powerpoints and referencing

Just like Jill I need to plan a lesson regarding how to reference. However, I won't be using an online tool to do this because my class will not be referencing any of the normal 'things' so its just easier to do it by hand. Also, they've never done it before.

So my first day on prac was great, but holy moly the teachers (and the students) LOVE powerpoint. Fortunately they've given me lots of resources to be able to plan (using powerpoint) but I would argue that for one of my classes we could use so much more. However, my yr 10's seem to learn best by 'read-write' through powerpoint. The are so 'spongey' they just soak up all the information and are able to do so much with it, to the point where we had a good 15 minutes of not doing much in the class because they had all finished. - sigh, they're amazing, talented, extension kids.

anyway, I think its time for bed. I'm teaching 2 lessons tomorrow :) wish me luck!

laptop trolleys on prac

On my last prac, every student had a laptop, we were using ICTs for teaching and learning every single lesson (except for maths in some cases). At my school on Monday, for every class we need to book laptop trolleys to use ICTs, (which to me actually feels like I'm stepping backwards in terms of what I can show I can use with ICTs). Not to mention that I feel like I'm going to be hogging the laptop trolleys if I want to use them every lesson because they only have a limited amount available. Anyway, because I haven't really had much experience with laptop trolleys except once or twice at my first prac school and before then not since I was in grade 9, I thought I should read up on some tips. This blog provides some tips.

Obviously when I'm planning my lesson using laptop trolleys I will need to consider how I will manage the students to make sure each of them gets a laptop etc.

I need to ensure I am monitoring their use of laptops. I also need to make sure I have a back up plan. I need to make sure my mentor books them for me they day before.

At my old prac school where students had laptops with them all the time, they all got into the habbit of coming to class and immediately going on to them and not focussing on the lesson first, so I probably wont have the issue of having to tell the students to shut their laptops before we even start the lesson.

But mainly, I need to make sure I'm organised, give direct instructions, make sure students know what to do when they have their laptops to ensure they don't start to use them innapropriately.

lets use all the apps!

I want to give a holla out to Laurenn's blog here  where she talks about using the AITSL app.

Just wanted to let you guys know as well, ACARA has an australian curriculum app. BCE has a religious education and religious life of the school curriculum app. They are all really handy tools. Khan academy has apps for certain things.

Other apps that may come in handy

- tuner apps for music teachers
- calculus formula apps for maths teachers
- mindly mind map app for all teachers. (kind of like padlet and poplet).

Theres heaps, so many. But I've found that there appears to be more apps for primary teachers than secondary, but you know, we can't have everything.

But definitely, we should all have the AITSL and ACARA app. - just saying, they are amazing.

PD for all you kiddies

Everyone in education should be at QUEDREX on the 25-26th of July

Check this link for more info. 

Positives about it:

It's free (now when I say free, the workshops are free, the registration is free, and a lot of the resources are free, BUT the food is expensive and I suggest you bring some pocket money in case you want to buy some books and stuff).

The workshops are great. Last year one of our own lecturers at USQ spoke there. There was an ICT workshop (I can't remember exactly what it was on, only that they had tech issues setting up). 

Its run by educators, for educators, and the people who showcase there provide their products to educators.

The only negative about it, is that its very 'primary/early childhood' focused. 

Its easy to get to by train, they give you a lovely bag to stash stuff in. 

So I shall see you all there :)

PRAC! - What else would I be talking about?

Some of you I know haven't got placements. Some of you I know hate the fact you can't work. Some of you I know are bummed about being in a religious school when you aren't religious (I on the other hand, have the opposite issue, having one of my teaching areas as religion, and NOT being in a religious school... but whatever, I got a school, any experience is good experience, I can't complain). So yes, I've flicked through all the other posts about prac including This one and I thought you would all like some cheering up with some RESOURCES!!!

 

After talking to my two amazing mentors (yes I've already formed an opinion), they mentioned that the students at the school I'm going to really enjoy interactive powerpoints, and they've already given me heaps of resources to have a look at. But one of my teaching colleagues showed me Neapod! I suggest you check it out. Its 'basically' a powerpoint generator.. but its so much more. You can add quizes, polls, vidoes, images, draw on it, sound, get the students to log in and collaborate on it. AND its free (weooo yeh free stuff!). 

Hope you enjoy!

religious education and ICT

ICTs are difficult to come by in the world of RE. I reckon its because most of the resources are books.

But I've found this. Its a handbook for RE and ICT. They basically say that use it when its going to benefit the learning and meet the objectives. use it for speed. use it for information. use it to communicate. use it for assessment and presentation of work.

Which is what I've pretty much done in the past :). So thats a good sign that I'm on the right track with using ICTs in my RE classroom.

Instagram and self esteem

Well, today was interesting.

I went onto Instagram and decided to check out what your average teenager is doing on Instagram. I saw things that I didn't want to, but I guess its a reality check thing. I saw a lot of photos of young people cutting. A lot of self hate. A lot of body image issues. A lot of social anxiety. A lot of depression. A lot of attention seeking. And all that from starting with #anxiety. Just google (images) "self harm instagram" and you will understand what I mean.

I think we need to make social media a tool for positive self esteem, self loving, etc.

I'm going to critique the cybersmart PD that we did here. I think there wasn't enough emphasis on how to teach students to be positive in their Internet use. I just want to clarify here. By positive I mean, not not negative. (Ok that sentence got away from me a bit). not negative is ignoring the positive. Just being positive and teaching students how to use social media in peace might be a step in the right direction.

Just for some information. Youth beyond blue  is a handy website with information about self harm in particular.

IWBs

Funs fact for you. My class at school was THE FIRST classroom to ever have an IWB in it. And my best friend Tara was the first student to ever touch one.

Thinking back to grade 5 when that happened (in 2005), my teacher really didn't use the IWB that well. He mainly used it as a substitute for a normal whiteboard. That's from what I remember anyway.

In terms of using IWB's in the classroom. I find that I prefer just a projector. Especially for physics and maths teaching. Unless I want to record what I'm doing. The reason being, is that a normal whiteboard is sometimes all that I need to explain a difficult concept.

Also, at uni, on level 2 in building B. I think the collaborative rooms are poorly designed because they don't have a proper whiteboard in there. They are not designed for learning. Teachers who want to use a normal whiteboard can't. Especially in engineering, where they need to write normally on the board.

I think its because when you are writing on the board, you can add animation to it. The teacher can be physical. Whereas, in the uni collaborative rooms, although they do have the tools to write, they can't animate and talk to the whole class as they do.

Anyway. As I've said before, everything is contextual. It depends on the students. It depends on what is available. It depends on the task and the content that needs learning.

PRAC! please hurry up and come!

I would really like to know where I'm going for prac. I was at 2 schools this afternoon. My old school, and another school for work. I'm getting a little excited about going and teaching again :D. I just wanted to touch on one of the things that I do just before I go on prac. I search for the school online. I check out the school's website, their newsletters, the mission statements, any news publications, information about the community they are a part of, whats coming up in their calendar etc.

If you are in a Catholic school this link might be handy, its a list of all the schools in BCE.

students being creative with youtube and ICT

Well, now that I've finished my unit plan (even though I feel like I could justify all my ICTs more, i.e. I really needed more than 500 words) I'm starting to wonder whether ICTs can be used for more than just teaching academically. And of course I know that they can. But after looking at Jill's post and Jesse's post I was wondering, why aren't students making more videos, animations, music, games, website etc. in their spare time. When I was in school, I remember a group of our friends made vlogs everyday because they walked home together. But we don't hear a lot about kids making millions of dollars through Youtube channels. We hear a lot about adults making millions with Youtube channels, as in, it becomes their income. I know there is one channel of some little kids who cook online (they were on sunrise this morning).

However, I have seen a lot of youtube videos of young girls asking the online public to 'rate' them, and tell them they are pretty or ugly. This, (insert rant face and rant voice here) is disgusting and horrible use of the internet. The girls themselves should not be asking those sorts of questions, they shouldn't have to, and people should not be responding in a negative way. This is legitimately the reason why students commit suicide. And I don't like that.

So, how am I going to change this? Well, going through that PD, there are some basic things I can do, teach students how to respond and how to prevent. But also, I need to make sure that my classroom is a place where students can express themselves safely.

Which brings me back to vlogging and videos, animations, music etc. Through all of these websites that help students to create stuff. Students, through these mediums, can truly express who they are, and can in some instances find their purpose/career path.

For example, when I was on prac, I had one student that wanted to learn how to mix music. I knew one of the teachers kind of knew how to do some stuff, so I referred him on, and he found a niche :).

connect.ed PD

This was a very informative piece of PD. I myself have grown up with teachers teaching us about cybersafetey. This PD is on point. It really does explain it well, they know exactly whats going on. I personally think that idea of having student leaders monitoring people discussions online is really handy. Or at the least, teaching students to block, report, take screenshots etc. I know that while I was online as a student, I wasn't the perfect cyberuser. I definitely think that teaching students the right and wrong behaviour online is a very good idea, and teaching them early what they should and shouldn't be doing. And why don't we do this using ICTs? I have come across this site  before that has helped me to think about my role as a teaching in the world of cyber stuff.

who loves to procrastinate?

I think I've come across this before, but I thought I'd blog about it anyway. This website recommendation was sent to me from a teacher that I worked with while on prac. Its called Iprocrastinate. Its a lot like trello, I found, but you can sync it to your iphone. Oh, and its only available on mac. Its procrastinating, but its handy, because its busy work, when procrastinating. So you can plan, write lists, upload documents, do checklists and make planners. I think, as a school diary tool, I would allow it in my classroom, provided all the students have iphones. Or suggest to the students who have iphones to get it. That way they can track how they are going will all of their homework and assessment.  

Religion in the classroom and ICTs

I was reading this article  about how some people believe that ICTs have no place in the religious education classroom. I completely agree with the article, ICTs and religion are definitely connected. Did you know (now, I can't remember exactly where I read this, but I did) when the first websites were created, religions were the first to create their own websites, because it meant that people could communicate across the world about their beliefs and build global communities of faith. In the past I've used ICTs in my religion classroom mainly for research, but I've also heard on websites that recreate religious rituals, that also create simulations of religious sacred spaces. I know some teachers have also created webquests (something that I have looked into but haven't tried yet). In my time in religion as a student I made imovies. But again, a lot of this is based on research and providing information. I think that is because in RE when it comes to transforming knowledge, there is a lot of application, synthesis and evaluation of knowledge and using ICTs to create new ways of communicating that knowledge. I haven't explored how I can use ICTs to talk to other people from other religions etc, however, that is definitely a possibility.

Lists

As you can see, I have a lot of lists. I use mac stickies. Its simple, but its messy. Trello  is much more effective. I don't think that I'd use it for teaching and collaborative learning, I think Padlet is better. I would recommend the website if there was a student in the class that loves lists as much as I do.

I also want to draw attention to a small icon on my desktop, in the bottom right. Its a program called Paintbrush (mac version of paint). I use it in conjunction with a graphic drawing tool, known as a wacom. I only have a small one, but they can be quite large. I also use a quicktime screen recorder and garageband to record my voice. BOOM using all of those elements, I get videos in which I can record maths and physics working out.

What I really don't like about twitter

I was scrolling through twitter just before, and when i signed up to twitter I chose to automatically follow a whole bunch of news twitter feeds. This, my fellow teaching colleages, was a huge mistake. 

The thing with twitter is that news companies only get 125 (i think) characters to introduce a story, and oftentimes, they choose to focus on a particular part of a story that .. well really doesn't have anything to do with the story, or at best exaggerates what the real article is about. 

For example, there was a link to an article from a newspaper that said "is it ok to call obese models fabulous?"and it had a picture of a beautiful obese model on there. I clicked and read on the article (maybe that was my mistake) but what I found was actually a medical professional (I think) talking about the negatives of obese and overweight people within the population. It had nothing to do with models, or looking fabulous, or what to call obese models. 

Again, I clicked on another article that talked about how Robert Downey Junior from the avengers walked out from an interview. With this tweet there was a picture of Scarlet Johanson along with it. The article then described how 2 of the members of the avengers cast (not Robert) had made the mistake of commenting in a derogatory way about Scarlet Johanson's CHARACTER the black widow. Then, about halfway down the page it had a video from the interview with Robert. 

In one of my early blogs I was talking about how I thought that twitter would be great in my classroom because it allows for more communication etc. But now rethinking this in regards to how big news corporations can't describe their understanding of things properly within the 125 characters, how can I expect my students to do the same? 

differentiating using ICT

I was thinking about something Vicki said in the lecture the other day about using ICT to suit a wide range of students within my unit plan. And I freaked out because I hadn't intentionally designed my ICT learning experiences to cater for different students needs. So I went back through and I thought about the general VAK model and all the learning activities seemed to have elements of each in there somewhere. But then I was thinking about multiple intelligences and I thought, 'wow with ICT its actually quite difficult.' So, I googled it. I found this slideshare that explains things a little clearer. Looking back at my unit plan, I can see now that, without even realising, I've catered to quite a few different types of learners. I thinks its because in the back of my mind, I wanted to provide students with diverse ICT learning experiences, hence the design of my unit, caters for the diverse needs of students.

Visual learners?

While reading Emma's blog  I saw that she mentioned that she loved youtube because she was a visual learner. I understand that completely, I just wanted to come at this from an auditory learners perspective. One of my subjects this semester only consists of readings and NO lecture (and very few other resources). The lecturer posted a Youtube video and said that "if you are a visual learner, I suggest you look at this." I just went ahead and watched it anyway to have a break from the reading (that I wasn't fully comprehending). I learnt so much from that youtube video that he gave us, even through it only went for 5 minutes, and not because I was watching a guy in a video presenting a workshop, it was because I was able to hear a person talking about the topic.

I'm not saying that visual learners won't get anything out of it, but why did he just mention visual? That means that within my classroom, I need to remember that both auditory and visual learners will benefit from youtube videos. However, I would suggest that visual learners would learn more from gifs (or really short silent animations) because they are purely visual stimulation.

learning another language

Just for fun. 

Yesterday I downloaded this app and just started playing and ... LEARNING FRENCH AT THE SAME TIME! 

I've never really even tried to learn another language, apart from Tetum when I went to east timor, and I only really learnt how to day hello, and yes, and no, and how are you.. that type of thing. 

But this app, is so clever, it really transforms learning. 

It allows you to do several thing functionally- start with the basics, do levels, gain points, go back etc. 

Pedagogically its amazing. In each level, you do several things such as translate, speak phases, match up words and their meaning, write in the language, etc. it also includes pictures so that you can visualise something and understand the meaning. You get to do all these thing, and you learn how the syntax works at the same time through hints and stuff. Its basically just a game. 

I've already learnt words like pomme (apple) robe (dress) noir (black) rouge (red) le/la/'l (the) hoome (male) femme (female) fille (girl) garcon (boy) et (and) calmes (calm) magne/mangez/manges/mangent (eat) livre (book) journal (newspaper) lisons (read) sommes (are) enfant (child) vous (you) nous (we) menu (menu) orange (orange) and a tonne more- and I've only done 2 levels that I completed in about half an hour. 

quicker, easier, more engaging, fun, - what more could you want?

Assignment 2 thoughts

Ok God, I'm getting the hint now, you want me to work on assignment 2 now that I've submitted some of my other assignments, its ok, I'm getting there. 

After being reminded by this post, and this post, and this post to begin my assignment and start thinking about writing a unit plan, I've decided that I will, due to time pressure, use a unit that I've already designed. 

But, I did want to share my thoughts on BCE's religious education curriculum. At the moment through my subjects at ACU, I'm learning about the differences between the different methods used in Catholic schools to teach religious studies. Now, religious education tends to want to do 2 main things. 

1. teach people about religion (like in SOR)

2. and teach people to be religious in a particular way (like in the church) 

But it wasn't always like this, and often, these elements overlap. The religious education curriculum is nice enough to separate all of the content areas onto knowledge and skills (constructing and transforming knowledge)- that tells us something about how we need to approach religious education. It means that we need to be integrating the topics as well as aligning the knowledge and skills within a unit. And each of the content areas relate "teaching people about religion" because the Catholic schools framework discusses what to do in Catholic Schools to teach students to be religious in a particular way. 

I just wanted to note as well that the BCE religious education curriculum has an app, same with ACARA, very handy. 

Onenote

After reading a post on Sammy's blog I was curious about onenote. I then went on to actually see what onenote is, and found that there isn't much information out there, however, I found this fantastic youtube video  about it which explains everything. Now my question is... WHY AREN'T SCHOOLS USING THIS RIGHT NOW INSTEAD OF PEN AND PAPER?... SERIOUSLY!

For organisation, for assignment work, for collaboration. And also... FOR PRAC!

I'm definitely trialling this while on prac in terms of organising my lesson plans and collecting resources, doing reflections etc.

Watch the youtube video and I promise you will be swayed. However, if you are already using evernote, you might find it a bit like de ja vu.

Acronyms, short hand, short cuts

After working for a while on another assignment for another subject that requires me to reference almost every government department and organisation.. I was thinking, part of our assessment as pre-service educators should be a test of our knowledge of acronyms... just acronyms and nothing else.


Anyway, this lead me to think about (don't ask how, it just popped into my head) how was use short hand.. like when taking notes in class. But now we have another kind of short cut when using technology. Exactly that short cuts. I've provided this link to all the basic shortcuts. Short cuts are just a handy tool to have, it can speed some things up. I know, sometimes in the classroom, students get frustrated when the teacher 'goes the slow way' using right click and all those 'old fashioned' ways of doing things. The difference is literally a second, but sometimes thats enough time to lose the students attention.

turning off a child

I noticed the new picture on study desk about how turning off technology can turn off a child. Well, what about the opposite way around, when we turn on technology, we are turning off a child? I myself was one of those students that preferred pen and paper in the classroom. I remember in physics they once tried to get us to learn how to use an online journalling program to record all our research for our reports. I disliked it immensely, it was difficult to use, I couldn't cut things out and put them in different places, and highlight and flick between ideas quickly, and draw arrows, or annotate, or draw graphs, or diagrams. It was very stressful, I talked to my teacher and she let me hand in my hand written one because it was of a higher standard, and displayed more understanding than the online journal that I created. But I'm sure that there are students out there that feel the same about learning maths, or history, for example creating timelines or drawing graphs. Maybe we should consider this when teaching students as well.

girls are from venus, boys are from mars... seems the same with technology

While browsing this evening I found this article. I also saved it on Diigo (I think).

I took the following notes

- written in 2008 about learning and also outside of the classroom activities

- ICT increases motivation more for boys

- girls use ICTs less

- boys use it for leisure purposes

- girls prefer social and creative uses and are often less confident

- boys see tech for their own sake, girls see it as a tool for learning and furthering interests. 

- girls are more likely to suffer from cyberbullying

- don't use ICTs differently in class. - boys prefer database software, file manipulation, internet.. girls - prefer communication, publishing, photo manipulating (social) - sharing etc. 

This are some useful findings when considering what activities can be done in the classroom. For example, girls may prefer to share, take photos, chat, comment and be creative, where as, boys appear to like to problem solve and use ICTs to their fullest extent, and try to learn as much about each program and how to use it as possible. Perhaps, in group work activities where students need to do a combination of any of these tasks, I should consider making groups with both boys and girls. 

A very insightful article, providing a lot to think about. 

#hashtagearemylife #omg #yolo

#ihearthashtags

They are pretty great. Even though it can be annoying when my younger cousins constantly hashtag on facebook about everything in their lives. #yolo #swag #lol - you get the idea.

But what about #help! #religionassignment
and tagging too! @missFoddy. @teacher @schoolreligionclass

I'm talking about using twitter for study. I tweeted David yesterday with an assignment question and he got back really quick (I was actually impressed). It also means that students can search hashtags for answers as well. So when students are studying for an exam, this would be handy. Also, collaborative learning on tasks could also be handy.

Theres also another tool here fakebook. Facebook for a classroom. I've heard its good for history and also religion and also character understanding in english.

I'm starting to see now how much we should be using social media in our classrooms. As I mentioned on twitter, I caved and got pinterest, something I'd been avoiding because I find social media a distraction, but I must admit I love it. I've already collected about 75 teaching resources already.

Jill's blog was the reason why I decided to get pinterest. Also, I'd heard raving reviews from many of my teaching colleagues on prac.

assessment and technology

Do we need to get rid of hand written maths tests?

Seriously? - with technology aren't they are bit outdated? We've got all the technology in the world to make tests online- lecturers do it all the time.. why aren't we doing it in our classrooms?

This article  provides some maths online test resources and also says 'it's so easy' - but is it?

for the students?

I also want to ask the question... why are we still using maths tests at the end of term? all the time?
In my experience with a test, they only really examine students understanding, memory, and maybe a little application. Depending on the question, it can ask students to analyse and evaluate - but this doesn't happen a lot in maths in tests. And tests certainly don't help students create. Of course, I'm referring to Bloom's taxonomy (the version of Bloom's that I use comes from Frangenheim (2012).

Back to testing online. I know that when I'm testing students on maths, I want them to show me that they can do the working out, which shows that they understand and can apply the laws, processes and formulae that they need to. With online testing, this is not necessarily the case. Also, in terms of validity and reliability of assessment, students can also cheat with assessment, unless there are some blocking of sites set up through the schools wifi- magic.

At the same time, for formative assessment, I can understand using online tests as a tool, but then again, the teacher may be restricted on the amount of feedback that can be provided.

I've seen students through one of my tutoring groups that I have at my old school struggle to answer questions to online maths quizzes because they weren't 'able' to do the working out. They thought that they had to just 'get' the answer straight away, but I mentioned that it may take a few steps to work out on pen and paper, you may not be able to figure it out straight away. I think the website they were using was http://www.mathsonline.com.au/

If you watched my online artefact you might be like 'hang on a minute alice, you've just gone against everything you said when you said you would use geddit as an online tool". Well, you have a point. However, in the context I mentioned that I would be using it for physics to check students understanding but ALSO to build self regulation - which geddit does. Geddit also lets the teacher provide feedback, and as a formative assessment tool, the teacher can identify what the students really aren't getting. And, I would tell the students to use pen and paper to do their working out, because if they can do complicated physics calculations in their heads, they should be at university and not school. Also, Geddit allows your to put multiple choice, short answer and long answer questions, so I would probably use a combination of these in the classroom. Different context and purpose.

So in answer to my first question, no. We don't need to get rid of hand written maths tests, if anything we need more maths assessment that allows for more higher order thinking. In this case and context, I argue that less technology is actually better.

My unit plan and some resources

Well, after finishing assignment 1, I'm getting more excited about my unit plan. I actually enjoy writing unit plans because its so practical in terms of teaching.

I'm using a unit that I wrote for another course for year 12 physics about circuits and testing variables on circuits to check energy efficiency and things like that.

Today, I did a quick browse of the web for some resources and I found a two that I thought Ah! that will come in handy when I will teach...


The first is a tool for making Gifs. Gifs, in my opinion, are under-utilised in education at the moment. Basically a gif is a image that moves or a really short video on repeat. For anyone who has never seen a gif, think the pictures in harry potter.

When I came across this website I thought what a brilliant idea... getting students to make gifs to show how something works. In physics, we use a lot of diagrams to explain how things work. I think it would really help if these diagrams could move. So either, I could make gifs to show for example, the water flow metaphor for electricity, or get the students to create gifs to show me how their circuits should work in their assignments, or get them to make a gif to help them remember how to do an equation. The possibilities are endless.

The other resource that I found that I thought ah! this would really help build student understanding and help them apply their knowledge, is a circuit digram/circuit simulator see here. I think I would use this in my unit plan when students are hypothesizing about their experiments to help them check and plan. Also, it can help teach the essential items in circuits.

I'm still working on getting some more resources etc, but I think this is a good start.

EDC3100 assignment 1 submission

Alice Foddy 0061035466 EDC3100 assignment 1 submission.

Well, I guess this is it.

For my assignment I've created a Prezi. The link is here. (I'm praying it works). I made it public so it should work.

I've included my reference list in this post because I don't like the way that the prezi made my references look. So I've embedded it below. I'm just picky.

I've also included a PDF of my script/transcript of the audio in the prezi. This will help the marker to know when to click. I thought this might be helpful because it can be annoying if you click to the next slide and I hadn't finished talking and you have to go back. It may not be entirely precise.. as in I may have said something slightly different, but you'll get the idea. I've also included the timing for each of the slides to show that it runs for less than 7 minutes. But I wouldn't hand the my reference list and script to parents in a real life situation.  I just thought it might be useful for the marker to have. 

Below are the links. I think I've embedded them ok. It links to google drive and I've also made them public so hopefully they work as well.

Script

References

Lets think on our feet!

Flicking through (wait, its more scrolling than flicking... whatever) scrolling through feedly I came across Jill's blog - Which I love (and hate, those macaroons look amazing!). Anyways, the post about having to deal with tech mishaps in the classroom was so handy. It just reminded me that in my unit plan and while on prac, I will need to think about what will happen if things do go wrong. The link in Jill's blog lead me to the list of how to cope when lucifer makes a visit to the classroom and unplugs the internet. 

I think it is important to just know your content, know all that you need to, know your objectives, know what your students need to do and achieve by the end of the lesson. 

I unfortunately had a tech mishap on my last prac, but luckily it was right at the end of the lesson, and it gave the students 10 minutes to think about their assignment. Mind you, that whole lesson was a muddle because there was noise outside, it was friday afternoon before a big day, and I was trying to teach and engage the students in stuff that was super important, but there were silly people misbehaving outside of the classroom which were distracting them way too much... anyway... thats behind me now, but I did learn that when there is a will there is a way, and students will learn, but we might have to use a different way.. that may not include ICT sometimes. 

Organisation through ICT.

There are so many students out there that don't have the skills to be organised, hate writing in their planners and constantly hand in assignments late.

What can ICT offer to help students become more independent and organised?
- Apps... lots of apps.

Though they basically only substitute a student planner, there are apps for homework, there are apps for calendars, there are reminders on phones that you can create. If teachers want to get personal, they can even send out group text reminders.

Theres a list here  of 100 organisation and productivity apps. But if you want a few less heres a list of 30.

Hope this helps people :)

Senior stress

Hi everyone, 

This post is a little less about pedagogy and more about benefiting student wellbeing in the classroom. I wanted to start off with just an anecdote. 

About 10 minutes ago I observed something in my brother that I've seen in myself so many times, but this particular thing happened to me a lot when I was in year 11 and 12. My brother is in grade 12 this year. 

What happened was, he came into the living room room, balling his eyes out, convinced that he could not 'do' a part of his assignment. Even though myself and my parents, and he probably knew deep down that he was more than capable of. Like so many other grade 12 students he is so scared of the number that he will get at the end of the year. My brother has always been stressed about our academic work. I remember him being really little and getting so frustrated that when he was rubbing things out on the page he'd rip the page. I've also had similar experiences as a student both in school and at university. 

We can say to ourselves that "its one paragraph, in one assignment, in one subject, that gives us one number that defines our lives for one year". However, we think that if we muck up that one paragraph, it will mean that one mark from that one assignment could impact on our position in the class which will lower that one number so that we can't get into the one degree that we want. We put an enormous amount of pressure on ourselves, and it probably isn't healthy.

To my friends out there that are working in secondary, we will have students that are just like this, you've probably met them. And its not always obvious the ones that are stressed because they express it in different ways. 

I'm going to a big bold statement out there that I truly believe. I think we need to teach students that it is ok to fail. In fact, it is a good thing to fail. (I even dare to say the whole "students don't need a ribbon or a trophy for everything"). We need to teach our students to be resilient. 

I want to introduce everyone to a program called superbetter, I've used it occasionally when I have the time to go on and complete the activities. Its basically a game watch the video as well, but it teaches you that its ok not to do great in something, it encourages you to do better next time, it helps your realise the power within yourself, it teaches resilience. Its an example of how we could be using ICTs in our classrooms to not only teach content and academic skills, but also life skills in general. 

If I was to use this, I'd get each student to create an account. I'd get them all to add one another as allies and play together to increase their resilience as a group. It also means that, as an ally to them, I'm able to help them out with any issues that they are having. Of course the program is not perfect for the school environment - considering some schools don't allow students to use facebook, the idea of the teacher communicating with students online about their issues may not always go down well either. 

All the timeline!

One of my teaching areas is Study of Religion. On my pracs, I have taught religion in grade 9 and grade 10. I have loved my experiences in these classes, however, there seems to be a lack of technology use in this subject area. I think this is largely due to the fact that a lot of religion resources are quite dated. It is worth noting though that I heard somewhere that the first ever website created was related to religion.

Anyway, regarding the history aspect of things in religion, there is the opportunity for students to create online timelines. There is a list of the top 10 free timeline generators that I've found. In most of them there are opportunities to upload images and notes.

I hope this helps all you history teachers and religion teachers out there :).

Dragonbox and SMAR... but does it really fulfil the requirements of the curriculun?

After starting to go through the learning path for this week, week 3, I tried out dragon box and I've investigated a little into the SMAR model after it was discussed in the tutorial, and I've come to the following conclusions.

Dragonbox is great, I'll give you that. I really do see how it redefines how students learn algebra. It moves them away from working with numbers, and allows them to understand key processes in an entirely new way. The results show according to their testimonials.

Also, the dragon box system could be used from grade 8-10 according to the australian curriculum. The dragon box content or games played covers all of the algebra content descriptors.

However, I researched into the standards elaborations for grades 8-10. One thing that was part of the standards elaborations that the dragon box system fails to meet it the reasoning and justification aspect. I know that the intention of dragon box is not to assess, however, students need to learn how to communicate their working, reason and justify their answers regarding the questions. In my experience at school, the teachers have always gone through worked examples and asked students to practice the skill of providing correct working out and justification for questions.

Therefore, if I was to use dragon box, I would only use it as a tool for learning basic content regarding algebra, but I would also focus on building students communication, reasoning and justification skills.

I also thought about what it would be like to have dragonbox as a card game!

Using ICTs in my classroom for the visual, auditory and kinesthetic students

I was thinking about how I could use ICTs to benefit the learning of all of my students. I was a bit stuck on where to start researching, so I went back to the whole VAK (or the VARK) model.

I found this website which outlines strategies that can benefit the learning of students in all 3 learning methods.

I thought about some ICT tools that could help with each suggestion.

Visual:
1. Colour code or highlight your notes - Diigo is perfect for this!
2. Use flashcards - there are actually heaps of flashcard making sites out there heres one that I found.
3. Translate core concepts into diagrams - again, there are plenty of sites to create things like concept maps. Even word and excel can help with creating diagrams.
4. Use symbols to emphasise important points- I can't think of an example website for this one, however, using consistent symbols in created ICT learning resources could help here. e.g. in powerpoints having a symbol of a pencil for the information the students should be copying down.
5. Always take down notes and create lists - I know macs have a stickies app that can help with this, students also have notes on their iphones to be able to do this.

Auditory:
This is my preferred area.
1. Add rhythm or music as a learning aid - in class I don't mind allowing students to listen to music. The Pandora website, which is a free radio station may help in this.
2. Recite key points aloud - If the teacher has created a prezi they can add audio, there are also text to speech functions included on macs (and PCs I'm sure of as well) that can help with this.
3. Participate in group discussions - Blackboard collaborate sessions were the first thing that came to mind for this one.
4. Record your classes - why not create a youtube video?
5. Teach others what you want to learn - I think skype is a great tool for this. In high school I used to talk with my best friend all the time about our maths and physics over skype. Although, when we were trying to talk to each other about complex equations, it got a bit difficult.

Kinaesthetic:
1. Using puzzles, games and the computer - well fancy that! Computer is already there! For things like Algebra, dragon box is a good game to play (see the learning path for week 3, I will be posting about this later this week).
2. Study outside or in new environments - Ipads and iphones- well any piece of technology that allows for students to access information in a different environment can help achieve this.
3. participate in laps or go on excursions - virtual excursions do exist out there for historical monuments.
4. Think of practical applications for concepts - this point is not necessarily something that ICTs can achieve on its own, this is down to the teacher's pedagogy. Providing practical examples and problem solving can be achieve through many ways online including webquests.
5. Study in short blocks - using timers on your phone could help with this.

I should mention here, I did try and research visual auditory and kinaesthetic strategies regarding the use of ICTs in this area through the library. However, there doesn't appear to be much research in this area. I will keep searching, but if someone finds any, I would love to have a read!

Literacies and ICT reflection

 The inspiration for the reflection came from reading Charmaine's blog post about literacies. I agree with Charmaine that literacy is essential and that we must foster literacy skills that benefit the use of ICTs. I started thinking about how I could use ICTs with the 4 resources model in my classroom. The picture below describes the 4 resources model.

In ICTs we have a lot more codes that we need to learn to be able to manipulate the many 'texts' including websites, software etc. To participate students need to have the knowledge of how to manipulate the text to communicate their ideas effectively. To use the text, students need to be able to analyse the purpose and audience of the text and discern whether it is right for their context. Students also need to be able to analyse and evaluate how their own texts or texts from others impacts on them and others. 

I also did a little bit of research to see what the literature says about using ICTs and literacies. And I found that there was a lot of research about how to teach students to be ICT literate, but not how to use ICTs to help become literate. - That sentence may have got away from me a bit. The first article I found focuses on the first idea. 

Gamble and Easingwood (2000) mention that an ICT literate person can read, digest, re-present, and display information. They can also story tell and speak in public. They can be creative and use text, graphics, speech, video and animation to do this. 

They argue that technologies can make it hard for people to concentrate and can diminish peoples sense of culture and community. Even though a computer is just as essential as a pencilcase these days. 

They ask whether students have the skills to access and decode multimedia text.  To create multimedia, know how to create text, scan/draw images, record sound and therefore we need to teach these skills to some degree. This is where the 4 resources model comes in. 

The second article that I found by Monteith (2005) focuses on the second idea. It mentions that ICTs provide an opportunity for us to rethink the way we teach students in literacy. This is especially because text can come in many forms and we can interchange these forms. Text in a word document can be converted to audio and we can print it. 

Upon reflection, I think its safe to say that I need to be able to teach students using the 4 resources model how to use, analyse, participate and code break ICT texts. But I can also use ICTs to teach literacy skills such as code breaking, analysing, using and participating. 

For example, in terms of using ICTs to teach literacies, I could use Diigo to help students to break the code of a text. Students can participate in texts through blogs and discuss with others the meaning they get from texts, determine the purpose and audience of the text, and analyse the impact it has on them. I could also use online surveys to show how texts can impact people, by asking the students to determine the impact a text had on them. Students could collaborate on twitter with people around the world to see how their own texts can impact others. I'm just throwing around some ideas here. I would consider designing literacy activities for students using ICTs in my unit plan for assignment 2. 

References

Gamble, N. & Easingwood, N. (2000). ICT and literacy: Information and communications technology, media, reading and writing. London: Continuum.

Monteith, M. (2005). Teaching secondary school literacies with ICT. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

21st century skills?

While on twitter yesterday I came across this article . It talks about how the 21st century skills that we as educators love referring to and teaching, are actually no different really to 18th century skills, it's just that we are doing these things in a different way. If you turn on diggolet while reading it, I've highlighted some bits and also added some notes that I've shared with EDC3100 (I hope it worked).

I found the most interesting point was when he described that the skills students have now regarding communication on the internet aren't learnt in the classroom, because we apparently don't allow the use of social media and communication sites. Student's are not becoming technology literate in the classroom, and this is often because teachers are not technology literate themselves. - I do not think that he has researched this enough to be honest, he might be surprised if he did.

But I do think he is right, we are not teaching students to be technology literate, they are learning it by themselves and are often better at it than we are. So why don't we use this in the classroom to help other students learn? If we struggle with ICTs why can't we get the student's to help us?

I read it on the internet, it must be true...

After reading going through this weeks learning path, I began thinking about how ... I don't really want to use these words... but.. gullible.. naive.. students that are native to the technological age are.

I found this article that illustrates my point precisely. Students struggle to evaluate the credibility of information on the internet. They also can underestimate the power of the internet and how easily something can 'go viral' and reach every corner of the earth. Some teachers have even put photos of themselves on the internet asking people to share the picture as much as they can to demonstrate to students how the internet works.

Back to the gullible point. I remember one of my teachers in high-school showed us a story of another teacher who changed the information on Wikipedia to say that Jesus was born on the Gold Coast. And of course, the students believed the information written on the website.

So the question is... how do we guide students to be more critical of what they are 'consuming' on the internet?

Just as a side, I'm coming from this from a secondary perspective where students often reference the internet in their assessment and do a lot of research.

I remember last semester while I was on prac, my mentor actually had a set of questions that the students needed to answer regarding a web resource before they could include it in their assignment. I should have got a copy of it! Anyway.. I did some searching on the internet and found 2 websites that list characteristics that help to determine whether a resource has credible information or not.

This one 

and this one 

Some of the tips include looking at the URL of a source and checking whether it is from and organisation, the government or some other source. Students should also be checking whether the information has references in it as well, whether the author of the site has done research themselves. Is the Author listed? Are they an expert in the field? Is the information congruent with what has been learnt in class or what is described on other websites?

In reality, the naivety is no different to when people believed everything they read in the newspaper. Now the newspaper is on the internet and any old soul can publish it, and any old soul can read it.