Week 4- Dust Echoes & M&Ms

I never knew traditional Aboriginal stories were so diverse, interesting, beautiful, complicated and, somtimes, gruesome! Nevertheless, it was really fascinating doing this activity that involved summarising a traditional Abrigonal story into it's most important elements. We used the Dust Echoes website from the ABC main page and it in itself was very beautiful and engaging visually, I believe students would be really intrigued and stimulated by this website.

Here is my summary of the Aboriginal story called 'The Mimis', done using Inspiration.

Trying to reduce a whole story into 6 or 7 main points is quite difficult but using Inspiration was great to show the story visually. It was also effective for doing something 'literate' without doing writing explicitly.

Understanding a story does not always relate to being able to write about it, being able to know the order of the story and what the most important sections are suggest great skills at being literate to me! One of the major criticisms of ICT is that it does not foster literacy skills as there is little actual reading/analysing or writing/synthesising when students are on a computer but using the above activity as evidence you can see that using technology can indeed build strong literacy skills.

Graphing M&Ms is a good idea! It might be hard if there are kids with allergies but my experience, as a teacher and a chocolate lover, tells me that using something with sugar will engage kids everytime. Asking lots of questions before they even open the packets kids thinking....does colour of the bag reflect how many of that colour are in there? How many in your bag? How many of that colour in the whole class? You can use Excel but kids can do this so easily on butcher's paper and coloured squares of paper or coloured markers. Excel allows for a lot of fiddling with the colours, layout, patterns etc.

Using Excel might be a bit confusing for primary school kids, I found it difficult to work out how to make my bar graph look the way I wanted it, I couldn't work out how to change each each section of each bar to coincide with the colour of each M&M. Overall, Excel is great, especially for graphing information and building knowledge in maths or science as students can insert information they have investigated then produce a visual respresentation of that information to show the class. Being able to see something in the form of a graph can also help students who struggle to understand information simply in written form, these may be more kineasthetic or visual learners.

The jumpiest frog in the land- Week 3

This week we had to create a frog that jumps using a design brief.

Design briefs are a great idea for getting students to be creative, abstract and collaborative. An emphasis on having no right answer allows all students to participate and think critically which I like and allows everyone to participate and be 'right'. There can be such an over-emphasis on being 'right' and not being wrong but in a situation where everyone students idea is heard and neither right nor wrong a classroom environment results that is collaborative and supportive. Doing activities that involve design briefs for varying problems allows every student to be creative and involved.

Throughout this activity I found that in a design brief a teacher should: include drawing or writing, be specific and build their confidence, emphasise structure,use of analytical and descriptive language, thinking outside the box and using everything they're given. Resourcefulness and working as part of team or pair has so many advantages for students that will help them during their school careers. Design briefs can also be done with paper and pencil, as a whole class on a whiteboard or smart whiteboard or individually/in groups on a computer.

While doing the design brief for the frog I found that it was hard to find the right language to describe what you're actually doing, for all age levels it would be a real test to describe what they're doing using visual language. The analytical section was useful as well to reflect on how well you did, why it did or didn't work, how you could have done it better etc.

Fine motor skills were used extensively when we were creating our frog, this would help to empowers students to create, reflect, evaluate, communicate as they develop and master these fine motor skills. It seems very important to emphasise safety in all aspects, especially if students are working independently so they can be responsible for themselves and others.

It was interesting how many different ways you can achieve the same result, various interpretations of the same thing were seen as pairs around the room displayed how they made their frog jump. It's a significant 'a-ha' moment for any person, child or adult, when they are reminded, or discover, that their way of thinking isn't necessarily the only way of thinking.

Extending this activity could be to impose more specifics on the design brief, certain amount of tape or whether the frog should jump forward, backwards, upwards, doing a good copy of the brief, or coming up with an alternate method.

Making a box guitar seems like a great idea for students, I'd like to do it myself! It would work in the context of a design brief as well, perhaps the topic could be to create a musical instrument only out of the given materials, eg- tissue box, string, tape, a pencil etc.

Doing the quizzes on Quia was a lot of fun, sometimes hard to think of topics or questions but a lot of fun, to create and play! Students would absolutely love this and it would work well to allow students to be creating these quizzes or games while simultaneously testing their knowledge of a given subject.

ePortfolios and Interviews Week 2

So, it seems that interviews are pretty darn important if you want a job.
Who'd have thought it?? Most of it seems to be pretty commonsense; be on time, look professional, be prepared, be direct, be honest, leave on a positive note and be polite.

To be honest, I haven't done that many interviews in my life but it seems only natural to give the best possible first impression you can! It seems like a lot of pressure and fairly nerve-wracking which makes me a bit afraid for applying for jobs when it happens.

Using Microsoft Publisher to create a brochure was great, although it seemed like it may a bit difficult to use as even I struggled! I actually found fiddling around with the layout, colours and pictures to be the most satisfying. I liked trying to make my brochure look great and appealing! I think Publisher may be a little bit difficult for some students to grasp but that may be because I found it difficult due to never having used it before! Being able to select layouts and colour schemes would really appeal to kids, it means they can be creative without

having to be a whiz with formatting.

ePortfolios seem like a great place to show a teaching philosophy, achievements, reflections, resume, classroom set-up, photos of students' school work, community interests. As they are electronic, they are also very easy to update when you need to. Having a portfolio on a computer allows you to make it aesthetically appealing as well which is important when creating the all-mighty first impression with a potential employer.

During research for the assessment ePortfolio for this subject, my attention was brought to an important aspect of digital portfolios raised by Helen Woodward and Phil Nanlohy in 'Digital Portfolios: Fact or Fiction' in which they attempt to ascertain the usefullness of digital portfolios. An interesting point was that with digital portfolios can often become more of a tool for schooling in technology than a learning opportunity to display school work (http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/woo02363.htm). Having seen some digital portfolios created by primary school students, they do seem like great ways to show their work and also to experiment with technology but to maintain the emphasis on either one would require the proper set-up and motivation in the classroom.

I believe that portfolios do offer both at once, a learning opportunity to develop and display work and a means to expand their knowledge of technology. In a classroom that was already heavily ICT based, there would be no such issue as the one described as Woodward and Nanlohy where "learning to use the technology itself could then subsume the learning opportunities of portfolio construction" because students would already be fluent in the language of digital portfolios. Many of my future students will probably know more than me in any ICT lesson but in these cases they can teach me, my role as a teacher then is to maintain focus on developing a portfolio in terms of their learning and school work.

First Blog, Week 1

Time to immerse myself in the world of blog!

I am curious to learn as much as I can about this tool (blogging) that I've heard much about but never used before! I feel like I don't really know what I'm doing but I suppose the benefit of being generation Y means I will catch on fast =)

I can see how this tool, along with Wiki and Inspiration (which we have both experimented with so far), could easily be transferred into a classroom. Getting kids to use mind maps and wikis to collaborate and express ideas would provide invaluable opportunities to engage kids in their learning. The uses of colour and pictures would translate well as kids can print their mind maps and have them displayed around the room. Without Inspiration, students could simply draw their mind maps on paper or on Word.

What I imagine for my classroom, when I have one, is for it be abundant in colour and visual stimuli, I love the idea of kids expressing themselves with colour and image which is all at their finger tips when using technology. The White Paper article by Inspiration Software Inc 'How digital tools prepare students for the 21st Century' struck me as extremely relevant in a time where it is essential to have computers and smart whiteboards in primary classrooms. They assert that many students are struggling (their study is based on American students but the information can be generalised) to take in the plethora of information which is presented to them on a daily basis, especially in the classroom. They go on to state that "the combination of visual learning and digital tools improves analytical skills, and information and data management" (http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/documents/How_Digital_Tools_Prepare_Students_for_the_21st_Century.pdf, p 2.).

I find myself seeing some unexpected advantages to using Inspiration after reading this, by removing some of the obstacles to higher order thinking, such as plotting a graph which is a lower order operation, you open the way for the students to really become involved in what they are learning without having to worry about ruling up a graph and all that it entails.

There are obvious limitations to such a reliance on technology in the classroom, not all schools can afford computers, laptops, digital cameras, software or smart whiteboards BUT as the prep students of this year get older they will expect and even require the use of technology in their classroom so it essential that as a teacher I know as much as possible about this resource at my fingertips.

Learning how to use Inspiration and transferring pictures onto here (as you can see above) has been good, feel like I'm back at school again in IT class. If I can have fun with this, I'm sure kids will! Before using software such as Inspiration, it would be essential to develop an atmosphere of safety, responsibility and creativity when using computers with kids, they need to know the boundaries, be aware of cyber safety and monitor their own technology use as well as others'.

I am excited at how easy it is to use Inspiration. There is a lot of clicking and dragging to create really visually dynamic representations of ideas and information which wouldn't be hard for primary school children to handle. And, as you can see below, the overall result can look really appealing and can be very satisfying for the student.

My mind map about food, perhaps my favourite subject!