Final Course Reflection

As I've not had a lot of experience with technology in the classroom this course has really thrown me in the deep end. It has been requested that all teachers at our school enrol in the course which I really was not too thrilled about, particularly while trying to complete the course with reports hanging over our head, wworking in a library with 2 Kindergarten classes and 60 students, having to move a classroom and set up a whole new room and then on top of that come in after school and during the school holidays to finsih completing this course. My head feels like a sieve and I have not had a break, it's non stop all the time (and then people wonder why teachers need so many sick days - our bodies just never have a breather)! Now that i've had my little rant, to be honest I feel that the course was INFORMATION OVERLOAD and perhaps, we should have a whole year to complete the course. In that year, there should be a couple modules to complete each term. This would enable us to look clearly at the Web 2.0 tools that are quite clearly useful in our classroom.

During the course, I commented on MRS C's blogspot:
http://mynameismrsc.blogspot.com/2010/05/module-2.html#comments


Now for my final reflections on iLe@rn and Blooms Digital Taxonomy:

iLE@RN for Kindergarten can be a scarey subject to brooch. Engaging, learning environments (physical & virtual environments) where students are constantly learning. Students are lucky to live in a generation where we have access to information at our fingertips. With the use of laptops, ipods and mobile phones, students can access this information (anything) 'anytime, anywhere'. As educators, we must provide structures to enable our students to develop skills in these areas to facilitate the development of reflective and responsible learners. It is a little hard for Kindy students to network internationally, with no boundaries (they don't understand these boundaries at such a young age) in a global and local building community
(Information from the eLearning witht he iLe@rn Model video).

The skills that may be brought forward by Kindergarten students would be communication and coolaboration skills, questioning skills (they do ask a LOT of questions) and perhaps they may be starting to reflect in some form.

A pro with the iLE@RN model is that everyone comes to the table bringing their own skills and individuality. YOu can then work at your own pace and in the end, still achieve the same outcomes as everyone else.

BLOOMS TAXONOMY - BLOOMS DIGITALLY
As a teacher we are CONSTANTLY (or we should be) referring to Bloom's Taxonomy to cater for our students and really help them to start using those higher order thinking skills. Again, I've only ever taught Kindergarten and I do sometimes find it challenging to get anywhere above the applying stage. When planning for curriculum, it is important to refer to the digital taxonomy to begin the process of fostering these higher order thinking skills. Andrew Churches' diagram (Blooms digital taxonomy map) is very simple and clearlly tells you what skills are needed for each of the key terms.

Second Life - Could belong to Evaluating or Creating. Second Life allows students to work collaboratively and network, while at the same time, they are programming and animating a story (through different ages).

MODULE 10

How can Web 2.0 assist in improving learning outcomes for all students?

Information OVERLOAD for students? Perhaps! I have a solution, use DELICIOUS to bookmark the 50 tools to Tell A Story. The tools are broken up into the following categories: slide shows, timeline tools, mixer tools, comic/sketch tools, collage tools (glogster is in there!), map tools, audio tools, video tools, fickr tools & presentation tools. The website states the obvious..not to try to review or try every single tool, but simply to pick one which sounds interesting and try to do something with it. That is what we can ask of our students (and our teachers). The online realm is something that is highly appealing to the vast majority of students. We can tap in to our students' likes and experiences through the use of WEB 2.0 tools and help to generate and faciliate a genuine love of learning and willingness to participate.

Module 9

Our school had a scootle account and although it is quite expensive, it is definately worth the money. I'm not really interested in reading other teachers comments and suggestions because we as teachers quite simply - don't have time! Scootle has many resources for people to share with one another but to be honest, I really am a fan of FREE SITES that teachers upload to. Yes we need to go through the resources, however we would have to do that anyway to see if it is valuable or worth using.

I'm not sure of what the benefit of posting links to facebook and twitter is for this module if we are not going to be using those sites as a way of communicating with students. I understand the purpose of it when social networking, but that's just it, it is social networking, not a classroom resource.

With social life, I was unable to access it through SAO so unable to see how it relates to primary students.

Module 8

RSS Feeds - what exactly does RSS mean? Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. I still don't know what it means, but I'm really liking the idea. As a religious viewer of the FIFA World Cup games, I've added the FIFA.com website and now I am able to view all news updates from the site. I can see the benefit of this branching out to the classroom. I'm a regular viewer of teacherstv and if I add a subscription to that on my RSS feed, then I'd get updated podcasts/videos from that site. I think it would be a good teacher resource but, I'm not certain that it is a resource children should be using at school. It would be very hard to monitor the content that is being filtered through to students.

Module 7

Delicious is a FANTASTIC way to bookmark. Not only does it save loading favourites to your computer but it is portable. You can log in to your favourites on delicious from any computer that has internet access without having to write sites down or save them to your usb. I love the fact that it has a 'network' associated with it. How easy is it to share links with friends or colleagues without having to do a thing. Of course, we need to remember to make the link public! Being able to save personal links and keep those links private is also another benefit of using Delicious.

Uses in the classroom for older students: when researching, students who have a delicious account could bookmark the sites for sharing and viewing with others in the class..WOW!!!

Module 6

I am relatively new to teaching. This is my 4th year of teaching on Kindergarten so I don't really have any experience using technology with older grades. I can see the benefits of using the bubbl.us website and glogster in a classroom that has ample technology for students to use.
I had a look at a glog titled Decisions, Decisions. Seeing someone elses glog helps to stimulate ideas. The glog itself was pretty ordinary and set out very simply but so effective for delivering the content in a visually appealing way. I would love to try this with an older grade when I change classes. It is very straight forward and easy to use and the children can pretty much navigate through the glog site on their own.

Module 5

WOW - i love this!!

This is the stuff that I would use in the classroom. Being a kindergarten teacher this year, I have used a few of these things. Podcasts and vodcasts are new to me and I look forward to looking into them furthur (when I get some time!). I use itunes for lesson breakers and morning prayer songs and I also use youtube for many lessons. You tube is an excellent way of finding many short videos to use in class with students. Counting, number work and phonics are things that I look for for my class on youtube. Every week I choose a new daily clip for the class, so that it does not get too repetitive or boring for them. They also have their favourites!
I also view many teacher tv clips not through youtube, but through the teacherstv website. You must join to view the clips.