Reflection 3 - Week 4

Catch me on video, if you can!

The task this week was for me, a bit like a conceptual trek into parts unknown. I can count on one hand the number of videos (as in VCR) that I watched as a student in high school.The use of photos and images was not as unfamiliar (although the cut and paste method was literal - with scissors and glue). I can remember the first assignment I submitted that was typed in Word and printed out - Grade 11. Incorporating podcasts and digital videos into lessons and assessment, was not something that even came close to occurring, when I was in high school. 

VS

So, it was of interest to me to choose digital video to review this week, as I wanted to explore some different ways I could use these in my teaching. Also, it seemed that there were some ways where photos (stop action films) and sound tracks could be brought together and created into video clips. There are so many opportunities for students to demonstrate their talents and creativity through this form of technology. Walsh (2009) discussed the ease with which students today are able to multitask with various types of digital media and how we, as teachers, have an obligation to develop our pedagogy to encompass digital literacies, that will adequately prepare students for the rigors of use expected of them in the workplace. 

Overview of technical aspects

There were a number of digital video tools to experiment with - some I had already been introduced to in previous weeks. For example, PowToons was a really fun online program I used to create a brief slide presentation, set to a basic music clip. I had to watch a YouTube tutorial to get a better idea how to use all the functions, but it really only took a couple of hours to get acquainted and put this presentation together. Having now become familiar, it would be relatively easy to create more, on various different topics, related to my teaching areas of Business and Maths.

I experimented a little when I found that SlideShare, Voki and Powerpoint can be uploaded to My YouTube videos account. This had a more practical or functional aspect that I appreciated, because as a teacher, I will now be able to organise and categorise anything I create through other sources or programs, within the one YouTube location. It then becomes much easier to disseminate (or embed, is the ICT term I'm now using) these to other places like wikispaces or website I create.

Incorporating into Business and Maths: lessons and assessment

It was pretty understandable to me, that students would find activities where they were creating class tasks and assessment pieces using multimedia, much more interesting and engaging. Walsh (2009) observed that even students who were usually disengaged, became more involved in working together on a multimedia project that required planning, talking, reading, researching, writing, designing and creating components. This had me thinking of Erica McWilliams comments in a clip we watched for Supportive Learning Environments - 'that we need to respect our students enough to challenge them'.

Given the proliferation of these genres in their everyday lives, it makes sense students will also perceive multimedia tasks as more relevant and transferable to real world application. It can also be fun! These students have been asked to create a YouTube presentation about perimeter and area concepts and have come up with the creative use of a slide presentation and an accompanying sound file.

I returned to Schwartz and Hartman's (2007) figure and thought about ways students could create video projects that demonstrated, provided step-by-step instructions, modeled or identified and explained various different mathematics concepts. The YouTube clip above covers only perimeter and area calculations. How more valuable would this be for difficult topics such as calculus or algebra. I then turned to my other teaching area for the SAMR table this week - Business topics - Interest specifically.

Redefinition	Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable	As a class, the students create a video project in the form of a TV segment or music clip about Interest. All students collaborate to write the script, film, edit, incorporate music or other sound effects etc. This film will be shown to the rest of the school at a weekly assembly.
Modification	Technology allows for significant task redesign	Students can collaborate with an in class project to create a joint SlideShare presentation about Interest that includes an embedded audio track of their own making. This can be converted to a YouTube video clip and shared online with other student groups. Students receive feedback from the teacher and other student groups via comments posted in YouTube.
Augmentation	Technology acts as direct tool substitute, with functional improvement	Students individually can create their own SlideShare presentation about their understanding of Interest and record a video of their aural presentation.
Substitution	Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change	Students view a YouTube video about the topic of Interest in class.

Finally, when searching for material and looking at examples, such as on YouTube, I was mindful of the implications for copyright issues raised this week. As a teacher, I will be responsible for ensuring that students understand their obligations for 'fair dealing' uses (for research or study, criticism or review, reporting, parody and satire type activities) in relation to materials from third party sources. Further, that they must attribute their sources and any online sharing (such as through a blog) would need to be restricted to access of users with a password. It was nice to know that 'free for education' resources are available and that use of these did allow a little more freedom, such as public access to online student materials.

References

Schwartz, D. L., & Hartman, K. (2007). It is not television anymore: Designing digital video for learning and assessment. Video research in the learning sciences, 335-348.

Walsh, M. (2009). Pedagogic potentials of multimodal literacy. Chapter, 3, 32-47.

Smartcopying: The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE, viewed 28 March 2015, http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/information-sheets/schools/using-wikis-and-blogs/what-can-a-teacher-do-on-a-wiki-or-blog-

Walsh, M. (2009). Pedagogic potentials of multimodal literacy. Chapter, 3, 32-47.

Reflection 2 - Week 3

ONLINE SPACE FOR MY HYPOTHETICAL YEAR 8 BUSINESS CLASS

It's a big World Wide Web 2.0 out there!

There has been a bit of an 'account creating' party going on this week, as I embarked on signing in to numerous online gizmos. I have been introduced to Weebly, Voki, PowToons, SlideShare, Flickr, Wordpress, Google Docs, Wikispaces classroom and YouTube, just to name a few. Technically speaking... the possibilities really are endless! I have spent many, many hours exploring all of these and having a bit of fun entertaining my sons with a voki that harps at them like Mum, to 'put your shoes away, make your bed, brush your teeth, stand on one leg, pat your head...etc'.

Aspects of the technology

It was difficult to decide which of the three online spaces; blogs, wikis or websites, I would select to overview. All are fairly easy to construct as the online providers have made the user interface very simple to understand. Each has different features and types of functionality that can be used to support learning. Having already become familiar with blogs over the last couple of weeks, I really wanted to spend more time looking at websites and wikis. There are so many examples of both that are used for educational purposes, however I really found the collaborative and interactive features of wikis to be more appealing when thinking about creating my virtual classroom. Websites just did not offer the same platform to have multiple students working together online on the same project.

Same

Different

-      Easy to construct -      Can embed video, photos, diagrams, documents -      The ability to include large amounts of information and teaching area content -      Ability to classify included content according to topics -      Can create links to other online sources -      Presentation styles can be greatly varied and customised

Blogs: -      Chronological sequence by date of posts -      More journalistic in nature -      Usually focused on one topic -      Interaction between users mainly via comments Websites: -      More content and information focused -      Can include a blog -      Content and usage controlled by creator Wikis: -      Online collaboration spaces -      Much easier to create classroom tasks and projects -      All members are able to edit, add, delete and change -      Edit functions can be easily setup and individualised for each page -      Assessment schedules and updates -      Creation and assignment of students to online teams -      Can easily incorporate different scaffolding tools and templates -      Intuitive display and navigation setup -      Permission settings allow setup of a safe place for students in cyber space

So after evaluating these aspects, I focused more attention on constructing a wikispaces classroom site for a pretend Year 8 Business class. I was able to create various components, including:

• a Voki that welcomed students and introduced some of the things they could do on the site
• navigation to each topic area of the content covered, including a unit overview
• humerous pictures to grab student attention
• YouTube videos
• links to websites with further information on selected topics
• PowToons animated slideshow presentation about income and expenses (this was so much fun!!)
• add assessment events in a schedule for students to track when projects are due
• create online activities for students to participate in
• assign students to teams/groups
• set preparation tasks for in-class activities
• documents and templates for students to download
• discussion forum that could be used to post updates, encourage questions and for communication among students

• set permission rules to ensure the safety of students online, but still allow suitable public access (for example parents to view student work)

It was interesting to see the ways that some of these embedded online tools could be used on a stand-along basis as great teaching resources. For example, this teacher has used the Voki Classroom in a really interesting way. While going through the learning materials for this week, a few ideas stuck with me, that I envisioned being able to incorporate into my wiki also:

• a student created textbook (this could be a fantastic research motivator or revision tool)
• a page for progressive note-taking that could be used for end of unit review
• upload student work for other students, classes, teachers or parents to view

Linking the design aspects to theory

As I was constructing my wiki classroom space, I referred to the SAMR model and deliberately incorporated different design aspects that could be linked to each level of technology integration.

SAMR Model for Year 8 Business class wiki

Redefinition	Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable	Students collaborate within wiki to create an online virtual textbook about Income & Expenses that includes videos, photos, animations, presentations, student recorded podcasts, links to other sources and documents. Students receive feedback via a YouTube video created by the teacher and embedded in the wiki, comments from other students and people in the ‘real world’.
Modification	Technology allows for significant task redesign	Students can collaborate through an online project within wiki to create a joint SlideShare or YouTube presentation on Income & Expenses. Students receive feedback from the teacher via an embedded audio file in the wiki project page and comments posted by other students.
Augmentation	Technology acts as direct tool substitute, with functional improvement	Students can create and share their own SlideShare presentation about their personal income & expenses on wiki. Students receive feedback via comments posted by the teacher in the wiki project page.
Substitution	Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change	Students view PowerPoint presentation on the topic ‘Income & Expenses’ that has been uploaded into wiki. Feedback is received from marked criteria sheets that are scanned and uploaded for students to review.

(Adapted from table source: http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/) 

I also wanted to include the following table, as I was able to use some ideas from this, when I was constructing the activities to use in my wiki.

 

Source: Google images

I also returned to Bloom's Taxonomy and contemplated how the redefinition of classroom activities through the use of my wiki classroom would be able to support students to synthesize the content I was delivering at various levels within this framework. It was important to me that students could be given the proper scaffolds to enable them to demonstrate some higher order thinking. Similar to the pictorial illustration of the pyramid below, I didn't want to undervalue the importance of first building within my students a solid foundation of Knowledge and Comprehension of the content I was teaching. The use of the wiki did enable me to explore some fun, attention-grabbing and novel ways of delivering this to students, through the use of Powtoons animation, links to websites about savings accounts and a YouTube video that had tips for teens to save money, as well as the written contents about each topic in the wiki pages.

Source: Google images

Through the projects area of the wiki I experimented with some of the teaching resources we were given, such as PMI's and Flowcharts, to develop some activities that would allow students to practice applying their knowledge, solve problems such as budgeting within an allowance, synthesize knowledge  about their own income and expenses to be able to understand new concepts about types of transactions and be able to evaluate the benefits of saving money regularly.

Source: Google images

Putting all of these wiki classroom functions together gave me some better, or increased context to the TPACK model, where we should be merging our content, pedagogy and technology knowledgebase to create and facilitate learner-centred activities. My recollection of endless, uninspiring processions of dull OHP sheets in my old high school classes are being gratefully replaced with these new possibilities enabled by IT, that I will be able to use as a teacher. Who's excited about this? - ME!! (and hopefully my future students too!)

Reflection 1 - Week 2

Mobile phones in Schools - What do you think?

The stated intention for this activity is to provide an example of a scaffold that will effectively support higher order thinking and learning outcomes. The topic for discussion – mobile phone use in schools. I have to admit that if I had been given this as a linear activity of 1. Topic and 2. Discussion; I would most likely have only looked at it from a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ perspective or PMI’s (Positives, Minuses and Interesting).

In terms of learning theory, certainly this activity moved beyond the teacher focused areas of Behaviourism and Cognitivism. If Behaviourism as a learning theory, posits that students learn through practice, then having to repeatedly load the wikispace and re-enter my contribution due to the technical difficulties with the site, gave me ample understanding of how this might be a less than stimulating or even frustrating way of learning. It also highlighted that an important aspect of using ICTs for teaching would be advance testing, having a backup plan, ensuring that whatever application you are utilising is relatively bug free and that technical difficulties are minimised for students.

Source: onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com

 

I did think that sites like Mathletics or Reading Eggs would be good examples of this type of Behaviourism learning, where students repeatedly cover basic concepts and content. The learning strategies these sites use include multiple choice quizzes and pre-recorded explanations and they also effectively use positive reinforcement with colourful and visually appealing presentation and reward systems.

 



The design aspects of the de Bono's Thinking Hats wiki activity incorporated:

-    Online student collaboration: this was certainly demonstrative of Constructivism learning theory with the features of collaboration and self-guided learning through research and discovery of information about the topic. Connectivism was also evident as I connected with other students to share ideas, gain some perspectives I had not considered, via a medium that allowed us to share various types of content, images and videos with each other in  a way that was pretty much self directed.

 

-    Scaffolding the activity with De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats: this was not something I had come across before. Having now been exposed to this, it makes perfect logical sense and was a powerful and effective demonstration to consider just how important it can be to properly consider how you scaffold a learning experience, if you are expecting students to delve deeper in their analysis and achieve better learning outcomes.

 

 

 

-     A topic that is relevant and interesting to the learners: the relevance to us as pre-service teachers was obvious and reading the comments of other students indicated this was an interesting topic with some quite strong views expressed. This incorporated many of the aspects we covered in knowing your learner and understanding how to structure information to ensure it is effectively processed and stored by your learners’ brains.

 

 

So the value of this scaffolding was apparent to me, where I moved my thinking beyond the yes and no sides of this issue and considered a range of perspectives, information and questions. It also provided an abundance of responses, content, links to other sources and opinions from other students. This genuinely lead me to a more informed and considered opinion of what my stance would be in this currently ongoing debate about mobile phone use in schools. There were implications for what sort of student behaviours, risks, policies, learning strategies and ethical issues I will very soon be confronted with on prac. My learning outcomes were so much broader than I initially expected. I did realise how pertinent this issue was, that it was something I would need to be informed about before I started prac – to find out what my school’s policies and disciplinary actions are. Most importantly though, it did encourage me to explore further positive, creative uses for mobile phones within my planning of learning activities that would be appealing and interesting to my students.