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