Browsing

Afternoon,

My brain is about to explode! Can you have to much study in a day?

Okay, so today I thought I needed to make some more blog post and I was just using Feedly to see if I could connect to someone’s page and instead I went into panic mode.

I just learnt from shannonmarieb blog post that not only after all our hard work at University (plus getting into major debt.. yikes!) we have to sit an exam in order to graduate as a teacher? What? Why am I first hearing about this now? Have I been on another planet?

I can understand why we have to do this but seriously? Not to be on the negative side but I see you can re-sit up to three times. What happens if you fail the 3 times? Oh sorry, no graduation for you. No employment, you’ve just wasted 7 years of you life for nothing.

Massive shock here…. Huge payment is due to sit the exam too!

Until next time.

Finding a lesson plan

“Amelia’s Sad Face” (CC BY 2.0) by  donnierayjones 

Good evening,

What a nightmare! I have spent way to many hours on this part of the assignment. Probably a solid one and half weeks and the assignment is only worth 19% of the marks. Each night I would log onto my laptop and search the internet to find a lesson and would come up against a brick wall (I’m just going around a roundabout and I’m not getting off!). I mean don’t get me wrong, I did find a couple of lesson plans but I was not to sure whether I could use them… to much grey area.. plus I don’t want to get a mark of zero for taking a risk on the grey area.

Take today for instance I said to myself that I was just going to upload a lesson plan myself, but here I was again searching for a lesson plan… WHY? Probably because I’m stubborn and I wanted to see if I could find a lesson plan that was free to use on the net.

Take a look at Nicola’s blog who also shares her thoughts and feelings towards assignment one.

Until next time.

 

Following a teacher who blogs

After many internet searches to find a teacher who blogs, I came across Miss Jordan’s Class Blog and all I can say is WOW!

Miss Jordan’s blog covers most learning areas, focusing more on literacy and maths with integrating ICTs to enhance her children’s learning. Like today, I read the classes blog post: Writing From a Photo. The students had to bring in a photo to use as an inspiration piece for their writing. Seeing the finish product was great as all students pieces were put into google slides and were uploaded to their class blog. What a great incentive for students! What I like about Miss Jordan’s Class blog, it that parents and caregivers are able to see what their child/children are learning, and for students who are involved in the activity are able to see their work published and be proud to show their accomplishments to family and friends.

Another thing I noticed is that on most of the posts, there are reflection questions for students to reply back. I think this is a great way for students to evaluate their thoughts but also for the teacher to see where the students are at with their understanding but also see what their students goals are.

Thanks Miss Jordan and students for sharing your adventure in learning.

“NZ TRIP” (CC BY 2.0) by  geishaboy500 

Until next time.

Concept Map

For some reason, I’m finding some of the ICT activities are talking me a very long time to complete (I’m assuming it’s from working out how to use certain software). For example take this concept map that I have created for why/why not ICT is important in a primary classroom. I first started with text2mindmap and found it frustrating, I had typed in the content for each section but for some reason, the headings were getting switched with the sub headings and it was taking so much time to fix it all up. At that point I though it would be time efficient to create  another concept map through a different site called  bubble.us.

My experience using bubble.us was great, really easy to use and lots of themes to choose from. Plus using this site, you don’t have to pay! I believe this would be a lovely tool to use in the classroom to enhance students learning. Another student who also used bubble.us is Charlotte, who explores how it can enhance student learning in the classroom but also how it can be used in your everyday life.

Until next time.

Feedly and Diigo

What to say about Feedly and Diigo? When I first was introduced to them, I was unsure, overwhelmed but now? I feel like I am in a loving relationship with them! They are my new best friend and as I write this post, I think to myself where have you been my whole uni life?

Feedly for example is a great way of seeing everyone’s blogs, you don’t have to keep going backwards and forwards, its all right in front of you! I feel like I am that squirrel from Ice Age who’s best mate, love is the nut! Oh Feedly! Thanks David for the introduction. If it wasn’t for Feedly, I wouldn’t have come across Kirby’s blog who also mentions Feedly and Diigo. It’s weird how we all sound the same when we are introduce to something new, but then when we become familiar with something, we start to see the benefits of it.

Diigo did take me awhile to adjust to, but again great invention. All my resources in one spot instead of me copy and pasting the URL into a word document but then forgetting what it is because I forgot to put a reason why I saved it. Today I think I did go a tad crazy with saving stuff to Diigo, it’s like when you get something new and all you want to do is play with it.

I hope everyone is enjoying their week 2 of uni life.

Until next time.

Copyright

Good evening,

Thanks to Kerri’s link about attribute images and David’s link to ImageCodr.org, I have gone back through my other blog posts to fix my breach of copyright. I have successfully acknowledge the creator from creative commons in the images that I have used. To be honest in all the time I have been studying I’ve never clicked on the link policy for terms and conditions. I’ve just always thought since I’m referencing the resource, it’s fine. Plus this is the first course that I have come across that addresses copyright. In hindsight, I should have known, as it is going to be part of my job when I become a teacher.

Copyright I feel is a like another world! All the different terms, I feel like I need to do a course to understand the legal language. Why can’t sites just say a simple yes or no? I guess it will take some time to understand the jargon, but that’s what this is all about, learning but also learning from mistakes.

So i’ll leave you with this image, fingers cross I acknowledge the creator right and I’m not breaking any laws.

“Learn” (CC BY 2.0) by  GotCredit 

Until next time.

End of week one

Afternoon folks,

Week one of starting my studies has flown! I don’t know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Good that I’m am getting closer to finishing my degree but bad as assignment one is going to be due soon and I haven’t even thought about it yet. Yikes!

After engaging with week one study material, I have learnt new things but I also received a deeper understanding on why ICTs in the classroom is important. From the past week, I’m having moments where I think… Oh that makes sense, I can see how that works or moments where I would feel success in completing a blog post and publishing it. Just like Ellen mentions of gaining confidence of the use of ICTs, I’ve also gained confidence in my ability of using ICTs compared to last year.

Just the other day, I finally introduced my tablet to my offspring and was amazed how quickly my offspring caught on (to swiping your finger to change pages or pressing the button to turn it on and off!) but I was also shocked to see once the device was taken away from offspring, one huge tantrum was brought on (offspring is two). We now have timed sessions and count downs so offspring knows when the tablet is going away. Thinking of my offspring with using the tablet, made me think of other Australian households how probably nearly every other child has had some contact of ICT and I can see why ICT needs to be incorporated into the classroom.

Until next time.

 

Comparing

Well it is Saturday night and instead of partying like its 1999, or getting my daily fix of Netflix (yea.. I just couldn’t just stop my daily dose). I’m catching up on loose ends of my courses, or should I say just double checking I’ve completed all the activities and by doing this I couldn’t help but compare the differences between previous courses and EDC3100.

The layout, the delivery of content, the learning paths of this course are very engaging. I find myself wanting to log on (even on Saturday nights) to see if there is anything new I can learn. Where previously I sometimes struggled with just the standard recording of lectures, the huge amount of readings and basically getting lost with all the content on the study desk. For EDC3100  though, I want to log on and work through the learning paths and see what new understandings I can take on board. Fellow blogger Lukewardell351 also mentions in his blog post how EDC3100 is encouraging him to interact with the content rather than just reading about it. So folks, its time for me to head off and enjoy the rest of my  night.

“Netflix” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by  clasesdeperiodismo 

Until next time.

 

Conceptual modelling to solve ICT problems.

This week in my studies, I came across the title “How do you develop conceptual understanding of ICT? And throughout this section I realised that I had in fact followed the conceptual modelling process to assist me in my last blog post of Unstable, opaque, protean, meta-medium (without even realising it at the time) to fix my ICT problem. Through conceptual modelling I was able to reflect and receive a greater understanding of my problem (embedding video into blog, previous post) and work through certain steps to achieve a solution. Even Nicola’s blog post about ICT blindness involves conceptual modelling. Nicola was having trouble printing in portrait and after going through steps, she found the solution in the settings to change the print layout.

Conceptual modelling involves three steps they are:

1. What is the problem?
2. What is your conceptual model of ICT?
3. Why or where does your conceptual model fail?

(Jones, 2016).

From these three steps, our lecturer David had us practice developing our own model to a potential problem. The potential problem i choose was “My link isn’t a link”. My model is below.

And it seems it’s on the blurry side, sorry folks. Apprentice in ICT still 🙂 In the forum where we had to post our conceptual models, it was interesting to see how people used different designs to develop their conceptual models. Mr Clancy designed his model through Gliffy and you can read about his experience using the software here.

Until next time.