Week 8 - Andrea Chicco

Last Lecture/Tutorial

In the tutorial for week 8, groups had been issued with different scenarios to study whilst in the tutorial, followed by designing a presentation based on the positives and negatives of the scenario.

The topic ‘Diagnosis’ was allocated to our group. The opening paragraph for the topic was “Prepare for a future where education diagnoses student potential, determines their place in the community and maps out their future. This is where you fit in. Get on with it” (Zagami, 2011). Furthermore, a description of the scenario was allocated to our group by Dr. Zagami in our tutorial. Using the given text, the three of us put together a list of positives and negatives for the topic. First of all we changed the topic name to ‘labelling’ as we believe it is another term and perhaps a common term used rather than the term ‘diagnosing’.

Our group came up with more negatives than positives as determining a student’s place in their future community is awful.  How can one be labelled either a failure or success at such a young age? The students who are labelled as a low achiever, does not have the opportunity to excel at a subject they have not been exposed to in primary school that they might excel in at high school (ie. Drama or complex Science) or in extra curricular activities  (ie. dance or football).

Dr. Zagami then mentioned the term 'streaming' currently occurs in a lot of schools. The majority of the time high schools stream when allocating students to Mathematics classes. I can relate to this topic as I was streamed whilst completing high school mathematics.

Group Assessment

As ‘blogged’ in week 6, our technology, content and pedagogy has been decided.

Webspiration Classroom

To have access to our technology, Webspiration Classroom, a 30 day trial had to be downloaded for each of us to be able to utilise any of its features. Alternatively, purchasing Webspiration Classroom is available too. Once the program had been downloaded, I was able to create an account as a ‘teacher’ then create student accounts which branch off from the main teacher account. This is for the teacher to create documents and 'collaborate' the activities to their students which then can be shared between other students should they be collaborating on a group assignment. 

Vimeo

To upload our video, we decided to use the website http://www.vimeo.com/ which was introduced to use by Dr. Zagami. He suggested to use this should one have songs not created by oneself as www.youtube.com takes out the music content of your video if they come across it. I believe Vimeo has better quality than youtube.

Camtasia Studio

My role was to focus on the content area for our PD video. As we selected English, I was able to select up to three examples Webspiration Classroom had to offer. As we wanted to demonstrate Webspiration Classroom and its amazing features to implement into classrooms, it was suggested to download a trial program of Camtasia Studio. Camtasia Studio is a program which records your curser movements on the computer screen. The program not only captures your work on the computer, it captures your voice when making a demonstration (TechSmith, 2011). This program had very helpful videos on how to use Camtasia Studios which gave me the confidence on navigating the program.

Editing

The longest part of completing our PD video was editing all our content we wanted to include in the movie. We utilised Jess's Macbook pro as it had the iMovie program. iMovie gave us the opportunity to develop our PD movie into a professional video. I thoroughly enjoyed putting the video together especially having the ability to work collaboratively. Below you shall see a link to view our Professional Development Video. Unfortunately, Blogger was not giving me the opportunity to 'embed' our video. However, this will give those of you who have not had the opportunity of using Vimeo to have an pleasurable experience. 

I hope you enjoy viewing our PD video! I know I did!

http://vimeo.com/22696692

Reference

Camtasia Studios. (2011). Screen recording and video editing software. [Computer Software]. TechSmith Corporation.

Week 7 - Andrea Chicco

This week, the lecture commenced with a PowerPoint presentation displayed on the Interactive White Board. This presentation was created by students in Grade 1. Students went around their school with digital cameras and captured images of what activities they accomplish during a school day. The students created a storyboard of their accomplishments and uploaded their captured images into a PowerPoint Presentation. The students edited their presentation by inserting scrolling text to enhance their presentation. As I mentioned in my second sentence, these students were in grade 1 and they had the confidence and ability to do all this! I can’t wait to see it in my own classroom!

Adapting to Change in Education

Activity Cards

Dr. Zagami split us up into six groups and issued each group with content cards on future education. Dr. Zagami asked us to organise the cards into a diamond shape and followed by organising the cards into most important topics at the top of the diamond and the least important topics at the end of the diamond. As a group, we believe the most important topic was “What sort of education do we want in the future? This card was selected as you always need a focus point of what you want in the future. The last card we chose was the celebration of learning as once students have completed their work, they would celebrate it.

Dr. Zagami gave us another set of cards to categorise. The set questions fell into the columns of 'present', 'with major change' and 'irrelevant'. As a group, we took 5 cards each, studied and sorted them into the relevant topics. We entered our answers into the classroom’s online document therefore to read our classmates answers they suggested. Subsequently, individually we selected a card from our pile to respond to extension questions. I selected the question, "What if most learning was collaborative?" The extension questions were:-

• Enabler/Opportunity
• Resistance
• Partners
• Actions to overcome
• Measure of success
• Benefits

I was able to extend on the following:

Enablers/opportunity: for those students that fall behind in lessons and do not understand the subject, can take the opportunity to learn from their peers when working collaboratively. 

Resistance: students who do not like working collaboratively.

Partners: teacher’s aids and parent helpers to assist in the lesson.

Actions to overcome resistance: Help students overcome and build on low social skills and to work collaboratively.

Benefits: group work, the lessons are not always teacher led and collaborative learning will build social skills.

It was beneficial to break down these questions as a lot of the time we oversee the reality of implementing some strategies.

Week 6 - Andrea Chicco

Group work – The First Stages

As part of learning adventure 1, a professional development (PD) video has been created aimed at existing teachers to address them of technologies they can be implemented into their classrooms. The chosen technology is called Webspiration Classrooms. 

Webspiration Classroom is an "online writing, visual thinking and collaboration tool for students and teachers". This online resource improves writing and thinking skills and allows a teacher to inform their students the necessary concepts and skills to help them write effectively, evaluate, synthesise information and improve performance for assessment (Webspiration Classroom, 2011).

To support this technology, samples from the English content area have been selected to present in the video. Other content areas such as Maths and Social Studies had been considered as they are also offered on the Webspiration Classrooms website, however our group believes English was most beneficial to showcase in the PD video as Webspiration Classroom offers numerous amounts of English activities and examples to enhance English lessons. The predominant activities/examples demonstrated in the PD video were narratives, character comparisons and descriptive writing.

To support these online activities/examples, Queensland Studies Authority’s (QSA) Essential Learnings were researched. The year level the activities/examples were aimed for, was by the end of year 5. After analysing the QSA (2007) document, the following knowledge and understandings were selected to coincide with the chosen Webspiration Classroom activities/examples:-

·    'Literary and Non-Literary' as Narratives have structural features such as the orientation, complication, resolution.

·   'Language Elements' as it describes settings and characters through figurative language.

·   'Writing and Designing' as the purpose is to entertain, inform and describe.

To view this document in detail, please select the following link:

http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/early_middle/qcar_el_english_yr5.pdf

A pedagogy was also required to include in this video to correspond to the English content and Webspiration Classroom. It was easy to select the pedagogy 'collaboration' as it meets hand in hand with Webspiration Classrooms. Webspiration Classroom states (2011), “improve writing and thinking skills with Webspiration Classroom service, the online writing, visual thinking and collaboration tool for students and teachers".  How could we decide to select an alternate pedagogy when collaboration is clearly demonstrated as one of its attributes? Additionally, Perkins (1991) believes that collaborative learning demonstrates the notion of distributive intelligence, which states that accomplishment is not a function of one person, but rather a group in which each contributes to the achievement of desired goals. I believe this statement is evident with the use of Webspiration Classroom.

Additionally, Webspiration Classroom engages students and extends learning time through collaboration and student-teacher interaction, anytime and anywhere. Students assignments are always available to access from home or school and is automatically saved and securely stored online (Webspiration Classroom, 2011). The above statement “securely stored online” articulates that Webspiration Classroom is an additional program to fall under the umbrella of 'cloud computing' which Dr. Zagami taught us in the week 1 lecture/tutorial.

References

Perkins, D. (1991). Technology meet constructivism: Do they make a marriage? Educational Technology, 31(5), 18-23.

Queensland Studies Authority. (2007). English: Essential Learnings by the end of year 5. Retrieved from http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/early_middle/qcar_el_english_yr5.pdf

Webspiration Classroom. (2011). Improving writing and thinking skills. Retrieved from http://www.webspirationclassroom.com/info

Week 5 - Andrea Chicco

This week I learned about many technologies I can start to include onto my professional knowledge list, below are two resources I believe are engaging for not just students, me too! These resources introduced to us in ICT and Pedagogy are definitely contributing to the Digital Pedagogy Licence statement “I understand how ICT can support and enhance what students learn, how they learn, and when and where their learning takes place” (Smart Classrooms, 2011).

Digital Story Telling

Go Animate

Just like Zoo Burst we were introduced to last week, Go Animate is a fantastic resource to implement into the classroom to enhance an English lesson. Go Animate is an addition to regular storytelling as stories are usually told by writing in a workbook. This website allows consumers to digitally tell their story by creating their own animated characters, animated settings and storylines. It is an extremely attractive website and has simple navigations for consumers to use.

Additional technologies that include digital storytelling are podcasts, videos, other animation websites and Microsoft Power Point, just to name a few.

Apple Mac – iMovie

I thoroughly enjoyed learning how to use iMovie in the Mac Lab this week. Obviously I would like to spend more time exploring its features as for everything we are introduced to in this course, however it was good quickly going through the basics. This is an additional resource of students to digitally tell their story.

References

Smart Classrooms (2011). Smart classrooms professional development framework. Retrieved from

            http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/pdframework/docs/scpd-framework.pdf

Week 4 Andrea Chicco

Augmented Reality

Week 4’s lecture/tutorial/workshop was an engaging session as one of the highlights was the introduction of Augmented Reality.  Yet again, this technology was a dimension I never had privilege of being aware of and I am extremely excited to learn this technology and implement it into my practicum classroom and future classrooms. This technology will definitely enhance the way students learn, especially when “visiting historical locations, doing field work, interacting with real-world objects, and even paging through books” (The Horizon Report, 2010). 

An excellent website Dr. Zagami introduced our class to, to promote Augmented Reality was www.zooburst.com It was great having a quick run through on how it actually works. I believe this website can be applied to the Year 4 class I have been placed at for professional teaching experience. Currently, the students are writing and completing adventure narratives as part of their English Unit. I believe introducing Zoo Burst to the students will enhance their writing. I am excited to sit with my Supervising Teacher to obtain her thoughts on including it as part of an ICT lesson.

Horizon Report

The Horizon report “identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe”. The report explains there are “six technologies featured and are placed along three adoption horizons that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications in the K-12 environment” (The 2010 Horizon Report).

These technologies are; cloud computing, collaborative environment, game based learning, the use of mobiles in the classroom, augmented reality and flexible displays. As mentioned, each of the above technologies have been given intense explanations and information on how they are likely to be implemented into classrooms within the next 12 months. As this report was realised in 2010, we can see some of these exposed into schools today.

References

The Horizon Report  (2010). The new media consortium. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report-K12.pdf

Week 3 - Andrea Chicco

GEMS

It was excellent to have the opportunity to contact Mrs M and her Year 2 GEMS via Skype. It is nice to see the concepts we learn in ICT and Pedagogy can actually be implemented into a classroom. When the GEMS were interviewed by the ICT and Pedagogy Uni Students, they were responding with terminologies such as "blogging" as a second nature to them. I was just learning these terminologies myself!

PRAC - Lead in Day 1

Well Well Well. I have been allocated to a school that implements a lot of ICT in the classroom. How did I get so lucky, especially whilst being enrolled in ICT and Pedagogy. The first ICT device I was exposed to and I was very curious about were devices that were sitting on the teacher’s chest attached to a lanyard. At first as I had not seen them in practice, I assumed it had something to do with a student who may have been a diabetic. Shortly after settling into my year 4 class, I realised this device is actually a microphone, which is has been integrated into each classroom of the school to deliver clear and concise lessons. The microphone looks like large USBs type devices.

The teachers I had informally spoken to about the microphones LOVE them as they do not have to raise their voice to ensure every student can hear. Additionally, when using the microphone in a teacher led lesson, during a whole class discussion, the teacher issues a student with the microphone to speak into to deliver their response.

Other ICT devices or programs the school implement that I had been exposed to on my first lead in day were; Interactive White Board (IWB), laptops per student (hired out from library, see below image) and instead of using a bell to distinguish break or class times, they utilise popular music through the sound system.

  

Week 2 - Andrea Chicco

TPACK FRAMEWORK

As one of the readings for the course, there is an article “What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge?” Written by Matthew J. Koehler and Punya Mishra. It explains the definition of TPACK as three components. These are content, technology and pedagogy. The article explains that the TPACK “framework builds on Lee Shulman’s construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to include technology knowledge” (Koehler and Mishra, 2009). I commenced reading this article and found the concept difficult to absorb, however after analysing Figure 1 (below), the graph assisted my understanding on how each framework is set out. Additionally, this article enhanced my knowledge as the writers explained each title displayed in the graph in detail.

GOOGLE PROGRAMS, BLOGGER & TWITTER

In week 2’s workshop, we continued on creating each of the above programs. I must say how mind boggling it was for me as we only had a quick flick through each programs features. As I did not have the time to explore and ask as many questions as I would have liked to about these new technologies during the workshop, it did not sink in as much as I would have liked it too. We were jumping from Google Reader to Google Groups, then from the Google programs to Twitter, then back to the Google programs to blogger. I felt as though I had kept up with the class, however, when sitting down opening these programs the following day, I realised it did not mentally stick like I hoped it had. I thought I should open all these programs all at once and begin to explore their features and try to work out what I had to do in each. The first problem I encountered was how would my blog on http://www.blogger.com/ be available for my peers and Lecturer to view as I did not have any followers or connections on that website. I decided to utilise the Google Groups website to ask for assistance via a discussion post. As Google Groups is not an 'IM' (instant message) website, I did not expect to receive an instant response after posting my question. I logged into Griffith emails and utilised the 'IM' feature to converse with a online friend who is also enrolled into ICT & Pedagogy. After explaining my issue, Jessica diagnosed my problem by addressing the fact that I did not post my “blog ID” address on Google Reader like everyone else had. Once I had subscribed myself, I encountered my second dilemma, I posted my blog without proof reading it. I remembered in the workshop, Dr. Zagami advised there was an editing function should one make an error. I used this editing tool to rectify my mistakes.

After using these programs whilst at home, I felt a little more comfortable navigating myself around the site. However, I was not able to navigate myself around Twitter as I do not understand its ways of working.

Reference

Koehler, M.J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), pp. 60-70.