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Authentic Learning: A Kayla take on it...

Sat, 26 May 2012 04:57:56 +0100

Authentic learning is the idea of teaching students in a way that applies to their real world situations.

Throughout my schooling experiences, I always found myself questioning the tasks set in front of me. Why am I doing this? What is the point? When will I EVER need to use this? Why should I want to do this? Authentic learning is about having answers to these questions.

I think the main reason that it's important to set authentic tasks for students is to motivate the students. If a student sees no reason to do a task, of course they're going to be reluctant. Even as a university student, I am still reluctant to complete tasks that I feel are irrelevant, and usually just achieve the bare minimum that I have to. The problem with this is that university students are their willingly working to achieve a degree, but school students are their because they have to be. Already this creates a motivation issue, so authentic learning helps to improve motivation issues.

When I was told I had to make an authentic learning task, I was a worried. In the end, my task was not as authentic as I might've hoped, but I still believe students would enjoy tackling my Assignment 3 task and would really engage with the information they're learning.

Here are some helpful links on Authentic Learning:
Authentic Learning Supported by Technology
Teaching as a subversive activity

Assignment 3: trials and tribulations...

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:43:28 +0100

So assignment 3 is done and dusted, and I have not blogged at all. Oops.

Anyway, i'm going to do a little recap of my experiences with assignment 3....

THE BEGINNING
So my group spent a good 2-3 weeks trying to figure out what we were actually going to do. None of us had a vague idea of what was actually being asked of us, and it seemed that almost all the ideas we threw out were somehow not right for task. Alas, we separated over break, reconvened when we got back to university and I had somewhat of an epiphany. Thus, our task was born...

NOW WHAT?
So we had an idea, now we had to work out what to do with it...
Wikispaces.
Don't get me wrong, Wikispaces is a great tool. It is also one of the most difficult sites I have ever used in my opinion. We struggled so hard making sure we had covered every component of our Wikispaces marking guide, from the pages, the tags to the navigation menu. It was by no means easy, and by the end of it I was given the task of setting up anything on Wikispaces (e.g. new page, linking) as my team mates just found it too confusing (which luckily I was fine with).

I also set up a Tumblr blog as an example of what we were asking for. It wasn't necessary, I just thought it would be beneficial as one might find our instructions confusing.

THE FINISHED PRODUCT
Our presentation was decent, but was not without technical difficulties. Of course, we lost our sound... So our class was left to watch some cool animations with a slight rumbling in the background. Fantastic.

Other than that, I think my group and I did a decent job (judging by our secret stalking of our peers wikispaces...) and we worked together quite well.
In the end, we my team members and I did not have set jobs. We found each other reliable enough to simply make a list of things that needed to be done, and just do them. We all ended up doing fairly equal amounts of work, and usually worked with whatever strong and weak points each of us had (e.g. me doing any confusing wikispaces things!).

REFLECTION
Would I do this task again? Probably not. I found the many constraints of this task quite confusing to account for, which caused our initial difficulty of finding a topic and activity.

Would I use my finished product? Maybe. I think by the end of it, we had a pretty good idea. I think kids would be a bit excited about the whole thing (although do kids really need to get more excited about the solar system?)

What would I change if I did this again? I would probably keep better track of where our images were taken from, for one. I'm not sure what else I would change, I guess i'll know when I get my marks back.

CROSSING MY FINGERS!

A little personal recap...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:04:55 +0100

Ok, so it's week 10 now, and Assignment 2 is due.
So far, I haven't had much of a problem with it. The only problem i've had, is one involving Mac vs Windows....

So part of the task is to use EndNote to reference a report written in Word. Now, I have a Mac computer, and I have Microsoft Word, for Mac. The problem with this is, unlike Microsoft Word for Windows, Mac Word has it's own inbuilt referencing program already. EndNote can be run within MS word for Windows, but not Mac. It can still be used, but it does not run together as such.

In the end I just uploaded my Word Document as well as my EndNote library.

Now to freak out about assignment 3. I am still not entirely sure what i'm supposed to be doing on this assignment...this is not good. My group and I have started communicating though, and I think they might have a better idea about it all. Lets all cross our fingers though...

The plan was to do something with space and the solar system I think, so that's a start. It was a part of the curriculum and lent itself to many activities, or at least I think it does. Only time will tell I guess.

That's pretty much all my feelings/thoughts/attitudes at the moment. It's going to be difficult getting up for next weeks early morning lecture after 3 weeks off, let's hope it's a good one :)

Twitter for Teaching

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:36:31 +0100

This is another post about an interesting recommended article I read, this time it was Top Tools for Learning 2011. What I found very interesting about this list, was that the number 1 Top Tool for Learning according to the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, was Twitter. Oh and by the way, it wasn't just number 1 for the year 2011, but also the year before, and the year before.

Now, I have a Twitter account, and have had one for quite some time now. I could not understand how it could possibly be the Top Tool for Learning. I immediately headed to Google to find out how this could be done and was greeted with a ridiculous number of hits.

I found this website, 100 Ways to Use Twitter in Education that explained the different ways teachers could use Twitter. Examples included ways to communicate between the teacher and other students as part of study, different features of Twitter that can be useful, as well as integrating Twitter into your assignments and tasks.

As a bit of a Twitter veteran, i'm genuinely dumbfounded that I didn't even think of these things myself. Evidently this is another great example of sharing ideas.

Teaching the Facebook generation

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:58:54 +0100

I recently read one of the articles listed in the recommended readings that I found very interesting. The article, Teaching the Facebook generation, talks about how so many encourage the use of social networking in schools, yet many schools ban such websites.

I already talked a little bit about using social networking in the classroom in my last blog post, but I didn't talk much about the consequences or what is preventing teachers from diving head first into this approach.

In my high school, like most schools, Facebook and Myspace were banned on the schools internet. This was to stop us getting distracted from doing our proper work. Of course, we students were more tech-savvy than some teachers thought us to be, and we quickly found ways around it. We would find 'Proxy Websites' that would allow us to access those sites and chat with our friends in the next room again. The IT department would then catch on, and block that particular proxy website. Our solution? Go find another proxy website. Easy.

I guess my point is this: You can't take the Facebook away from the Facebook generation. They will pretty much always find a way around it. It's like banning anything really, you are always going to have those few people that find a loophole. Plus, almost all teenagers these days are going to have a phone with Facebook.

I think that teachers should encourage social networking more, but create guidelines. Let students collaborate online for academic tasks, let them share information online. Like every task in school, it has to be monitored.

I personally feel much more comfortable in an open, collaborative classroom. My experience in high school was anything but that. Now that I am in university, I found the approach used in my classes to work so much better with me and other students I have spoken to. I only wish that my high school was more encouraging of such working environments, and I think that allowing social-networking online is a great way of doing that.

Online Teaching vs. Classroom teaching

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:26:34 +0100

One of the ideas that I keep running into is using Social Networking as a tool to enhance the learning of students.
A great example of this is Murdoch's LMS system, which allows students studying the same subject to ask each other questions and discuss the unit content.
I wanted to learn more about this, so I read up on chapter 5 of our book (Meaningful Learning with Technology) as to why using these tools is a good idea (or why not).

Face to face communication vs. online communication
So the main argument against having online discussion boards or other online tools is that it lacks the face-to-face conversations, so we lose out on any non-verbal communication. This can be an advantage however, as people think through their responses more on a text based discussion board as they have time to respond.
The way I thought about this, is if a teacher stops in the middle of the class and asks a difficult question, students are left puzzled and silent. If a teacher posts a question on a discussion board, students can stop, think about it, research anything they need to know, and then post an answer that better reflects their understanding.

Online communication knows no distance boundaries
Of course, the main difference between online communication and in-class communication, is that you don't all have to be in the same room. This means you could even post discussion boards between schools in the suburb, state, country or even internationally. This opens up a whole new learning experience altogether, and allows for collaboration between different students resulting in an enriched learning experience.
Going back to the immediacy of real face to face communication, their is now programs such as Skype that means you can have that comfort of a face to face conversation with someone across the world.

All this discussion left me wondering... So how are classes actually achieving this?
I read up on some programs in my book, and then decided to go out and look for social networking sites that I might be able to use in the future.

The first site I thought of was Google Docs, which I had used before in this unit. On google docs, you can create and share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, drawings or forms online with selected people. I found it was great if you wanted your discussion to still be private.

If Google Docs doesn't really appeal to you, I found this website called 5 Great Alternatives to Google Docs that lists some other similar websites (Ironically, I googled this site).

Another site I stumbled upon on the Living and Learning with Technology Companion Website was Diigo. This site allows you to highlight and collect documents, notes, images and pretty much anything else you might find on the internet. This would be fantastic for a research project.

Of course, one really useful tool for any classroom to have is it's own website, like the companion website, or like the examples given on the companion website such as Bluegum School and Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. You could even encourage students to write a blog similar to this one.

More Website Modifications...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:20:14 +0100

I have made a few adjustments to my website as a result of some feedback I received in my tutorial and ideas from other classmates.

Firstly, I have changed the layout of my Social Learner task on my site. Previously, I had a blog set up. I needed to do my instructions in instalments because their were so many instructions, so I thought a blog setup would work well. After using it for a couple of lessons, I decided it was too confusing as the blogs were backwards (from most recently posted), so the last step i had posted came up as the first post on the page. So confusing!

I changed it so that it still had it's own page, but then each part of my instructions had it's own page. I then linked these to the "Social Learner" tab on my page, so that people could just click on whichever step they're up to rather than having to scroll through instructions they don't need. This also solved my problem of image size being pretty much unchangeable on blog posts, which was a problem as my screen captures were virtually unreadable.

An example of my teeny tiny screen captures!

Another problem that I blogged about, I have managed to resolve. I mentioned that it was difficult to post a video tutorial for My Heritage, as a lot of my personal details are on there. I decided to edit my My Heritage account so that my details were not displayed, e.g. my relatives only have first names and no date of birth!

I also found a program I would like to use for one of my steps called SlideShare. It's kind of like an online Powerpoint tool, so it would be beneficial for this task. It would save me a lot of time in uploading screen captures and then putting in text in between etc.

At this point, each step will probably be in a different format! That's a bit of a worry. I'm not sure if this inconsistency will be an issue for users, but I hope that all of them are effective (fingers crossed! Perhaps i'll have to ask for another review when i'm finished…)

Website and Blog ideas

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:50:35 +0100

I've been looking at readings and links lately to try and find ideas to improve my website. At the moment, I think my website is acceptable but I am trying to look for things I can improve.

I found this link to Simple ideas for website design, which gave me some very useful ideas that I didn't think of. One of these is to include a contact point for feedback, which will be particularly useful considering the next assignment includes a Peer Review component. I think i'm going to add a page with my details, and see if I do end up getting any feedback.

Another interesting point was to 'improve readability with plenty of white space'. I had to google what 'white space', and found out that it's essentially the blank, unused parts on the webpage. I'm going to go over my current pages and make sure everything is sufficiently spaced out, and possibly move some things around. Hopefully it makes a difference on my website's overall impression!
In my googling, I found this website about Why whitespace matters that helped explain what it's purpose is. I also found this website on 20 Examples of White Space Properly Used in Web Design which shows you some websites that have used white space effectively.

I also did a bit of my own research on websites with poor or good use of white space. Here's some pictures I took of some famous examples:

The Yahoo!7 website

and it's rival, and one of the most famous examples of white space, Google.

Luckily, Yola takes care of a lot of these layout issues for me, but I am trying to apply the same technique to my blog posts by having extra space between ideas and paragraphs. Let me know how I am doing by emailing me! My details are on my brand new Contact Me page.

Social Learner task - progress so far!

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:21:23 +0100

So for my Social Learner task, I decided to show people how to create a My Heritage account in order to organise a family reunion. It has been a bit of a struggle, but is quite interesting so far.
One of the dilemmas I have had with these tutorials, was showing people using visuals of the site how to use it. This is because my personal details are on almost every single page! It was not such a big issue in simple screen shots, as I have just blanked out the words I don't want to share (which results in a bunch of rectangles all over the page, but what can you do?). Using video captures has not been so easy though.

I downloaded Jing solely for the purpose of video capturing my tutorials (mainly to save time instead of taking so many photos and typing in between), but because of this privacy issue, I have yet to use it. Hopefully I can find a task to video that does not reveal much of my personal information, but it hasn't happened yet.... :(
I tried googling how to blur or blank things out on a video, but most sites said that it required some sort of video editing software, which I don't have. I do however, have a boyfriend that is studying Film, so with a bit of convincing I might be able to arrange something. In the meantime, I might keep an eye out for other ways to do an online tutorial.

The other issue I have had is the restrictions on the free package on My Heritage. Many of the useful tools are reserved for Premium (paying) members, and this has thrown a fork in the works for my assignment. I have found ways to work around it so far, but if any of the readers are Premium members, I will not be able to show any instructions for the extra tools they have access to.
If anyone has any money for me to set up a Premium My Heritage account, donations will be gladly accepted!

Other than these issues, i've found the website quite easy to use. I also found out that I have relatives with a My Heritage account. Huzzah!

Week 1 - First Impressions

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 05:31:26 +0100

Hello, and welcome to my first blog entry!
I am a bit unsure at the moment as to what I should include in this, so i'm just going to talk about my thoughts/concerns/goals for this unit, after having a couple introductory classes.

Thankfully i've done a learning journal blog before, so that's a plus. I'm finding this blog a little more nerve wracking though, since my last blog assignment specified exactly what to write about, and this one has no such instructions! Hopefully I will be able to look at some other blogs later on and get a better idea of what to write, because as you can probably tell, i'm stumped.

So far i've read chapter 1 of our recommended book, Meaningful Learning with Technology. I've found this book to be really helpful in showing me how what we are learning at university in this subject can be applied to my classes when I graduate. My experiences in the lectures and tutorials have mainly been on how to use technology, which I already know enough about to manage, and this book takes those skills and puts them to good use.

As you can see, i've managed to create my own website and blog, so I think i'm making good progress on my first assignment. Hooray! Now to learn to write a proper blog entry....

Kayla