Reflective Synopsis

My e-learning journal has come a long way in 8 weeks. I used to think I wasn’t too bad with computer technology, having made a few PowerPoint’s in my previous positions and using face book, utube and Wikipedia. How little did I know? ICT’s for Learning Design has been a very long and often arduous journey but it has also been very interesting and at times exciting. I quickly learnt that I still had a lot to learn about what technologies are available to help us provide education for students in a way that keeps them engaged and wanting to learn. When we first had to set up our Blog it seemed weird and I didn’t quite understand what was meant of us. However, once I started engaging in the different tasks it became apparent that our Blog was a way to document and display our learning achievements for others to view and comment on if they liked. My first task was the Voki; we had seen these on Residential school with Scot and also in our online study guides. Definitely more fun to create our own. This technology is the epitome of the Engagement theory allow us and students to Relate (find the topic they want to talk about)-Create (The Voki)-Donate (Publish it to their blog or the web). Students could pick a topic say the “Heart”, research information about it, summarise and put into their own words to put to a Voki to teach to their peers. This would also encompass Bloom’s Taxonomy with needing comprehension skills in summarising and relaying back in their own words. With modern society trying to achieve more student-centred learning and steer away from the traditional chalk and talk modalities, teachers need to arm themselves with more and more entertaining material and techniques to keep students engaged. Schools are traditionally Mode 1 learning, however, nowadays teachers need to focus on Mode 2 learning which is produced in diverse sites, produced in teams, subject to peer review, global, and produced in the context of application. A Wiki is a good example of student-centred mode 2 learning. In my Action Plan for a unit on Recycling in Year 12 Multistrand science I have indicated that the students will use Wikis to formulate plans and techniques to re-engage the community in recycling. The Wikipedia online is a perfect example of this. Mahara is an online storage device that students and teachers can use to store everything they need in relation to school or work. This can be utilised to keep track of certificates and awards, assignments, resumes and even your blog it should be introduced to students as early as possible. There is even the potential with Glogs, wikis and web quests to go almost paperless for projects at school. My Mentor teacher has student email him their drafts of assignments and he emails back. I will definitely be adopting this practice as a teacher and encouraging the use of online assessments rather than paper copies. PowerPoint’s are the form of technology that most teachers will use, they are quite easy to prepare and give the students something more interesting to look at than the textbook. Inserting utube videos into the PowerPoint was new for me but something I have latched onto in my lessons. There is an amazing amount of utube videos already produced on every topic imaginable. This would be a great assessment task for students, providing them with an authentic situation, recording a video on the topic of their choice to publish on utube. Here it will be viewed and commented on by all different people so the incentive produce a worthwhile product is high. This would also be useful to encourage them to produce videos to teach another grade or even the general public, which ties in with the Active Learning theory and Dales Cone, giving the students direct, purposeful experiences. Other technologies we have learnt were Flickr and Piknik, the former being a free website of pictures that can be used without concern of copyright. Piknik is a picture altering site where you can add and enhance pictures for publishing. Costa’s 16 Habits of mind “are dispositions that are skilfully and mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent, successful people when they are confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent.” My post of the Autistic teen is a classic example of the Persisting phase of these habits, which really made me think about how I perceive others and what each individual can achieve given the right avenues and support. Realizing that each student learns in a wide variety of ways, it is necessary for us as teachers to provide for these differences through the persistent use of a variety of teaching strategies that take into account the diverse ways that students learn. We can try to do this by stimulating active participation by all students, providing challenges, and opportunities to collaborate with others. The interactive white board and Gizmos do just that. Gizmos are online learning tools and lesson plans specifically created to help engage students and give them an interactive learning experience, a way of bringing the world to them by way of virtual experiments. These work superbly on the interactive whiteboards. These encompass all of Marzano and Pickering’s Dimensions of learning(1997); the students are positive about learning, they acquire and integrate the knowledge, extend and refine this by analysing and comparing, making decisions and investigating and solving problems and finally seeking to be accurate, persevering and using the necessary resources to get the answers. Devolver and Storybird both allow for engagement and active learning. The students can create either a dialogue or a story to publish to the web. They are both easy to use and a lot of fun. This would also encompass the higher order level of thinking required in Blooms Taxonomy of comprehension, analysis and synthesis. I would use these applications for students to do peer teaching as part of their assessment; they could break down a particular topic and reword it to appeal to a younger age group. This would help both classes, with literacy skills and the Dimensions of Learning. Incompetech is a site for royalty free music and therefore like Flickr is ideal for students to access for assignments. It has a wide range of music and I would use these as a component in my teaching. I have read widely about the benefits of music whilst learning and find that I myself prefer background music on while I am studying so I am keen to implement this. Google earth is a relative treasure trove of possibilities, definitely not what I had expected. It has options unlimited for all areas of teaching and would work exceptionally well with an interactive whiteboard. This would be opportune for discussing current events and tapping into the authentic topics.
Reference List
ACU Adams Centre for Teaching Excellence. (2000). Dales Cone. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from Active Learning Online: http://www.acu.edu/cte/activelearning/classroom_comprehension.htm
Aldred, S. (2009) Effective E-Learning: Authentic learning and assessment. FAHE11001 Managing E-Learning, viewed 5 August 2009, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=641
Bloom B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.

Costa, A. (2010). Describing the 16 habits of mind. Retrieved from http://www.mindfulbydesign.com/about-habits-mind
Dryden, G. V. (1999). The Learning Revolution. Auckland: The Learning Web Ltd.
Heath, G. (2001) Teacher Education and the New Knowledge Environment: RMIT University: Fremantle
Houghton, J. & Sheehan, P. (2000). A primer on the Knowledge Economy. Melbourne. Victoria University
Kearsley, G & Schneiderman, B (1999) Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning viewed July 14 2009, http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm
Marzano, R.J., & Pickering, D.J. (1997). Dimensions of learning: Teacher’s manual (2nd ed). Aurora, Colarado, USA: McREL (Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory)
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