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.