EDUC1049

Emily Smith. 18. University of Queensland.

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Digital Storytelling

As a student, I rarely used tools such as Photostory to create a digital storybook. In fact, we were never asked to create a movie using images, audio files and music to convey a story; it just wasn’t part of our learning.

This section of the course interested me because I have never been involved with it before and I was interested to see if my learning could have been enhanced if it was included in the classroom.

Digital Storytelling is not only a great way for teachers to introduce new topics in a simplified introductory way, but also provides a technology-based option for writing and literacy development among students.

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In our tutorials we looked at Rubistar, and online tool to help teachers create quality rubrics.

It saves the teacher time with already created rubrics, or there are base rubrics that teachers can build on and edit to suit their particular marking criteria. 

The great thing about rubrics is that it can be given to the student so that they can see what quality of work their teacher is after and will build their assessment based around the criteria. Personally, I loved rubrics simply because it was literally my answer sheet; as long as I addressed the items on the rubric, I was going to pass.

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When looking online, I came across a website called Scoop.it, which was designed to create a Web presence to aide in the successfulness of businesses through the sharing of ideas made by professionals – i.e. marketers, consultants and the entrepreneurs.

One of the articles I found under the Creative Assessment brings forth the idea of online badges that contribute to recognising skills obtained outside of school or online. The Mozilla Open Badges project acknowledges these skills and is working at helping learners to display what they know in a way that can be valuable for career/educational opportunities.

I have a lot of friends who have taken the time and effort to learn something online (html coding and other technological skills) and now have a vast knowledge in a wide range of things that they will never fully be recognized for knowing. If this Badge Projects is a revolutionary idea that will help those online/out of school knowledge seekers be accredited for their skills, then I am 100% behind it.

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Classroom Mobile Learning

Mobile learning in the classroom was something I was interested in. I had left High School just as they were introducing iPads as their main form of learning.

Each student was to purchase an iPad from the school, and were handed a list of apps to download for their classes. I was immediately keen with the idea, mainly because students were using these devices anyway, so why not use them educationally as well? 

Whole text books became available to them on their iPads and all their written assessment was done on Pages, a free app that works as the Apple equivalent to the Microsoft Word processor.

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The great thing about this is that the students can then submit their work straight from their iPads to the Teacher via a sharing app, the most popular one being Dropbox.

Not only does this make sharing easier, but the iPads are excellent for maintaining student concentration and attention. With all the different types of learning resources and games available to teachers and students, there is constant engagement.

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Not only are apps great, but so is another online program call TopHat Monocle.

It is fantastic! I recommend TopHat for any teacher looking to engage their students.

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I became acquainted with this gem throughout the course, as Chris would often put up questions as a flipped classroom activity. It was engaging and I found that I would understand the lecture a lot more having watched the video and participated in the TopHat questions. 

Through the use of an electronic device, whether it be a laptop, smart phone or tablet, students can submit their answer by selecting their option,or by texting the number provided. Statistics are then sent to the teacher who can share with the class the results. It is fantastic to see whether or not you were right and where you compared to the rest of the class. Overall, I was very glad to have been introduced to this website.

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Although I realize this game is not an app made for iPhones or the Android phone, but it a perfect example of how games can be used for educational purposes. The Cassowary Fractions game is aimed at years 4-6 and provides a fun way for students to learn about fractions.

The game can be found here on Scootle, an excellent site that works at providing teachers with resources for their lessons. 

Students can work together or individually to follow the instructions of the zoo keeper to save the cassowaries. By choosing a shape, the students must apply their knowledge of fractions to divide the shape appropriately. The great thing about this game is that it's continuous and can be replayed as many times as the students wants or needs to.

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Social Constructivism

Basically, my understanding of social constructivism is that already formed ideas are built upon by connecting it to a newly introduced idea or notion. By embedding new ideas into old ones, we are able to expand our knowledge for deeper understanding.

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In an educational setting, students can work in collaborative groups while the teacher works as a facilitator rather than someone who stands at the front and drones on. It is very much student centred, allowing the students to take control of their own learning. With the vast difference in personal cultural knowledge between each learner, combining individual experiences with the research they gather collaboratively makes for an expansion of ideas that would've been impossible from traditional style learning.

Social constructivism makes for a more productive, interactive and stimulating lesson for students and their teachers.

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John Abbott

John Abbott discusses the theory of constructivism in learning.

This video is great for a basic understanding for what social constructivism is.

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I found a cool wiki the other day when looking up some of the terms in the readings. It’s called the Edutech wiki, found here. It’s a wiki containing everything you need to understand the basics of educational technology. It’s awesome and I’ve used it several times when writing this blog if I was having trouble understanding a concept or needed an abridged knowledge of another concept. For me, I was struggling with social constructivism, and this wiki helped me tremendously with grasping the basic concept before branching out for more in depth knowledge.

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At first I was confused as to the difference between wikis and blogs; they both sounded pretty similar to me. However, Kent explains that a “wiki has a much more open structure and allows other who have access to change what others have written”, while blogs are created posts for people to read and comment on (2013).

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The above concept map was created by me using Popplet, and it can be fully viewed here. 

Popplet is another great site introduced to us in the collaborative learning part of the course. 

Jonassen states that by using concept maps, students are able to brainstorm ideas, structure the flow of ideas and negotiate meaning from tasks set before them (2008).

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Wikis and Collaborative Working

All throughout my high schooling years I was told that Wikipedia was the devils site and honestly, we became so wary of the site that no one would even go near it when doing assignments. Imagine my surprise when Chris announced we would be working closely with Wikis as part of the course!

Obviously my teachers were only warning us against using Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, because, like everyone knows, wikis are subject to change and you might find that pigs really can fly.

I believe it is important to know to what extent you can use the information given to you on Wikipedia. As I have learnt in this course however, is that there are hundreds of other wikis out there that are more reliable, or better suited to a particular topic/subject.

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If we can push aside the fact that any John could change the information, good wikis have setting put in place to filter what is changed and by whom. With this in mind, wikis are great for collaborative work because content of the wiki can be changed and edited by anyone with permission to do so. The openness of wikis allow for a wider range of contribution to a particular topic.

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Flipped Classroom: Nick Shepherd at TEDxMCPSTeachers

This video introduces the Flipped Classroom and how it can work to benefit your students' learning in the classroom.

This course was the first time I was introduced to a Flipped Classroom setting, and personally, it was a huge success. I loved the videos we watched before each Monday lecture, and I found that the lecture itself was much easier to understand than if I had not watched the video.

I decided to have a go and create my own flipped classroom using TED-Ed. It uses a video I found on TED (a website dedicated to sharing inspiring ideas) that explains what a flipped classroom is. It is a talk given by Nick Shepherd at the TED MCPSTeachers event in November 2012.

On my flip class you can watch the video, think about what was seen and answer a few questions, and discuss ideas and opinions. 

I loved using flipped classrooms and wanted to share this one with you.

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ICT Current Trends: Interactive Whiteboards

When I first heard that we would be working with IWB in this course I was a little apprehensive. Having had numerous negative experiences with such technologies in high school, I was both curious to see how it can work and interested in how my own teachers could have applied ICT better.

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Jenny Gage emphasizes that it is important for the teacher to not just familiarize himself or herself with IWB, but to understand how it can enhance student learning (2006).

Although I believe that understanding is crucial, I also believe teachers must also be very familiar with software and technology in general. My negative experiences mainly stemmed from the fact that we spent more time waiting for the teacher to figure out how to work out a particular slide than actually learning content. It brought about a very unconstructive lesson with too many students distracted and uninterested. Too many of my own teachers used the Whiteboards like they would a normal projector without utilizing its full potential, therefore for the teachers to know how IWBs can enhance student learning is extremely important. 

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I found an example in the Kent note (2010) that visually explains how IWB can take an ordinary blackboard example and enhance it.

Math was never my strong point, and I struggled a lot through high school mainly because I never grasped a concrete understanding of the basics in primary school. Personally, this example Kent uses can show the difference between traditional methods of teaching versus the interactive content of IWB. Students can engage in class discussions to gain a deeper understanding – the content is open for interpretation, leading to promote higher order thinking as the class synthesizes ideas to create a solution.

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Another thing I learnt about the IWB that I have come to appreciate it its ability to cater for multiple learning types.

Visual: colours, pictures, graphics, mind maps and other visual tools

Kinesthetic: videos, interactive content

Auditory: audio/video files that promote class discussion

I am a visual and kinsthetic learner, but many of my classmates were kinesthetic, so when the teacher would just write on the board, they all lost interest and there wasn't a lot of learning taking place.