Final Course Reflection

Activity 1: Web 2 and the eLearning with the iLE@RN Model

This is the element I have been waiting for. Through out the Web 2.0 course I have continually questioned “where are the teachers?” wanting to know where does the face time with students sit if all learning is ‘engaging, evolving and embracing’ through online platforms.

It puts the role of the teacher at the forefront of the learning. The teacher’s essential role is to explicitly teach the ilea@rn skills:

•               communication and collaboration skills,

•               questioning skills,

•               reflective skills,

•               creative thinking skills,

•               critical thinking skills,

•               multimodal literacy skills.

Modeling examples and non example of these skills in authentic situations and allowing students to experiment with the different techniques.

It is about creating a fully functioning collaborative environment for all. The iLe@rn reference “drawing together existing knowledge to create a new understanding” is the essence of collaboration. This has been my schools focus in recent years as they undertook the CLRP project and led the Change 2 process via CEO Melbourne.

It’s not about the technology: its about the teaching and learning first. The technology is merely a tool.

Activity 2: Web 2.0 and Bloom's Revised Digital Taxonomy

Do you find this adaptation of Blooms to digital technology helpful in planning your curriculum?


This is certainly helpful in planning the curriculum for students. But even more so as an audit tool for assessment. I’m fortunate to be in a school that is moving comfortably along with the changes in technology, reporting and assessment practices and other preparations for the move to ICON. So many of the elements for ITC have already been addressed.

But in terms of making a correlation between Bloom’s and the digital behaviors that take place, I think that this tool is an invaluable audit tool.

Where would you place other tools such as Second Life, Picasa or Glogster on this map?

Picasa is a platform that lies across many of the Blooms levels. From searching for pictures (remembering) and uploading(applying) to animating/ remixing/publishing (creating).

Likewise, Glogster and Second life keep these same features as well. What this tells us is that these applications/ platforms a rich, dynamic and authentic learning tools for our students. They allow for students to achieve success because they cater for a wide range of abilities.

Module 10: Learning Communities, Constructing Knowledge Together in Wikis

Wikis

I love the idea of Wikis. It fully supports collaborative learning in online spaces. The benefit of all members being able to access the document/ conversation without millions of emails going back and forth is so high. It also eliminates the possibility that some members of the conversations could miss out on vital information because they weren’t cc’d in on an email or if two of the members continued the conversation between themselves.

Next term my 56 students are undertaking an economics unit where they have to plan, budget and execute a class excursion. This platform will be essential in supporting them to complete their investigation.

The 50 ways site was excellent. It gave clear specific feedback about the usability of different platforms. As an educator this is an essential service for me. Time poor but idea rich means that I need to know that a product is going to suit my needs before spending hours exploring it to only find out that it doesn’t.

I have linked this page to my staff blog at school so that other teachers can utilize these platforms too.

NING – I found this to be a great example of how online platforms can be all pooled together to create a community of learners, Historically research has always told us that students learn well with their peers so this allows for a vast array of peers to collaborate together and share their ideas.

This has absolute potential within the classroom. However, my continual concern remains, as we know the greatest impact on students achievement is directly related to their engagement with their teacher, to be- what happens when a teacher allows ning/wikis/platforms to take the predominant role within the classroom space?

Where are the reflections on how these platforms are used in balanced with engaging, interactive, personalized teaching?

Google sites.

The more years I spend teaching I continually marvel at the changes to our approach to teaching. It’s not that long ago that we were teaching content driven units and testing our students on the numbers of facts they could regurgitate. But I find that as well plummet head first into an interactive unplanned future with our students we are compelled to teach them conceptual skills of research, adaptability and problem solving to help them survive in this ever changing world.

I can see myself planning a unit of inquiry for my students based around creating their own websites. The rich learning and discussions that could be born out of this experience boggles me. Even if students used the content of the ‘passion projects’ (personal topic choice) to drive the purpose of their website creation, the journey of creating them will become a life long skills that would support them in to high schools.

Module 9: Networks on the web – professional and social

In this module the course looked at professional and personal networks online- looking at Scootle, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Scootle 

 Scootle is a platform that allows for access and easy sharing of resources to support learning in the classroom as well as professional learning. Although CEOM makes you jump through a few hoops to gain access, it is incredibly easy to navigate your way through the site and look at the plethora of resources. For me the greatest challenge was narrowing down and selecting the best resources to support my program. I liked the feature that enables me to nominate my teaching level and isolate resources specific to my students.
 I’m intrigued by the Learning Paths, made me reminiscent of the teaching programs you can create using Mathletics. You can create online interactive lessons for your students, catering for their specific needs. It’s a great resource to personalize learning for students and engaging them with the new format. Second Life The Second Life Interactive platform is excellent for students who are engaged by design, the arts and creativity. The interactive nature of the learning experiences can only engage students. There is flexibility to visit space or underwater allows students to have virtual experiences of situations they couldn’t experience in their own lives. The opportunities to source other designers who can create these experiences supports those teachers who are not ‘designers’ themselves.
 There is the potential to take the words from our lectures and textbooks to create a virtual experience to collaborate and share their expertise with others. The key is not to replicate what we can do in real life but to use our imagination to go beyond what is possible to that which is necessary for our students. The design skills required for student are exceptional and would take ICT in the classroom to a whole other level.

I can imagine that some teachers, themselves may become very engaged with this type of learning. My concern here would be does limiting the face time with teachers help or hinder student out comes. We are all well aware that recent studies indicate that the greatest impact on a students learning and their potential to advance beyond the expected standard for their level is their dynamic relationship with their teachers. Does this tool support those findings?

 Facebook 

 I have my own personal Facebook page. I believe that it is not necessary for the entire world to be privy to my opinions, activities and interests, and as such I have heavy privacy setting and my account name (handle) is not easily recognizable by my school community. I refuse to ‘friend’ parents and students both past or present because I believe it compromises the professional relationship that our profession compels us to maintain.

That being said I can absolutely see how face book could be utilized within the classroom. It is very similar to a blog with its ability to create posts and allow others to respond to your ideas and opinions. Inserting images means that in a closed groups (invited members only) student’s work can be shared with families allowing parents to give feedback about what is happening in the classroom. As always it is essential to educate both students and parents alike as to the conduct appropriate to these platforms and set very explicit user agreements for the benefit of all.


Twitter

I feel that I may be of the minority but I think you are either a lover of Twitter or you’re not. I can see the positives for the platform for the classroom and certainly if I was in a school that was using it as a means of communication then I would jump on board.

For personal purposes I think that there is a great risk for it to become self indulgent. In the classroom I question whether it would dimishing a students capacity to self motivated and organized if they continually receive reminders from teachers about what is homework or what they have to do that week. Where are the skills for them to record their homework or use researching skills to access information. Are we only contributing to a society of immediacy?

LinkedIn

Additional information and research about LinkedIn indicates that this platform is not nearly being utilized to its fullest potential. Many participants are stagnant with their usage, merely creating their first profile and not updating or being active in its application. Perhaps because it is a professional site the engagement levels are limited in comparison to a ‘social site’? The possibilities are there – I’m not sure how I could utilize this platform in a primary classroom, perhaps there’s more opportunity at a secondary or tertiary level to apply its features.

Module 8: Managing your flow of information on the Internet

The focus of this module was to explore the applications for RSS feeds. It obvious that this platform is time efficient. It cuts down the need to revisit older, but still popular and relevant websites, by sending the information to you rather than searching it out yourself. The module focused solely on the Google Reader application and while the clips and written information were comprehensive and easy to follow. I found it redundant as the Google Reader platform will not be functional as of 1 July 2013. The new learning in this module did however inspire me to explore the finer details of my class blog and look for options to include RSS feeds. There are many information based sites aimed at primary school students that can be linked via and RSS. I found the following link to share an interesting array of student friendly resources and ideas for the classroom. I will investigate other RSS readers that are available and see how they will best support my classroom teaching.

Module #7 Building Online Communities

Having once attempted to join del.icio.us years ago and not using it effectively in my classroom I decided to explore Diigo. “Diigo enables effective collaborative research. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues. A project team, a class, or a club can create a group on Diigo to pool relevant resources, findings and thoughts together.” https://www.diigo.com/about “A SIN is a social network where information consumption, research, and sharing is central, and where the connection between people and people, between people and information, and between information and information, are exploited and harnessed to improve knowledge sharing and content discovery, and to enable more meaningful social connections and intellectual exchanges.” – this quote especially makes me reflect on the work my staff have been doing over the last 18 months as part of the CLRP project. It seems to fit with the true essence of collaboration; that the sharing of ideas and development of these ideas into new understanding, can only be supported and enhanced through the use of an online platform such as Diigo. I love the idea of social bookmarking and having the flexibility of accessing my favourite URLs wherever I am. My great fear, as with many new platforms and innovative curriculum tools is that I won’t use it nearly as much as I would hope too. How can we use all things? How do we avoid using many of these brilliant platforms with our students just once and the never returning to them? I can see with Diigo that once embedded into my blog it can be a constant resource for myself and my students. Its other, self indulgent trap, is that one group can lead onto another and then another group and soon your find yourself four hours later still adding URLs to your Diigo site and the ironing never got finished!

Module 6 - Picasa & Copyright

The Picasa platform is very flexible. I appreciate the online 'cloud' where all of your images can be saved and shared without having to download them to your computer. thus taking up valuable hard drive space. Being a google app, it fits very well with the concept of google docs and everything is accessible on the net. I feel a little like a broken record when I say that the implications of this platform are heavily effected if not all students have google accounts. In my position it would have to be the decision of the school to take this platform on board. The feature that caught my eye most was a rather simple one. The filing of photos in albums seems to lend itself well to the essence of ICON the upcoming reporting program for Catholic schools. uploading the pictures into the cloud, creating access for varied parties is a tool all educators will need to embrace. I think the most valuable learning I took away from this module was the information shared about copyright of images and You Tube footage. my students and I have a continuous discussion going on, in regards to what images they can or can't access for their work. their general understanding is that anything on the internet is fair game. after reading the links on copyright Ive actually been able to identify some child friendly statements that we can discuss. One part that stood out particularly for educators was the following clause: Section 28 allows teachers and students to play YouTube videos in class where it is: in the course of education and not for profit; and the people in the audience or class are giving or receiving instruction, or are directly connected with the place where instruction is given.

Module 5 Prezi

This module took me a long time to complete due to the amount of clips I needed to watch to have a good understanding of the new platforms. I really like the Prezi Platform and can see so many benefits for my students. I experimented with the program and just did the start of a Prezi, so that I could have a look at some of the features.