Reflective Synopsis

Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) have the exciting potential to change the way teachers teach and the way students learn. The ‘Teacher Centric Model’ which sustained teaching and learning throughout most of the twentieth century no longer will meet the diverse needs of our contemporary young people who have grown up with computers. The ICTs will increasingly be a necessary tool to inform teachers and teaching as well a key strategy to engage, extend and inspire students and extend student learning.

Education has taken a step forward to a more student centric learning where students are learning while being involved in authentic tasks that are valued in the real world (Kearsley & Shneiderman 1995). Because of this practical, hands-on approach, learning experiences are more effective if they are highly interesting, engaging and considered to be an authentic experience for the students. By utilising ICTs, students can create, problem solve, investigate, research, plan and present with a greater choice and range of ICTs. In fact the range is so great that it is difficult to write a comprehensive review of all the technologies that I am becoming more familiar with so I will focus on ones that have the potential to enhance student learning and help make my teaching more efficient.

Blogs & Wiki
The early interactive aspects of this course introduced us to the use of Blogs and Wiki. As discussed in my blog (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogging.html) students can utilise blogs for the purpose of their own continual learning. If students are interested in learning more about a particular lesson, the teacher can utilise a blog to assist with continual development outside of school by inserting videos, documents and activities. Teachers can also utilise blogs as a way for students to simply spend time journaling their thoughts and opinions on their learning. This is a learning enhancing tool to improve the writing skills of students as they are not only required to write more frequently and respond to fellow student comments (Ramaswmi 2008) but may be more motivated because of the interactive elements of the product. Kearsley and Shneiderman (1999) discuss their Engagement Theory of ‘Relate’, Create’, ‘Donate’. They state that “students must be engaged in their course work in order for effective learning to occur”. The use of a Wiki in education covers these aspects of their theory. Wiki as described by Bill Ferriter (2009 p. 37) “is designed for collaboration among groups of users”. Students can work collaboratively on a class project such as the one discussed in the following blog (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/03/wiki.html) where students have the ability to create a Wiki based on project topics, giving them a sense of ownership of the site. The site is accessible by millions of people and is open for comment and opinion.

Voki
“learners must perceive that tasks are valuable or interesting or they will not put much effort into them” (Marzano and Pickering 2006, p. 29). What could be more interesting then creating your own Voki? A Voki could be utilised in a lesson as a ‘hook’ by the teacher who introduces the topic and can be a novel springboard to commence and stimulate student discussion. This has been shown in my use of a Voki on my blog
(http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/03/acvokiembed200267fc4e853cf5446f1c59d942.html). It is inevitable that once a Voki is shown by the teacher, students will wish to have involvement in the creation of a Voki themselves as this technology is easy and very user friendly to cater for all levels of age and abilities. Therefore, it will be important to use a Voki not just as an introduction to a lesson but as a core tool to enhance learning.

PowerPoint, Incompetech & SlideShare
PowerPoint is a somewhat older technology. It allows students to create their own presentation from simple to very sophisticated formats that are an effective means for supporting oral presentations. Until now, I never saw its potential as an interactive tool for lessons. An interactive PowerPoint would cater for every Learning Style, visual, auditory & kinaesthetic. However, it is important to note that according to Dale Cone’s Learning Pyramid, the extensive use of verbal and visual symbols is the least effective learning technique (reference Dale Cone’s pyramid). Incompetech is an interesting resource. As stated within my blog (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/04/incompetech.html), students could create their own silent movie (maybe incorporating this into their powerpoint presentation) and utilise sound and visuals as the main focus. Incompetech has a large range of royalty-free music that is simple to download. By having students and teachers upload their powerpoint presentations into SlideShare, they can be easily accessed in one location at any time, making preparation for teaching and marking students’ work much more efficient. Also, students can again ‘donate’ (Kearsley and Shneiderman 1999) their presentations to the world wide web.

Flickr & Picnik
Flicker is a great tool for storing pictures relevant to units of work and would decrease the amount of time teachers often spend locating images when planning lessons. Teachers can find interesting visuals to use as an introduction to a lesson or to generate in-depth discussion and opinion. As referred to in my blog
(http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/04/vietnam-ha-long-bay.html), I have already attempted to utilise pictures as a ‘hook’ for some of my lessons and have tried to assist students to find pictures through Google, often with frustrating and time consuming results. With Flickr one has free access to a numerous and wide range of images all in one location. With Picnik students could take pictures from a source such as Flickr and alter it by cropping, adding effects and changing lighting. The result, an effective picture for use as a visual aid. Please refer to my Picnik blog for an example (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-naughty-red-bird.html) This technology would be a marvellous tool for developing visualising/verbalising activities to assist students’ developing questioning and answering techniques.

YouTube & Wikipedia
YouTube and Wikipedia are commonly used to locate general knowledge in a particular area. Teachers may utilise YouTube to gather interesting clips that can engage students or use Wikipedia as a first port of call for research on a particular topic. These tools are important in improving students Declarative Knowledge. However, as stated in my blog posting (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/04/wikipedia.html), I believe these types of resources do contain risks. For example, YouTube is a publicly shared website where anyone can place clips about anything they wish. Wikipedia at least has tighter guidelines and rules that attempt to ensure the information placed on the site is accurate. As referred to in my blog however (http://jaimeafrench.blogspot.com/2010/04/wikipedia.html), because of the exhaustive nature of the site, I would want to place rules on its usage and ensure students’ skill in research and identifying academic articles is developed.

It is vital that educators must continually update and be willing to embrace new and emerging ICTs in order to maintain a high level of technological literacy. I believe the use of ICTs within the classroom is crucial to the knowledge development of children who have grown up in a technological age where the ability to use technology to its full advantage is necessary not only in the workforce but also socially. Engaging students in authentic experiences through the use of ICTs will mean student skills in collaboration, creativity and problem solving will be continually fostered. This will help maintain and assure a high level of student engagement enhancing, learning outcomes.

Reference list:

The ACU Adams Centre for Teaching Excellence 2000, ‘How does active learning work’, viewed 17th April 2010, http://www.acu.edu/cte/activelearning/whyuseal2.htm

Ferriter, B 2009, ‘Learning with blogs and wikis’, Educational Leadership, vol.66, no. 5, pp. 34-38, (online Ebscohost)

Kearsley, G & Shneiderman, B 1999, ‘Engagement Theory: A Framework for technology-based teaching and learning’, CQUniversity e-Courses (EDED20491)

Marzano, R & Pickering, D 2006, Dimensions of learning teachers manual, Hawker Brownlow Education, Heatherton

Ramaswami, R 2008, ‘The Prose of Blogging (and a Few Cons, Too)’, T.H.E. Journal, vol. 35, no. 11, pp. 21-25, (online Ebscohost)

Mahara

On reflection of setting up my Mahara account (which was quite a while ago, I simply forgot to blog about it, sorry) I found it to be quite time consuming at first, looking through and trying to understand all of its capabilities. Mahara is an e.Portfolio that can be utilised by professionals as a personal portfolio of work or simply as an online portfolio of student work. This would make it easily accessible by teachers and parents. I feel that I would be more likely to utilise the account for personal reasons such as uploading my resume and storing lesson plans on there. overall it will be an interesting tool to learn more about in preparation for assignment 3.

Incompetech

Incompetech is a really great site to find royalty-free music. I looked around for a little bit and really liked the fact that you can search for music not just based on genre but also based on feel. This in itself would be highly useful for students as they may create a silent movie and have to concentrate on setting the feeling of scenes by using music only. Music within teaching is also beneficial as it intices students to get out of their chairs and move with the beat. The most common idea would probably be to have a range of music that changes in speed and style. Students are to move around the classroom in a way that exhibits that sound.

SlideShare

Powerpoint presentation

SlideShare, when importing my original powerpoint presentation into my blog was a complete nightmare. It took forever to download then told me that the presentation had been deleted (I didn't delete it!). I tried again and it didn't work. The third time I tried it finally worked, although I had done nothing different. Therefore, my current relationship with SlideShare is not a positive one.

However, I can understand the benefits of it. Not only can you develop a presentation and present it on SlideShare for others to view and comment but you have access to hundereds of different presentations and documents from one easy location. What I really do love about this concept is that it fits Kearsley & Shneiderman (1999) Engagement Theory, specifically the ability to 'donate'. Students could create their own presentation on a specific topic that is then placed on SlideShare for public view and comment.

I would have been interested in synching audio to my PowerPoint presentation however I do not have the resources to do so, such as a microphone. The advantage of including audio in a lesson from a teachers perspective is that you could include crucial comments throughout the presentation that you may otherwise forget to mention due to the busy rush of the lesson. You may also use it to add in extra little 'did you know' comments to get the students thinking.

The main benefit of utilising the audio for powerpoint presentations however, is the students ability to learn and become comfortable with a new technology. As an example, students in my prac class have recently created their own television advertisement. This was basically a powerpoint presentation with their audio. Students learnt how their voices sounded once recorded and noticed that sometimes they spoke too quickly, too loud or too soft.

Wikipedia

I still don't know exactly how to feel about Wikipedia. I have used it to gather background information on particular topics but have never used the content or referenced it in my work. This is probably due to my original opinion that it is a social encyclopedia that is not monitored. However, I have since discovered that Wikipedia has a tight set of guidelines and rules that ensure the information provided is accurate.

I think if I were to use Wikipedia in the classroom, I would be inclined to use it for quick reference. For example, if we were commencing a science project on energy, and all the students were interested in what kinetic energy was, we may quickly search Wikipedia and place the results on the interactive whiteboard, knowing that there will be a relatively accurate definition available. We may also use Wikipedia in group activities where students have 15 minutes to source as much information as possible about a particular topic to present to the class. Wikipedia would probably be their first port of call because the information is extensive and usually available.

However, Because of the exhaustive nature of the site, I would probably be inclined to place rules on its usage. Students need to develop effective research skills and if we allow them simply to go to one site that has all the answers, they are not developing their ability to search for relevant data.

Google Earth

The only word that comes to mind...insane!! I am blown away by what can be discovered using google earth. When this first came out, I used it to search for my house, was amazed that it could do it then simply forgot about the program. I was actually almost not going to load the newest version because I had the opinion that I had seen it and used it. Gosh am I glad I did download it, it is incredible.

I think I am glued to the 'space' section. You could create lessons utilising google earth and an interactive whiteboard purely on the moon. Students get a better visual of how the moon looks and can be involved in finding out facts about it. Google Earth includes data, pictures and even clips of stars, planets and constellations.

Most commonly known is Google Earth's ability to find a location. If you want to see a view of your house, type in your address and Google Earth will take you there. It will take you anywhere in the world and show you famous locations and give you valuable facts. If the students have international school pen-pals, we could research and view where their international friends are from.

Davidson Hall (2010) summed up the use of Google Earth within the classroom perfectly. He stated "Google Earth enables teachers and communities to easily create tremendous collections of work integrating video, 3D buildings, photos, podcasts or NPR stories. Teacher and students will travel the real earth of explorations, migrations, heroes and history and share new instruction growing on the planet itself".

Hall, D 2010, 'Teachers speak out', Google for Educators Discovery Educator Network, www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html

YouTube

YouTube is something that I am relatively familiar with. I spent a little while tonight exploring and trying to find a video that could teach children the main elements of writing an interesting narrative. The reason I chose that is because the students in my prac class are currently learning the skills necessary to complete an entertaining narrative. Unfortunately I could only find one and it was very uninteresting, so decided to pass.

I then thought about the fact that there are many children who not only struggle with maths but find it difficult and wonder why it is necessary to know. I found a really good youtube clip, probably targeted to younger years, that identifies maths in everyday life. This is important as children can then see maths as being relevent outside of school. Tasks such as counting money, counting the number of slices of a pizza, identifying patterns on road footpaths and seeing symmetry in nature, are all considered maths. Students therefore can see more clearly the authenticity of learning mathematics and its purpose in their lives.

I believe this clip would be a really good introduction to the concept of maths. To form this clip into a project, students could form groups and identify together, maths concepts they can identify in everyday life.