week 4

THE LEARNING FEDERATION

Having registered with the Learning Federation I was able this week to look over the amazing educational multimedia resources the Federation is able to offer teachers and students. This website offers resources on nearly every curriculum area that is covered from P-12. It offers links to museums, war memorials, National Archives of Australia and art galleries, to name just a few. Nearly anything you can think of is on this website! This tool will be so useful next year when I start my teaching career. There's information on any topic and you can just follow the links to find out about specific areas such as archeology, art, mathematics, social sciences, etc. It will be great to have a resource to go to if there's something in curriculum that I don't know much about and I log onto this website and not only find out about the topic but be given a multimedia resource to teach the topic to my class. It also offers assessment of students work online so teacher's are not burdened with never ending amounts of marking. So the students can go online, learn about a topic, do the activities and be graded by the program. I think teachers can use all the help they can get!!

EXCEL

M&M spreadsheet

In this week's workshop, we grouped the colours of a packet of m&m's and counted how many in each group. We then put them into an excel spreadsheet. I really like excel, I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's really organised...? There are so many wonderful things you can do on excel, not only for maths. While maths is the obvious one with entering data and creating spreadsheets, literacy, ICT and other skills can be used also. Excel can be used to create surveys and analyse the data (literacy and possibly numeracy), create timelines (literacy) and create graphs or pictographs (literacy and numeracy).

There are many other online programs that allow you to create spreadsheets and graphs such as MathGV which allows you create polar graphs, cartesian graphs and dimensional graphs. You can even create artistic graphs that look amazing! Smart Draw offers the same graph building software but also includes mindmaps, timelines, flowcharts and organisation charts, plus much more. There are endless amounts of software out there that can be used successfully in the classroom. I haven't had the experience of seeing students using this type of product on placement yet but I believe it would be quite valuable for older students. These programs are also great time savers as students can spend ages just drawing up the graphs but if the template is there already for them to use, they just add the data and they're away!

Inspiration 8.0I

ABC Dust Echoes - Spear

This week's Dust Echoes activity showed me a great way of testing students comprehension without having to give them boring questions to answer in their literacy books. I am always struggling with new ways of testing students comprehension so that they don't get bored and neither do I! This idea would work with many different programs including concept mapping, mind mapping or even just Word. Kidspiration is another great online resource. It's similar to Inspiration except that it's designed for students up to grade 5. Students can develop their literacy, numeracy, ICT and art skills with this program. It also strengthens students thinking skills by allowing them to create mind and concept maps.

Another way the fantastic Dust Echoes dreamtime stories can be used is to get students to create their own animations based on the particular topic they might be studying at the time. Online software such as FluxTime Studio or Toon Boom Animation allow students to create their own animations and share them with others. Students will love creating their own animations and will be developing their literacy, ICT, thinking and art skills while they do so!

week 3

QUIA GAMES

Hangman

Products such as Quia are amazing assets to have in the classroom. In this week's workshop, we created online quizzes and games. The great thing about Quia is that you can use these products to strengthen students literacy, numeracy and ICT skills while they're having fun! I created a hangman game based on African animals which was fun and educational. There were example games based around the Presidents of the USA, which could quite easily be replicated to create a game based on the Australia Prime Ministers. Students can learn about history and have fun at the same time. Playing games is a much better and more effective method to teach students material as opposed to giving them paper tests or encouraging rote memorisation.

I also used Quia to create an online quiz about the Simpsons. Of course, you can use Quia yourself as a teacher and create the quizzes based on the unit of work your class is completing or you can get the students to create their own. They are developing their literacy skills whilst creating a quiz about things that interest them. They can also share their quiz with other students which not only develops other students literacy skills but also lets students share their interests with their peers.

Quia also has online maths games which I think are fantastic. Most of the schools I have been in this year have had these programs and at least 4 or 5 students are asked to use them during the designated maths time. However, even during free time, I noticed several students playing online maths games. Getting students to learn without them realising they're learning is often very effective. Students just think they're having fun but they're learning at the same time.

SPECIAL EDUCATION ICT

In my final placement working in a special needs school, ICT has been very important. Many students are unable to communicate verbally and therefore ICT is often their only method of communication. Products such as DynaVox allow students to use technology to communicate their feelings, needs and answers to questions in class, at home or in the community. While it often takes quite a while for these students to convey their messages, if it were not for this technology, these students would have great difficulty communicating.

Even for the students who can communicate verbally, ICT plays a huge part in the special education classroom. Programs such as Galaxy Kids is used nearly everyday for students who are autistic or have concentration problems. Galaxy Kids offers a learning to read multimedia program which allows students to click on their reading level and hear the story read to them before they then read the story themselves. Students can also click on different pictures and are taken to new pages where they can do an online comprehension activity based on what they have just read. While this product is great for all schools, it is especially valuable for special needs as it is incredibly interactive and can keep students attention for long periods of time which can be challenging when it's just the teacher at the front of the room reading a book.

Special needs students also respond quite well to sensory stimuli so ICT is brilliant at providing this. There was one girl in a class I was volunteering in earlier in the year who was obsessed with popping bubble wrap. She constantly had to have it in her hand and be popping it. The teacher downloaded this great program called virtual bubble wrap which the student used on the interactive whiteboard. Her face just lit up and it kept her entertained for quite a while which was unusual for this particular student.

FROG JUMP ACTIVITY

TECHNOLOGY DESIGN PROCESS

ACTIVITY
Design a frog that jumps using the materials provided:

cardboard card
picture of a frog
rubber band
sticky tape
glue-stick
scissors

What design process are you going to use?
Once completed test your frog to see that it jumps.
Then design a poster explaining the Design Process in specific detail showing all the stages/steps you went through in the making of the Jumping Frog.

This week's workshop activity in which we had to design a frog jump was great in highlighting that not everything needs to be ICT all the time. Getting kids to physically create is also a very important part of education and integrating physical design and ICT together can be fantastic. This was a very tricky one for me and my partner as we had no idea how to get the frog to jump! It required thinking outside of the box and was a lot of fun. This type of activity is a great engagement activity for the beginning of an ICT, literacy or even science lesson. This activity can be followed up by students going online and outlining their design process in a poster or even through procedural writing. Activities such as this promote higher order thinking and can be used to begin a variety of lessons.

Week 2

MICROSOFT PUBLISHER

I found this weeks workshop really useful. Firstly, the use of Publisher to create brochures was fantastic! I realise that many students probably know how to use Publisher with their eyes closed but I had really never used it before. When I was on placement, I was planning an integrated unit of work on safety for the grade 1 students and I wanted to get them to create a safety brochure that they could use to tell other younger students about how to be safe in your home, the road and the water. I had absolutely no idea how to go about creating a brochure on the computer. My mind flashed back to my high school days when I'm sure we had to create a brochure on the computer for an ICT class. I couldn't remember for the life of me what program we used. I tried word but it didn't really give me a proper format. In the end, I got the kids to type up their safety sentences, cut them out and paste them onto coloured cardboard which I had folded into three for them. I just wish I'd known about Publisher before I had conducted that lesson. Of course, in the end it didn't matter because the kids absolutely loved making the brochures with coloured paper and drawing their own pictures, etc. However, next time I think I'll give Publisher a try!!

Of course, Publisher can be a problem if you have a mac, which I do! So I found several other publishing programs that work on a mac including Swift Publisher (which is easy to use and can be used for professional or home activities such as newsletter, brochures, cards etc), Quark (which is for professional use but can be used by someone who is tech savvy or perhaps for design in high school classes) and Ragtime (which again can be used for professional or home purposes). These are just a few of the different types of publishing software out there that students can use to develop their literacy, art, numeracy and ICT skills.

Eportfolio

The discussion this week in the workshop about designing our eportfolio, applying for jobs and going for interviews was very daunting! After a very stressful and busy year completing my teaching diploma, the last thing I want to do is write 10 page job applications times 100! However, I realise that the education of children is so very important and it is incredibly essential that schools employ teachers who are dedicated, prepared and passionate. All the information we were given this week was invaluable and I feel that the process of going for jobs was made less ambiguous and uncertain.

Designing my eportfolio was another daunting task I was not looking forward to. However, a friend of mine put me onto an amazing website called scrapblog. Through this website I have begun creating an amazing eportfolio. This program allows you to add pictures, stickers, themes (ie school), photos and different backgrounds. My portfolio is starting to look amazing and I have thoroughly enjoyed creating it. Nonetheless, while technology does have the advantage of making things look amazing, it can take a lot of patience and a lot of time. Like the WebQuest we created for Integrated, this eportfolio has taken many many hours of work. Adding pictures, moving images, adding text, straightening things up and moving them around all takes a great deal of time. Like most things in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to using ICT. In this case, I do believe it was worth it as the end result speaks for itself!