Tangled in a Technology Web! My Experience with Flickr

I am so frustrated right now because I spent most of today typing my reflections about my experience with Flickr and Picnik, only to hit the ‘post’ button in my blog to get an ‘error’ message! I was devastated to say the least so here I am with a second attempt!

I spent quite a bit of time (perhaps I was procrastinating a little), looking for a suitable image on this website to upload to Flickr – as I have just learnt is an online repository for images. I ended up choosing this picture because I feel it represents a good analogy of how I am feeling at this point in the course. It is a picture of the world caught up in a technological web, and yes this is how I am feeling. On a positive note, I realise that the frustrations that I have experienced along the way form part of my steep technological learning curve and we all have to start somewhere. I am hoping that in years to come I can look back at this post and have a little chuckle to myself. All the activities I have engaged in so far have taken me a lot longer than I anticipated and I seem to always manage to find the longest and most confusing way possible around things. Is it just me? I find myself asking this question a lot!

I found Flickr easy to register with and a wonderful way of uploading personal pictures/photos to the Internet where you can store them in one accessible file. I uploaded some personal family pictures and also the one used on my blog for this activity (which I am unable to upload right now). I then set up a Picnik account and uploaded some pictures to play around with and manipulate. I am stoked to find something that can get rid of ‘red eyes’ in photos. I had only ever heard of PhotoShop before but never actually used it. I spent a few hours experimenting with the resizing, chopping, rotating and red eye functions, and found this program to be a very useful tool indeed. Of cause there are many other software packages available that can alter images but these require additional cost and some time to become expert in I would imagine.

So how do these technologies fit in with the pedagogical frameworks discussed throughout this course so far? Well, I believe students can incorporate these technologies when they prepare presentations in PowerPoint or include images on a wiki for example. Flickr and Picnik are just a couple of examples of the wide variety of software tools available for design, planning and making presentations to enable students to do more sophisticated and complex tasks. Technology provides an electronic learning mileux that fosters the kind of creativity and communication required to nourish engagement (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999).

As of tonight I will be offline for 1 week as my family and I drive from Brisbane to Mackay. Yes we are finally making the move and I have mixed feelings about it, believe me!!! I am very sad to be leaving my family and friends, but also trying to remain positive about embarking on new beginnings. I will literally hit the ground running in regards to my embedded learning placement (Here’s hoping I have a school to be placed at by then), as I will commence the day after our furniture gets delivered to our home. I look forward to catching up on all your Blog’s in 1 week! I hope you all have a very safe and happy Easter break, and I do apologise that you are unable to view my image.

References:

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning, sourced from: http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm

Obesity PowerPoint Presentation

Obesity Presentation

View more presentations from Chrissy777.

Whilst I enjoyed putting my PowerPoint presentation together, I certainly found parts of the uploading and embedding into my Blog process rather challenging, time consuming and frustrating. I chose to do a topic that I felt was very important for children to be aware of from an early age, which is why I have targeted this presentation to the middle primary years and onwards. My topic is Obesity and it is something that can be prevented, so I believe knowledge and understanding around healthy eating and exercise patterns is so important.

I have based the content of the presentation around the Learning Engagement Theory (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999) using the Relate-Create-Donate process. Students get together in their groups and work on their project, putting together a suitable exercise and healthy eating program / worksheet (create), which can be used in their day to day lives (relate). They are to incorporate this new program over a 6 week period and at the end, present their findings in groups to the class via a PowerPoint presentation (donate). Also, I believe this would be in line with the Active Learning Theory because students would be creating a presentation with a true real world purpose. I tried to cater for the different learning styles by incorporating texts, pictures, links to an online quiz and some videos from utube. I have included the online quiz which is an individual activity that they can reflect on, and by doing group work this ensures that students are also working in a collaborative learning environment.

In relation to my own learning experience, I found PowerPoint itself was quite user-friendly so I think kids would certainly have a lot of fun playing around and experimenting with it. I do recall putting together a PowerPoint presentation some 8 years ago for a Marketing topic I undertook at university, but I have honestly not touched it again since then. After brainstorming and coming up with a topic I thought would capture student’s interest, educate them, and get them engaged in the learning process, I began my research. I relied mainly on information from the Internet and Utube. Then I worked out what I wanted to achieve and prepared my presentation outline and began to put it all together.

It was this next step that really threw me! Now I had to work out how to upload my PowerPoint Presentation to my Blog. I researched this subject forum and I was able to track down some information explaining how to upload to Slideshare. So I followed these steps, but for some reason my presentation would not upload. It was about 2am at this point and I was so eager to get my presentation embedded into my Blog, but I had hit a wall. I tried re-reading the steps and uploading the file a couple more times but I still got the same error message. So I took a deep breath and something made me refer back to ‘What are the Habits of Mind’ (HOM), as described by Arthur, J. Costa, reading at which point number 1 jumped straight out at me, stating “Persistence - is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time. Efficacious people stick to a task until it is completed and they don't give up easily”. This was of particular relevance to me at this point and I found it very motivating at a moment where I felt like giving up!

Another day of trying various different alternatives to get my PowerPoint presentation uploaded (my husband who is quite technologically savvy even spent an hour trying to find a solution), and still no success. This morning I was at my parents place and so I thought I would try uploading it on their computer and to my delight, it worked! I was then able to copy the embedded web address and post it into my Blog.....finally! I have certainly learnt a lot throughout this process and I feel a real sense of achievement now that I have produced my end result.

References:

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning, sourced from: http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm

http://www.mindfulbydesign.com/sites/default/files/16%20Habits%20Info.pdf

Reflecting on setting up an e.Portfolio in Mahara

This is all very new to me! It has been over a week now since I have worked through the course material relating to Mahara, so I am going to revisit the package this weekend and continue to build on my e.Porfolio - I have really only touched the surface and am still very much in the exploration stages. Already, I am amazed at what Mahara allows you to do - a fully featured electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system that connects users and creates online communities. Imagine the possibilities for us as future learning managers to be able to watch our students use this tool to set up their personal learning and development environments, and what a great example of student-centred learning!

I think Mahara is a fantastic way to build presentations for a specific purpose, and we have the ability to include evidence of what we have designed, developed and implemented. We will get to experience this first hand when we put together Assessment item 3 – our Teaching e.Portfolio. I found Mahara allows me to save a wide range of file types within my account and to produce ‘views’ that can be developed for a specific purpose and made available to whoever I choose. The fact that you can have several views to cater for different audiences is very beneficial. For example, I may have a personal business that I want to create a view for, which would have a different audience to my student-learning teacher view.

I can see how an e.Porfolio would be very useful for school students as it would allow them to keep all of their learning experiences, grades, results and certificates etc., in one organised place. Also, because they are in control of what they share and how they share this information and with whom (collaborative engaged learning), students are intrinsically motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the learning environment and activities (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999, Pg. 1). Although, I do see Mahara as being of more benefit to high school and university students, than primary school students. Perhaps I am wrong to make this assumption?

It is exciting to think that by the end of this course I will have developed the beginnings of a student teaching e.Portolio that I can use for interviews and job applications. This will hopefully assist me with gaining a relief teaching position, by making examples of my work throughout the course, and background available to school principles. I think this is a good example of how Mode 2 knowledge is becoming more widely established in educational settings and fundamental to adapt to our ever-changing knowledge-rich environment, as reinforced by Heath in (Teacher Education and the New Knowledge Environment, 2001 "Schools" para. 5).


References:

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning, sourced from: http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm

Heath, G. (2001) Teacher Education and the New Knowledge Environment, Fremantle.
sourced from: http://www.aare.edu.au/01pap/hea01582.htm, 10/02/2010

Capabilities of the WIKI Technology

I have now learnt all about the usefulness of a WIKI! I think it's great that you have the option of having it completely closed to non-members or open to everyone and that as the owner you get to choose who can do what. I must admit, although I have created a WIKI through WikiSpaces (originally I created one through WetPaint, but found my web page looked too busy), I am still trying to get my head around what to actually do with it now. I am sure once some ideas are generated, things will start to flow a little more and become more interactive. The WIKI I have come up with is called 'Time Management Ideas', as I thought this would be a very useful topic for many of us undertaking the GDLM course. We are all juggling many things, whether it be family and work or other interests.

The use of the WIKI technology is in line with Mode 2 way of thinking and supports the notion that we as future teachers will have to become expert in understanding the processes of knowledge production and use. Also, this reinforces the idea that the abundance of knowledge and the rapid change in its currency will greatly diminish the importance of the teacher as knowledge resource but enhance our role as a knowledge manager (Heath, 2001, p.9).

This is a prime example of how students can be meaningfully engaged in various learning activities through the interaction with others and worthwhile tasks, which is the fundamental idea underlying the engagement theory (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999, p.1). I love that the theory is based around the idea of creating successful collaborative teams that work on projects (such as the WIKI application we have just learnt about), that are meaningful to others outside the classroom.

I think that is enough about this topic from me for now. I am on information overload again, so I am going to take some time out to recharge those batteries!

References:

Heath, G.(2001). Teacher Education and the New Knowledge Environment: Paper Presented to the Australian Association for Educational Research Conference. Fremantle, RMIT University.

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. (1999) Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning.

My experience with Blogs & Aggregators so far

This experience has revealed just how much of a technological desert I really am! Blogging is very new to me, but I am feeling a great sense of achievement when I do finally accomplish an activity which has to be a good thing right? Whilst the YouTube video on 'setting up an RSS aggregator' was fairly straight forward, it took me some time to get my head around how to 'actually apply it', but I think I have got it now. I managed to set up my Google Reader account without too much trouble, so this is a good start.

I can see that in a real life scenario, students can benefit from having a Blog and utilising this RSS feed, because as they add the URLs of their fellow colleagues' blogs to their 'feeds, and each time they make a new posting, they can read and comment on what they have shared. What a wonderful way of encouraging interactive student-centric based learning. This also supports the engagement theory as it promotes interation in the context of group activities (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999, pp.2-3).

As mentioned by Marzano & Pickering (2006, pp.29-30), as part of Dimension 1 of the DoL (Attitudes Perceptions), students should perceive tasks as valuble and interesting as this will help them develop positive attitudes and perceptions about classroom tasks. So I can see there are many ways in which technology could be encouraged with our students and one of these is by interacting via Blogs. One example for primary school students could be to post a series of images and links to great reading activities that kids can do from home.

References:

Kearsley, K., & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning.

Marzano, R. J., & Pickering, D. J. (with Arrendondo, D. E., Paynter, D. E., Blackburn, G. J., Brandt, R. S., Pollock, J.E., Moffett, C.A & Whisler, J. S.). (2006). Dimensions of learning teacher’s manual (2nd ed.). Alexandra, VA: ASCD.

What are the Roles of ICT in Education?

What an interesting learning journey this has been for me so far, particularly on the Information Technology side of things! Why did I not start a blog long ago? It's such an amazing concept and I am finding it very interesting to read the postings of my colleagues. I have attempted to set up the aggregator to follow the postings of my course colleagues, but I am unsure of how successful I have been.

I looked at Clay Burrell's blog and watched his presentation on 'Learning Technologies 2009: Keynote Part 1', and found this very interesting to watch and listen to. He quoted a saying which I particularly liked which was, 'Nothing can be believed unless it's understood'! How true is this?

Introduction

Hello All,

I have just created my Blog and this is my first posting. I am very excited to be learning all about Blogging and am looking forward to adding more soon...