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.

Will I always be so easily distracted?

What was meant to be a quick Google search for a technology related image or cartoon to add to my website, soon turned into an exploration of a hundred different websites belonging to various cartoonists. I found a great site with really relevant cartoons on a huge range of topics. The cartoonist's name is Randy Glasbergen and this is his site. He seems to have captured some of  my fears regarding the use of technology in the classroom quite succinctly:

 

First Post!

Welcome to my first ever blog post! One of my units at Murdoch University requires me to keep a blog of my learning experiences throughout the class. Though I've never been very electronically savvy, always a pen and paper kind of girl, it's been a lot easier to get the hang of than I expected. I've even made my own website, though it's still a little rough - now all that's left to do is the research! I had thought, up until now, that creating and designing my own site would be the hard part of the assignment but it seemed too easy if anything. I had no clue where to start until I looked at some examples from previous students and professors and that cleared everything up, all of a sudden I had a hundred different ideas that I couldn't possibly cram into one site. I used weebly to create the page, as it seemed simple and it it had a nice look to it. The site itself had a tutorial and checklist to go through as you planned the site, so all my paper and pencil diagrams and drawings were useless as the design I ended up going with was nowhere near my original plan.

While creating the site you are given the option to either upload your own photos, choose from a gallery within Weebly, or add them to the site from another page using the URL. This final option is very useful as it gives you a much wider expanse of images that are automatically accredited on your site in a footnote as they are uploaded. The galleries within the page were quite limited, as the free options were of low quality and were often very irrelevant to what I had searched for. It's quite frustrating to search for "whiteboards" and be presented with a hundred or so photos of people playing sport, with not an in-focus whiteboard to be seen anywhere. There were, of course, other images of higher quality - in fact they were exactly what I was looking for, however the copyright limitations on them required you to pay $5 or so in order to use them on your site. $5!? Think I have that  kind of money? Ridiculous!

Despite my ranting, I would encourage anyone to make their own site, even if no one ever sees it or it's just for your friends and family. It was a lot more fun than I thought it could be and it's such an easy and efficient way of documenting your studies or your travels, even just everyday activities.