and Jessica about it and we all the discussed a way that we could make it authentic. I felt like I did not have much to add because it had been a few weeks since discussing authentic learning and therefore I was a bit fuzzy. Bianca and Jess then explained to me that authetic learning is a way of learning using real-life problems.

I went all the way back to week 4 to re-read the lecture of authentic learning, here the context of authetic learning was discribed as 'A physical or virtual environment that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real-life'.
Re-reading the week 4 lecture definately re-freshed my mind about what authetic learning is and how it is valued in a classroom. I also look at the the text book Meaningful Learning with Technology that describved authentic learning as 'a learning task that are situated in a meaningful real-life tasks'. It goes on to say that all learning should be embedded in real-life situatiosn that the students are able to learn from.

I now feel like I understand the word authentic a little bit more as it is creating a task that has real-life relevance that will educate the students. I feel that this knowledge will be very important in my further studies and when I am teaching.

Blog Thirteen- Wikispaces

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:19:57 +0100

I am currently finding Wikispaces hard to use. According to Meaningful Learning with Technology, Wikis create an online environment for students to join in a community while learning about a specific topic. Wikispaces is a website in which you are able to create pages of necessary information for a learning purpose and this is how we are presenting assignment three. Wikispaces allows you to also communicate with your group members and also allows to edit anything you desire, which is helpful in group situations as sometimes people can see an error that has been made that you can't.

Both my computers dont seem to like Wikispaces as they both load the page very slow and therefore it is taking twice as long to write things as it usually would. Although it is a great idea and looks great, I am finding it very irritating to have to wait for words to appear on the screen. I discussed this problem with others in the class who all seem to be have the same difficulties, also on the discussion forum for this unit it appears that others are having the same problems but have solves it by downloading a new browser, something I would prefer not to do.

On out Wikispace we have a Home page that contains information about the assignment such as what age, topic and how it fits into the curriculum criteria of that age group. The Task page contains information that will describe the topic and instructions of how to complete the task. We will write ours in teacher mode as our website to directed at teachers. The Resources page which is what I have been working on will contain links to documents, websites, videos etc for teachers to use in the classroom. After finding a large number of resources with the help of Jessica McDonald I asked Bianca if she could help out by finding documents about the digestive system. She was happy to oblige and soon enough we had all our resources. The final page is a page containing information for the teacher to use, it will contain a brief overview of the lessons and provide information necessary to teach this subject.

Blog Twelve- Goodbye Teacher.

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:52:34 +0100

Todays lecture was based on the idea that in the future there will be no need for teachers as computers and technology can do the job just as well, if not better. Mobiles are now being used in classroom to make digitals stories such as slowmations. I like th idea of using mobile phones in the classroom. Thye can be very educational especially when using the media that it has such as music, camera or video player. Even with the use of the internet nowadays it will allows students to research the information that they need rather than waiting until they have a computer to finish the work. According to David Jonassen in Meaningful Learning with Technology(2008), mobile phones can impact student motivation to participate in the work provided by the teacher.

The three key goals and obligations of teachers is to cause greater achievements, cause greater interest and cause greater confidence.

In the workshop we were given the oppurtunity to work on assignment three for the whole lesson. 5 minutes into class we recieved a text message from one of the group members telling us that she would not be in today for car reasons. So we got to work with the three of us and were able to start to put the assignment together.

At home Jess and I went through the K-10 syllabus and highlighted the areas in which the authentic task falls under.

Blog Eleven-Assignment three

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:53:11 +0100

Today we were back on campus after the small break. We had guest speaker Rob Phillips again to discuss the many different ways that technology can be used in the classroom to enhance learning. He began by discussing how computers are used in learning by teachers and by students as computer can be used as a tool to support knowledge construction, explore information and reflect back on previous work( like this blog). I remember my family buying it's first computer when I was 5 now I am so dependant on it when doing homework and researching that using books from the library or from other sources would seem harder. I feel that technology is essential to learning nowadays as there are so many programs that can be used to gain further knowledge.
The second part of the lecture was on the use of multimedia in the classroom. Visual multimedia is something that you can watch, aural is audio learning such as music and kinesthetic is a form of tactile learning therefore it is more hands on. Rob than showed the class examples from the Learning Federation that support these types of multimedia. One was on the digestive system in which I had found to use in assignment 3, one was a science interaction game and the last one was a interactive sight in which you can zoom from the smallest atoms to the largest of planets.
Throughtout the lecture the thing that stood out the most was the question 'Where is multimedia useful?' I had never considered that multimedia is used because the real life experiment is too dangerous, too expensive or not possible for the student to do. I found this lecture one of the most interesting to date in this subject as I am very fond of using technology in the classroom. I believe that technology and multimedia make learning more exciting and therefore more enticing for the students to learn. I feel I have always learnt from watching something rather than reading something especially in science or maths as you are able to see how it is done and what the steps are rather than reading the steps.

In the workshop I finally got to meet my other partner for assignment three, Bianca. I was shocked that when I walked in I recieved another member named Kirsty. During the days previous to this class I had begun to research resources and Jess and I had decided on the digestive system. I think that knowing what the human body does and how important health is from an early age is essential to growing up healthy. After meeting the girls we discussed what we are doing what the authentic task would be and we assigned everyone with a page to work on. We had been talking for 30 minutes about the assignment while waiting for our lecturer to help me out with my wikispace problem when she asked each group to stand up and show what we had achieved so far. Truth be told it was horrible. I have never had a problem with public speaking but I was slightly embarressed that we had nothing to show as our group had just formed while the other groups had great ideas that we coming along really well. We had not yet spoken to to the tuturor (we were the last group and the class was almost over) about whether we were on the right track and therefore our idea for an authetic task was shut down in front of everybody as it was not 'authetic enough'. I hate being put on the spot like that and truthfully it made me embarressed. I do feel like we needed that time with the tuturor to ask those important questions. After class I finally recieve the proper instructions about how to sign onto wikispaces. It was a great sense of relief that I could finally begin on the resource page.

I added the resources that jess and I had found to the page and wrote a brief explanation on the resources. I was able to find an extra website and video to add as well. A few days later I looked at the website to see that Bianca had added a few documents to the page.

I am normally quite happy to work in groups but as we only have one class a week and each group member has a busy schedule it's going to be a little bit harder to communicate. My group will need to use the time in the class effectively to make sure we are all on the same track and we all pull our weight to make this assignment as good as possible.

Blog Ten

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 07:33:45 +0100

So I am just about to hand in my assignment two and although I tried my hardest I am worried about the outcome as my other assignment that I worked hard on only recieved a credit.
I feel so much more confident in using EndNote now and have been able to use it for my other assignments much more easier than before. I feel like I struggled to write a great report as there was so much information in every resource and not very much room to write it. Only using a maximum of 2 pages was a challenge and shortening the information provided in all the resources made it tough. But right now I feel very proud of myself that I managed to be very organized and have this assignment done a few days before the due date so that I didn't need to rush and I could do my best work.

I found that the text book 'Meaningful Learning with technology' has not been helpful for this assignment or for the past few weeks without a lecture and workshop. Iam looking forward to going back into a classroom and being able to ask questions face to face so that I am positive that what I do it correct.

Blog Nine.

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 07:34:53 +0100

This week’s online tutorial is about the Wikispace website and how to use it. I have never used or heard about this website before so I am quite worried about learning how to use it without the help from Jenni. I have realised that I have yet to receive an invitation from the website to join and have spent the last couple of days emailing around to get some help. I ended up looking to the discussion board and finding a discussion post that had the email to contact which was a big relief.

As my sister is one of my partners for this it is very handy when discussing what to do it on. Unfortunately Bianca (out other partner) has not emailed us back or tried to get in contact with either of us. While browsing on the Learning Federation came across a great interactive whiteboard resource that would be such as great thing to use when teaching about the digestive system to children in years 3-5. This topic themes like an interesting one to do it on as learning about the digestive system is so important so it will be great to see how entertaining teacher's can make it for the children. While I looked for a teaching network site my sister looked for a video or movie to use. I reminded her of our favourite television show when we were little was The Magic school Bus and how they travelled inside the human body to learn about the digestive system. On YouTube we were able to find the whole episode and watch it, it is such a great and entertaining way for children to learn so we are definitely going to run it by Bianca to use as a movie resource.

Not long after I managed to come across the Teachade networking website and what a great site it is. I typed in the digestive system and it came up with over 26 pages of lesson plans, quizzes, activities and videos for students. It is definitely a website I will be using when looking for resources. The teachers are able to publish their idea and receive feedback from teachers all over the world.

This assignment seems like a lot of fun but I am still waiting for an email about Wikispace and I think I will have a lot of questions to ask about how to use it when I can sign on.

Blog Eight

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:44:31 +0100

This is the first online week. The online lecture was about referencing and the importance of it.
Referencing is a way of using someone else's research and ideas to write your own work. It is a way of protecting yourself from copyright. Referencing is essential to this assignment as I need to find 5 resources that provide information about using technology for a drama class and then reference the sources and the information they provided.
There are 4 steps in referencing, these are:

Record- the important information that is required to reference the source correctly.
Organise- Use a program such as Endnote to reference them correctly.
Cite- In text reference anything that you may have re-stated from the source.
List- Create a reference list that is in alphabetical order.

There are so many website that can be used to find resources. I have used the Murdoch University FindIt database before and find it very effective especially being about the limit the resource type to a specific one. GoogleScholar was a database that I had heard of but never used before. I found it very easy to use and was happy that I did not need to type in too much information to find a great resource. Although YouTube is a very common video library, I couldn’t find anything on it and therefore tried other sites such as Google videos, Bing and Teachertube.

After much research I finally found a video that was exactly what I was looking for. It was on the YouTube and lucky for me had only been posted for a few days. I felt so very lucky to come across this video as it was so simple but so educational. A teacher giving the viewer details about how she uses technology in her drama class is very effective as it is coming from a teacher who uses those strategies everyday.
I came across a newspaper article using Murdoch University Findit that is from a New York newspaper about using two different online programs to incorporate drama and technology together to encourage students to learn. I was interested in this article as those two programs are something a student can use at home and school to receive feedback on their work from a diverse range of students. I wish I had something like that to use when I was in school as I feel criticism and feedback always allow you to learn more.