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.

Module 4

Flickr...yuck!!! I find flickr to be a waste of time (for me personally). With so many programs on your own computer to edit photos and other social networking sites to post photos and communicate electronically, why on earth would someone want to create a whole new account to post and edit photos? Seems like more work to me.

I'm not exactly sure yet where or how I would use Flickr with my students but with furthur personal use (to change my mindset of this tools and to familarise myself a little more with its editing features) I may find a purpose for it in my classroom.

I was not aware of the "Creative commons organisation" until this module. It can be a great way to organising and sharing of "cultural, educational and scientific content." It allows indiciduals and creators to give permission for use of part or all of their material.

Module 3

I found google docs to be a highly valueable tool and very easy to use. My practise google doc that I created was for my taskboard session. Parents entered their name and selected morning or afternoons that they were available and selected activities that they were available for. At the end I was able to receive all information in an excel format and it was very easy to read.

There are many uses for docs. One that I am thinking about using in the near future is for student assessment and feedback. Particularly with the younger students, I think that it's a very easy format for them, all they need to do is read a question and tick a box. How easy!

Module 2

SUCCESS! Well at least that's what I'm saying to myself. After not being able to create a gadget for my igoogle page and working myself to a frenzy due to frustration, I now feel like a normal human being again. I completed module 2 almost 2 months ago, however I did not post a blog straight away.

Creating a blog is actually quite simple and straight foward. I have also managed to help other teachers from my school create their blog long after I created my own. Blog use in the classroom can be lots of fun and very enticing to our students. In the older grades, students could make their own blogs to demonstate their understandings of particular topics or subjects. In the younger classes, teachers could make blogs on particular points of interest which the younger children can look up at school or home.

A blog can be as simple or intricate as you intend it to be. There are no rules (which is exactly what we like) and if you make a mistake, you can always delete or even start again. Blogs are a great way to experience and interact electronically with people and to keep the intended audience informed. If there were more hours in the day, I could certainly spend a few of them creating blogs. =)

Module 1 - part 1

WELCOME TO MY BLOG SPOT

MODULE 1 REFLECTION

As you can see from my picture, Module 1 proved to be very frustrating. Watching the videos and related links for Web2.0 and making an iGoogle account were very straight forward and quite simple. The frustration (and trouble) began when trying to make my own iGoogle gadget. After about an hour of playing around with this, I have up and submitted to failing this component of Module 1 (for now). I will seek assistance from other users and then attempt to complete that component again.

In terms of instructions giving to create a gadget, I found that there was not enough straight forward information provided. The information that was given was not useful to me. I google searched other ways to create a gadget and attempted a number of times to make my own, and failed on all occasion's.

I have not given up hope and will return. Stay tuned for part 2 of my Module 1 posting over the next few weeks.