Done and dusted

As I have decided not to include a PDF file on my site, just about everything is finished for Task 2! Hooray! I hope it isn't marked too harshly. I had another student look over my instructions and join my social space, I also joined her social space and had a look at her layout and ideas. It's amazing how two people doing the same assignment can go in such different directions with it. If there's one thing I enjoy about this unit it's the creative licence we have in completing the tasks.
As I play the ukulele as a hobby, I wanted to make my site something to do with that. Something like a space in which people can post video tutorials, chord charts and plan music camps and other events, however it proved to be quite difficult to come up with an idea that just about anyone could contribute to. I also have a huge aversion to filming myself, especially if there's a chance I might have to sing as well! I also didn't want my social space to be too specific, I wanted anyone to be able to join and post and have an interest in the topic. I thought my party planning idea was a little silly and maybe too simple at first, but I quite like it now. I feel it's open to everyone and people can post from so many different sites through so many different medias - videos, playlists, social event planners, images, links or just plain text. I even have my first member from outside of the unit! Or at least I think she's from outside the unit....

I'm happy with my choice of Google Communities as well. The layout is simple and effective and the automatic hashtags are really handy. You can edit them by deleting ones that aren't relevant, however I wish you could also add your own - maybe you can and I just haven't figured out how yet. I'll work on it! I had a look at some of the other Party Planning/ Party Planner pages on Google Communities and none of them are quite like mine, which makes me happy. An idea that I originally felt was a little plain and simple has turned into something I feel could actually be a successful social space for anyone with an interest to join.

An assignment that had me baffled to begin with has become my favourite one yet from this unit. Social media is a huge part of the internet and oftentimes it is the only reason people go online. The ability to make use of the wide variety of social media sites out there and create a social space tailored to the needs of your followers is going to be a handy skill. It's easy enough to just create a Facebook event and add all your friends to it, but it's become so common these days with everyone creating an event for anything that happens to them. Using an entirely new social media site is refreshing and interesting and it also feels more professional.

So check out my Party Planning site and join in! Feel free to post whatever you find interesting. If you're from the past and signing in to Google+ and clicking the "Join Commnuity" button baffles you to no end, you know where to find the handy instructions on how to do it! You never know, your post might change someone else's party for the better.

Feedback

A combination of feedback from the peer reviews we did earlier this week and the poor mark I received for Task 1 have led me to believe that, regardless of what I feel to be efficient and convenient, my choice of instructions on my website - a series of screenshots, with descriptions and annotations made using Skitch and embedded into the Social Learning page of my website may not be satisfactory.
Though anyone born after the year 1950 should not have any difficulty accessing and following the instructions given on my site, it seems that they should be presented as an irritating downloadable PDF file which is likely to confuse, if not just annoy, anyone trying to post to my site. If they cannot understand the instructions I have posted they most likely have some technology issues and the need to open external applications and/or browser windows is likely to give them some sort of brain haemorrhage due to extreme technical complexity.
However I have looked over the marking rubric for this task multiple times and I can't see anywhere that states the instructions should be external to your website. In fact I've made use of my new skills using Skitch to make a little annotated screenshot of the rubric:

Now I don't want to be big-headed and say my work is excellent. I would like to point out, however, that it does not say anywhere in the rubric that the instructions should be a PDF or annotated screencast. I see no point in including the same information I embedded into my website in a downloadable PDF. You are clearly going to be online if you are posting to my social media site and therefore the instructions do not need to be accessible offline. I worry that the assignment is being marked solely on using of a variety of multimedias, rather than our ability to use technology efficiently and in a way that we feel is appropriate for the task. There is no point demonstrating my ability to create and upload a PDF file to my site (as already demonstrated in Task 1 with the poster) if it is not relevant or necessary for the task at hand.

Final Draft Complete

I finished my social space, it is now an official google community for Party Planning. I gave it a profile picture of balloons (relevant, right?) and posted some things onto the page myself, to make it look more interesting and to give any visitors to the page an idea of what they can post. I also completed the instructions on how to use my social space and added them to my website. I made my instructions based on how I prefer to receive information online. There are a few things that are common in websites that contain tutorials that I find are inconvenient and inefficient.

• Video tutorials/ narrated screencasts: These are irritating to me as they are often either too fast paced, requiring you to pause the video every 5 seconds and switch back and forth between the instructions and the task, or they are too detailed and slow, explaining every minor detail such as how to open and close a tab, as if they think you are from the 18th century. They are also inconvenient if you are at work or on public transport and are unable to play a video with sound, or you have slow internet connection that will only load 2 seconds of the video at a time.
  
• Downloadable PDF file: Although this is more preferable than the previous method, I find that these are also somewhat inconvenient. They either require you to open an entirely new window or tab, or they automatically download a file to your desktop. I find this intrusive as I don't feel it is necessary for a third party site to control your downloads or windows, when a site downloads to my computer I often just delete the download immediately and exit the site - more often than not it is spam, regardless of whether or not the site says it is "instructions on how to post to my site!" If my research on ICT told me anything, it's that you can't trust everyone online, especially if they're trying to convince you to put unknown file onto your computer. A final reason why these are inconvenient is that if you do choose to download the file and open it from your desktop, it requires the use of an external program such as Preview (Mac) or Adobe Reader (Mac and Windows), which may take time to open and cause your computer to run slower (not to mention having to switch back and forth between the external program and your internet browser).

I chose to give my tutorial as a series of annotated screenshots, presented on the same page of my website as the other information about my social space. I feel that this is the least intrusive, simplest form of online instruction. When people decide to contribute to my space, they will not be bombarded with my voice suddenly talking at them and telling them what to do from a narrated screencast; nor will they be put off by new windows popping open, downloads starting and external applications jumping up at them. All of these things I find to be major deterrents that, rather than helping me to contribute to someone's site as a kind gesture, encourage me to abandon the entire endeavour and just read a book.

New Assignments, New Ideas

Our next assignment is to create a public space online, which people can join and contribute their own ideas to. I've changed my mind a dozen times over what to make my online community about, and what website to use to host it. I have decided to use a Google Community to form my group. Google communities seem less formal than other websites used to host groups. They also seem easy to use and to join which I think is an important part of an online community, particularly one that anyone around the world can join. I don't know how many times I've gone to sign myself up for an online group or page and given up because of all the steps you need to complete - and that's just to be a member, not even to post anything! The second part of the assignment relates to this, as we have to have instructions on our website for people to follow so they know how to join your group and add their own information.

I've decided to make my community about party planning, where people can post recipes, themes, music playlists and stories from successful (or unsuccessful) parties they've hosted in the past.
I already have a Google+ account, so creating a community was easy. I just had to log in to my account, and click the button that said "Create Community" - simple!

Now that I have decided what social media site to use, which is the hardest decision, I just have to make my instructions on how and what people should post.

Final Touches

I'm just about all finished with Task 1 for Living and Learning with Technology at long last and yet I'm stuck with the feeling that I've forgotten something. It was a huge process of trial and error, lots of changing everything and then getting frustrated and changing it all back again, but I'm pretty happy with my final website and poster. Still can't get rid of that feeling though! Like I'm going to submit it all at 9am tomorrow morning and then kick myself at 9:30 when it's too late to change anything, realising I accidentally uploaded embarrassing selfies to my website instead of the useful information I intended to put there...

Despite my somewhat ridiculous worries I do feel more confident using the online tools I used to make my website and poster and I feel that I would be able to help someone else use them too. They really are as simple as they say and as far as assignments go, this one was pretty fun and had a lot of flexibility for us to be creative with - it's been really interesting looking at the different paths other students have taken with the same assignment and seeing everyone's different styles. Some of the posters were so good they even tempted me to scrap my work and use a whole different site to make a new poster. I found posters made with easel.ly to be particularly artsy and effective.

As with the 6th step of Authentic Learning - Articulation, I think the making of my poster and website did make me research the topic more thoroughly as everything is going online where anyone with an interest can just search it up and read it all. Considering I post to things like Facebook and Snapchat all the time, I've never really thought of anything I write as "public" but of course it is and researching things like cyber bullying and cyberstalking put some of that into perspective.

Digital Literacy

I recently completed my research on digital literacy and added it to my website. The assignment was to research the safe and ethical uses of ICT and present the information in a poster. Originally I planned to make my poster specific to one area of internet safety, such as how to avoid cyber bullying, but when I actually started my research on digital literacy I changed my mind.

I'm not sure how integrated the internet is in primary school curriculums today, but when I was in school we had very little access to the internet during class. It wasn't a part of our lessons and therefore we were never taught about online safety until we reached high school. I never even heard the terms 'digital literacy' or 'digital citizenship' until I began my technology unit at Murdoch University. Since I found the term digital literacy so ambiguous, I figured other people might have as much confusion regarding the topic as myself. I made my poster for primary school aged children, though I kept the design simple so it is appropriate for high schools too. It explains the basics of how to become digitally literate and why.

I used Piktochart to make my poster. I tried Infogr.am to start and, to be fair, it was the first site I tried and I only glanced at the starting page before I had a look at some others. Unfortunately for Infogram Piktochart seemed to have more themes that matched what I was looking for, as well as a large range of graphics that you can just drag and drop into place on your poster. I had been putting off making my poster until almost the last minute - you may remember I described myself as not "technologically savvy"? Well, my art skills (or lack thereof) make me look like some kind of techno-genius in comparison and being given an assignment that requires you to make art on the computer kind of terrified me. Lucky for me, however, Piktochart is very flexible and allows you to pick a theme and either change it completely or just remove their information and put yours in.

If you want to check out the full size version of my poster or even download it, you can view the online version or you can find it at on my website along with my research on digital literacy.

Authentic Learning

We discussed the 9 elements of 'Authentic Learning' in our lecture the other day. I feel that these points are very important for teachers to know about, as too often in class I have said to myself 'when am I ever going to use this in real life?' Or 'what does this actually have to do with our topic?' And I'm sure half my class was thinking the same thing along with me.

Authentic learning has 9 properties:

1. Authentic Context
   The physical or virtual environment that students are learning in should reflect the environment in which they would use the skills they are practicing.
   
2. Authentic Activity
   The tasks set for students should have real world relevance - goals should be clear and the students should be involved in the production of knowledge, rather than just reproducing facts they have memorised. Tasks should be complex and completed over a longer period instead of short and strictly defined by one particular technique or learning style.
   
3. Expert Performances
   Students should have access to a professional's advice and ideas such as those of a teacher or an older student, or a professional in their area of study. This allows them to see the different levels of learning, and share their own experience in the subject.
   
4. Multiple Perspectives
   This refers to both the materials the student has access to and the varying points of view on a topic. Students should research a topic through a variety of mediums such as textbooks, online searching and discussions with experts. Just as they should not limit their study to any one medium, they should also consider several different points of view on each topic to give them a broader understanding.
   
5. Collaboration
   Students should work together in problem solving, discussing various solutions with their peers instead of just being told the answers by a teacher and then going home to memorise them.
   
6. Articulation
   In speaking to the rest of the class or to a small group of students in a presentation, students can explain their ideas and illustrate how they came to their conclusion. Presentations are an important part of learning, as often it is easy to breeze over a topic without much thought, but if you have to present it to others so they can understand, you want to become an expert in the topic in order to explain it well.
   
7. Reflection
   Organised classroom learning can often have strict rules and guidelines. It is important for a student to reflect on their learning independently and organise their ideas in a non-linear fashion in order to express their knowledge in a way that makes sense to them.
   
8. Scaffolding and Coaching
   It is important for those who are more experienced in the topic, such as teachers and parents, to assist the student in their learning by tracking their progress and helping them with areas they struggle in and encouraging them to continue their studies.
   
9. Authentic Assessment
   Just as point 2 stated the importance of relevant classroom tasks, authentic assessment is just as important. The final examination should reflect the work done in class throughout the year and should involve all the same skills. If the end of year assessment does not relate to the assignments done during the year, students are more likely to forget the skills they learned as they consider them to be irrelevant. 

Though these points may seem all too obvious when you read them listed out like this, they are easy to forget when designing tasks and assessments - especially if you are somewhat of an expert in the topic you are teaching. Year 2 spelling may seem obvious to someone who has graduated university and it is all too easy to brush over various rules (and exceptions to the rules) as they are second nature now. To someone new to learning the rules of spelling, however, repetition and knowledge of the importance of the subject for real life are essential to the retention of knowledge.