blog

Authentic Learning and wiki's

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:47:57 +0100

Yesterday in our final tutorial for this unit we got to present and watch everyone’s group wiki presentations.Our group decided to go first and I was really pleased with the outcome of our movie, but after seeing other groups present their work I realised that some of theirs was heaps more engaging. One group that did really well was the girly geeks, I think this is because they chose to stand up and present their work to the class on the day. They chose to do their topic on healthy eating which I thought was a great idea because it’s not only a great authentic task to work with it also install’s really good morals for young minds that they will hopefully grow up with and help the world become a more healthy place. Another group that impressed me was Hakuna Matata, they did their presentation using imovie and used humour and quirkiness which I think achieved a more engaged class and really got everyone’s attention. It was really interesting to see what other groups had come up with, how they worked together, and how they visually chose to present their wiki. Everyone put in a lot of effort and seemed to come up with really different ideas that I think would work great in primary schools.

Watching the wiki’s brought everything into perspective and showed me how far we had all come since the start when everyone was stressed out and confused about what was needed to be done. I think that authentic learning has been a huge challenge for most of the students in this unit including myself, but in a good way because it has pushed barriers and made us go that step further into our learning. Authentic learning is a perfect way to learn as students becoming future teachers as I suspect there will be many times in my near future that I will be continuing to learn new things and be highly creative on my own without the guidance of a tutor or any sort of support person there to help.

I definitely think I will be using authentic learning in my classrooms no matter what the year group, because as an adult now I wish my teachers had of exposed me to this style of thinking. Now that I have come to an end in this unit I can really look back and reflect on it. I feel that this unit has given something to me that no other learning environment has and that’s the ability to push myself and come up with what I think is a more creative end product. Authentic learning gives students the option to express their own personal creative styles because they are not pushed to do something one way or the high way. I can see now this will greatly benefit all students in being confident with their work and rewarding them massively at the end.

YouTube and TeachersTube

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:45:33 +0100

For our group assignment I have been looking through some different resource’s to use, that will work well for giving teachers advice and enhance students learning environment. I have found that YouTube and TeachersTube are great ways to communicate information to either teachers or students. They are good because they provide all the information you want to know on whatever the topic is you’re interested in, using video (short movies). This is a very visual way of delivering knowledge and I think as teachers we should all provide this sort of learning as an option to those who learn better through seeing things happen. They would also make good websites for teachers who want to present something to their students in class. Teachers can create the movie at home in their own time, upload it to YouTube/TeachersTube and then show the class the movie. This makes the teacher’s video very accessible and easy to set up, saving time. If you want to check out these websites for yourself please click on the link provided below;
YouTube
TeachersTube

BLT group contact.

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:47:12 +0100

My group for assignment three includes Tash, Lisa and I, we decided on the very first day when we chose our group that a good contact source was to create a private group on facebook where we could all chat. This as proved to be very useful as it is quick and non complicated. My group has been a pleasure to work we so far and since we have worked out what to do for this assignmnet I think we will all work together now to produce something great!

I have supplied an image below to show you what a facebook group looks like :)

As you can see in the picture, once you have logged onto facebook all you need to do and go down to groups and select BLT (or whatever your group name is). From there it is really simple and you can just read what group members have posted o you can write something yourself, it is a brillant social network to use expecially for something like this.

Surprise Learning

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:34:10 +0100

Today I went to Harvey Norman with my little sister (Kimberley) to help her pick out a new laptop for university as her old one is getting fairly old. She didn’t really know what she was looking for or needed and usually I could ask a staff member on the floor, but to my surprise I knew what most of the computer codes meant. I was pretty proud of myself because I am used to being quite hopeless with this sort of thing, but I understood that RAM was the random access memory, so short term memory, GB means gigabytes, that core i3/i5/i7 tells you how fast the processer is and so on. I know all of these things thanks to a lecture I went to for this unit in week six, where we had a guest speaker come in and explain how a computer works in detail. I never realised how important these things were to know and how helpful knowing this information could be and I am very thankful to this unit for explaining it to me. I will now be able to choose the right laptop or desktop to suit my needs either as a student or teacher in the years to come. J

Group Assignment - Frustration!!

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:30:17 +0100

It is now week 10 and I feel as though our group has got nowhere with this assignment, Today we had our second three hour meeting and we are all so confused about what is actually supposed to be done? Do we put all of our information about the resource on the wiki? Or do we do to it on our personal website? There are so many questions we need answered and it feels as though time is running low, I feel that we are wasting so much time and energy just trying to rap our minds about what is being asked of us when we could be creating our authentic learning resource. This has not come at a good time with all our assignments in other units being due and not having any classes for these past two weeks. I am really frustrated, I have posted a question on the discussion board which I am now waiting for a reply, I hope that it will clear a few things up, but until then I guess I’ll just have to keep looking though the wiki page and companion website to see if I can get a better understanding of this.

I do think that the idea of what is needed to be done is a good one and I think once I can comprehend the task I will be keeping this idea tucked away somewhere safe so that I can use it when I am teaching a class in the future.

Endnote vs. Microsoft Word referencing

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:35:32 +0100

I have been using endnote for my researcher assignment but I have found that it confuses me more than doing the reference on my own, so it’s not worth it. I think that a problem I have with it isn’t helping my chances, I looked up the help information linked in on the endnote program because I was confused as to why it never automatically put a tab in my 2010 word program. The help program didn’t actually give me any information as to why these never happen so I went on to YouTube to maybe find a video on how to fix the problem. I did find some helpful videos on how to use the program but none on how to get the tab in word, so I then searched Google but still nothing. So for now I have decided to use the Microsoft word referencing and I really like it, It is so much simpler to use and I think the program has a much better design, I’m very happy with it.

I would still like to learn how to use endnote, so I have asked a friend in his third year who studies at Curtin university to help me out with it, he is coming around to give me a lesson on it in a few days so until then I will stick with the word referencing and maybe if I decide endnote is okay after I learn to use it right I will go back to it.

Researcher Assignment

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:16:08 +0100

When my class was first told about this assignment I said to Lisa “oh cool doesn’t seem to hard”, I straight away decided I was going to do the assignment on dance and the arts because that I what I have a passion for. When I started looking for information on the arts combined with technology and classroom learning I realised it was going to be harder than I originally thought. I started by looking on the Murdoch library site and typed in using technology for the arts it did look promising but whilst I was reading through what seemed like hundreds of articles I realised nothing really fully related to the all three topics combined. I decided to ask some other students whether they had struggled with the same problem, but many hadn’t because they had chosen maths or literacy and there was heaps of information on it. I did think about changing my topic but I really wanted to do it so I’m going to stick with it.

I have so far had a little more luck I have found a movie on a website from Google search and a journal article from Murdoch, so I feel like I’m defiantly getting somewhere. The more I look for information the easy it gets and the better I get at it, this unit has surprisingly given me a lot more confidence around computers and I feel much more capable in my other units because of it.

Assignment 1B

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:44:38 +0100

FINISHED!

I have officially created my social resource for assignment 1B, it has been a fairly confusing process for me. There have been so many people telling us different things tutors saying one thing students saying another it was a little difficult to actually figure out what needed to be done.

So to start off with I thought I figured I would think of the event I wanted to use for my assignment I decided to go with a mothers get together club because I can relate to it and I thought many people would be interested in something like that. I also asked around my class to see what sorts of the things other people had thought of doing, many had chosen to do a wedding or birthday party so I thought mine was a bit different so stuck with it.

I then added into my menu my assignment 1B page and started to write about what my event involved, I didn’t want to just write all of my instructions of how to use my resource on the webpage so I decided to do it through power point. To do this I had to learn how to take a screen shot and in a previous blog I explained that to you, it took a little while but with the help of the program Jing I am in love with how easy this is to do and I will continue to use this new tool all the time.

Once I completed my power point I was having trouble with upload it onto my webpage so I went to the discussion board to see if anyone else was having any of the same problems, turns out they were and some of the students on there showed me how to change my file to a PDF which i thought worked a treat, but turns out it loaded to my webpage but the link didn't actually work. I then asked my friend Jayde, and she suggested i change my file type through 'save as' a few times and see which one works i did this and it is now working.

After all the confusion on what the tutors were asking us to do on this assignment it turned out to be a pretty simple task that I have learnt a lot from.

I have also changed my website a fair bit since I got my peer review which was pretty bad because I had not yet completed my assignment and had nothing on the site to let my peer know, so I have learnt from that for next time.

Diigo

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:34:00 +0100

A few days ago I was having a look through the companion site and checking out what the sugggested technologies were, I came aross Diigo and wasn't to sure what it was but thought i'd download it and have a play. Well at the time I wish I hadn't downloaded it but I had so much hassle with it. At first I followed all the link of the home page of the website and it downloaded okay but when it came to opening the program it wouldn't let me, it kept telling me to reset the computer so it could finish it's downloads. When I tried to do this my computer would not close down at all, I decided to ask my sister what she thought and she said I may have downloaded a virus if nothing I did would shut down the system, this scared me a little. I then texted Lisa another student at Murdoch in this unit and ask her if she had any problems with the downloading process, but she said no everything had gone smoothly. So I elimated the chance of it being a virus even though I had already thought this would be extremely unlikely considering the website came from Murdoch's recommedation. So by this time I had enouugh and closed my computer down via the power button.

I came back to it a few hours later, nice and fresh and my computer opened up perfectly and all the links for diigo worked. So no one or myself knows why these problems occured but it's all working now. I have now been experimenting with Diigo for the last few days and have actually found it to be useful. The program allows you to highlight, bookmark, send things to social networking sites, save bits and pieces off webpage's and read them later and has an easy to use favourites and library.

I have actually used Diigo mostly for another unit I am currently in called creativity and innovation as I had to do a lot of reading and research for an essay I have just completed. Diigo came in handy for highlight and saving information that I could use to put into my assignment. I haven't yet used it for this unit but I'm sure I will need it at some point.

Just below here I have used Jing to do a screen capture of the Diigo toolbar, just do give you an idea of how it looks.

Talk soon.

Jing

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:29:58 +0100

I recently found this new tool called Jing. I came across it because I wanted to know how to take a picture of my screen for my assignment 1B. So i went to Google and typed in - screen shot and the first thing that came up was Jing, the website didn't really tell me much about how it worked, so i looked up a YouTube video to find out some more information on it before I downloaded it. I have put up the link of the video I watched about the tool, just click here.

Jing is really great it makes taking a picture of your screen so easy and is fairly hidden away so that it's not in the way of anything on your page. I'm so glad I came across this tool as i will be using it on a regular basis from now on.