I just made a new Voki. See it here:

I just made a new Voki. See it here:

Reflective Synopsis:

The idea that good pedagogy is good pedagogy regardless of the method of delivery really resonated with me. A successful teacher, using good pedagogy, should still be able to teach effectively if all they have is blackboard and chalk, whereas a teacher with unlimited ICT resources is not guaranteed to succeed. It is important to understand there are circumstances in which digital tools are not available, appropriate or effective. With this in mind I hope to ensure that the only reason I employ any teaching method digital or otherwise is pedagogical.

Investigating the individual capabilities of digital tools has been informative, educational and eye-opening to say the least, but for me the pivotal idea is: Digital tools do not automatically equal good digital pedagogy. That requires intelligent task design. This was illustrated by the de bono’s hats activity. Without the scaffold of the hats, the activity was merely a use of digital tool which most would have likely resulted in heated arguments instead of plethora of perspectives.

Many of the ideas I came up with while completing the embedded tasks would never occurred to me without keeping in mind, Bloom’s taxonomy, SAMR and the hallmarks of good digital pedagogy. These concepts provided me with a gauge to help assess the bewildering array of digital tools and possibilities against, and provided me with a process that informed and will continue to inform my digital design task process.

Without that focused design process I would have easily been distracted by all the figurative shiny buttons of the digital world as almost every digital tool we have investigated over the last seven weeks was new to me. I was completely amazed at how much I could do with a basic laptop. What was frightening, however, was the realisation that those are the tip of the iceberg and are probably already somewhat out of date. Therefore researching up-to-date relevant digital tools for use in the classroom will need to become an integral part of my lesson planning process and something that I constantly review.    

My biggest concern with introducing digital pedagogies into the classroom is safety, specifically from inappropriate content, cyber-bullying and digital footprint. For instance, I was searching for images on Google and entered the word “one” into the search window.  Scrolling down I was dumbfounded to come across multiple images of male genitalia!!! That was the last thing I expected to see, as I considered that search word to be completely innocuous.  I have no restrictions other than antivirus software on my personal laptop so I am unsure if a net nanny or similar would have screened it out.

Regardless the incident highlighted that all aspects of cyber safety are essential to consider seriously before introducing tasks where students are likely to have unrestricted access to the internet. There is no way to completely remove this risk, unless you avoid digital tools which will disadvantage students.  Restricting the interactivity of tools, or removing the audience, limits the transformative aspects and again will disadvantage and disengage students. Teachers can really only mitigate the risk by ensuring age appropriate content and assess each tool and task on a case by case basis that takes into consideration; school policy, the opinions and wishes of caregivers and the benefit to students.

Bullying is a perennial problem in schools and now cyber bullying is also an issue. (1) This is concerning because one of the aspects I most enjoyed of digital pedagogy is the ability to create relevance by providing students with a legitimate audience via the internet. However as anyone who has ever read a trail of Face book comments will know, that feedback can be uplifting or soul destroying. I feel that this is a dangerous atmosphere to carelessly expose adolescent students who are still forming their identity.  I’m particularly concerned about the “body shaming” that is happening at the moment, so I will be particularly cautious when designing tasks that include images or videos of students.

Social media and the associated problem of a digital footprint aren’t going anywhere and in all probability will get even more complicated in the future. My plan is to mitigate the risk to students through relevant current information and awareness. This does not mean that I won’t include digital tools in my teaching; it will simply mean adding another facet of planning to implement them.  

I’ll admit referencing is the bane of my academic life as the sheer amount of detail required and information to assimilate is overwhelming and the internet is particularly difficult to correctly reference depending on which referencing system you are using. I think the important idea to convey to students regarding ethical use of the internet is acknowledging where they found information or ideas. I would much rather students put in a simple website source reference rather than give up in disgust because they can’t figure out where all the commas are supposed to go. This is why, in order to model correct practices for students to copy, knowledge of what can and can’t use in lessons is essential. It’s also useful to know that playing resources such as TeacherTube or embedded YouTube videos don’t contravene copyright.  

On a side note I think it’s wonderful to see that digital age has created the need for the creative commons license under which people can take an original idea and build on it. Many well known classical compositions wouldn’t be around today under the current copyright laws! This would also be an interesting idea to introduce as part of a scaffolded discussion among students on the topic of referencing and copyright.

There are unlimited types of and ways to use digital tools in the classroom which is a matter of personal preference, however use of contemporary relevant digital tools, combined with good task design , emphasis on safety and copyright awareness is a matter of necessity. These ideas form the basis of my evolving personal digital pedagogical framework.  

1.    

         http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Schools/Cyber%20issues/Cyberbullying.aspx

Reflection 6

Without sounding too arrogant, I have been amazed at the amount of ideas for teaching Maths that I have come up with in response to the weekly embedded tasks. If I take that number of ideas and multiply it by all the students in this course and then add in all the ideas that those ideas spark suddenly the amount of ideas is growing exponentially. That’s just using an online community the size of this class imagine what all the teachers in the world could come up with!

This is why online learning communities are so useful, as they connect an unlimited number of people all with a unique perspective that can contribute ideas to the collective knowledge and can be customised to target a specific area. For instance just within one school you could create a; teacher online community, school online community, student online community, parents online community, school/local community online community the list is endless and the end result essentially is enhanced communication and passage of information between all participants.

As a distance student who works full time I can often feel a little isolated and as if I’m trying to assimilate huge text books all by myself. However throughout the course of the last seven weeks reading and commenting of other students blogs has considerably lessened that feeling of isolation. I formed a small group with two other students to collaborate with by reading and commenting on each other’s blogs.

Both of these students are younger than me so I have found their insight fascinating and invigorating. Another point I noticed was that one of them was a very visual learner. Through her blog postings I have come to a much better understanding of how to interest and target visual learners. The other student is very digitally savvy and curious, her blog postings highlighted how much research I need to do into digital tools just to scratch the surface of what is out there and available for free. I particularly thought this comment was an excellent example of constructive criticism by a colleague.

CQUBlogger13214 March 2015 at 22:39

I took the same points, however I slightly disagree on your final point. Teachers should always cater to the students and teach in a relevant way absolutely, however I think that if a teacher is uncomfortable there should be some lenience. For example, if I were to realise that Wiki's would help a class, yet I am uncomfortable, I might skip it for that term and then over holidays make it a point to learn myself and become more comfortable. Perhaps even asking for a PD on newer technologies once a year sort of thing. Teaching something you don't know is worse, because students can tell no matter how much you try to cover it up and then you lose respect and their engagement

Embedded Task 5

This is what my mind looks like when I first see an Assessment task! 

I often feel overwhelmed by too many competing ideas, and unable to make sense of the million thoughts rushing through my mind. My normal coping strategy is to write down a plan to help me organise my mind without getting sidetracked by unnecessary details (something I struggle with daily). I have never actually used a mind map or a visual aspect to my planning prior to this and I can't believe what I was missing! 

After a few false starts my assessment plan ended up looking like this

:

One of the most appealing aspects of this tool was the ability to visually represent the chaos in my mind and then transform it into order, it was very cathartic. I also like the idea that its never finished you can just keep on refining your ideas as they occur to you. I felt that keeping the original and various versions was very important to help me see how much progress I had made.

Technical Specs:
The free version of Text2mindmap is fairly limited, you can really only customise the space by changing the text and colours and line width. It has a lock/unlock feature as well as an editing or read only version. There is the option to download the map as a PDF or image and you can only create one map at a time without a subscription. No versions seem to have a ability to embed or upload images or links into the map which I think would be an excellent addition. The only knowledge required to use this tool is the ability to use tab correctly so all the subbranches end up where you want them to. Overall it was very user friendly.

Learning outcomes:
The genius of this tool is that it is essentially a visual representation of a thought process and so can be used to teach and illustrate higher thinking processes. It allows you to see where you are getting confused, sidetracked or overwhelmed with too many ideas and then organise them and continue to refine them until you are satisfied as either an individual or as part of a group.  The final result isn't really that important but the process of getting there is. Setting students the task of creating a map on any topic would be an excellent way to get to know the way your students think and maybe enable you to identify their learning style. This could be used in conjunction with any task that required planning or organisation.

S: Divide students into groups and set them a task to brainstorm on a topic using computers and a mindmap. This is no different than getting students to brainstorm using pen and paper while this could be an effective teaching tool for some situations it isn't using ICT to its fullest potential.

A: Students are asked to create a series of successively refined mind maps illustrating their progressing understanding of a topic. This is a good use of visual representations but isn't at the transformative level of digital pedagogy.

M: Students are given a difficult maths problem of a type they have never seen with a worked example. Using a mind map tool and information they can infer from the worked example students are asked to reverse engineer how to solve the problem, they are then requested to come up with a general rule. All mind maps are published on the class website, from these the teacher helps the class to creates a single mind map on how to solve that type of problem. This way the teacher becomes the facilitator and they have taught themselves a concept! The mind map would also be great revision tool, and comparing the different mind maps would illustrate how many different approaches their are in solving a problem and encourage students to think outside the box.

R: Using the scientific method as a scaffold to form the basis of a mind map, students are set the task of creating a mind map to come up with a testable hypothesis on a given topic. The mind maps and hypothesis are uploaded to the internet and members of the public or other schools are encouraged to try the experiment and post the results. After the results are collated a refined hypothesis is formulated using the mind map and the process is repeated as long as results keep coming in. This illustrates beautifully the concept that science has no facts only more refined theories.

Please see above the mind maps I created, or follow this link.

Week 5 Reflection! 

Thinglink! 

Please see above image for my week five reflection.

Digital Video.

Technical Aspects

·         What can this technology do?

o   Digital Videos:

§  Accurately record events

§  Available on almost every smart phone

§  Easily edited

§  Create personalised videos

§  Combine images with audio

§  Present large amounts of information in short period of time.

§  Bring real life examples into the classroom, via video

·         What do the settings of the technology allow you to do?

o   Movie Maker

§  Create webcam videos

§  Record a narrative

§  Add soundtrack

§  Embed videos

§  Upload images and videos

§  Add captions

§  Format images and video

§  Trim videos

§  Add basic animates and special effects.

·         Can you multi-author, do you have privacy settings?

o   Movie Maker

§  No in-built privacy settings

§  One author at a time

·         Could easily be used with group work

·         Can you customise the tool or space?

o   Depending on the software you can

§  Add title page

§  Edit text

§  Slide appearance

§  Fade in/out transitions

§  Add animations

§  Special effects

§  Add filters

·         What other technical considerations are important? Is it easy to use? What experience is needed to operate it?

o  This so far was the most frustrating digital tool I have attempted to use yet. Mostly because of the sheer amount of options. Once I had mastered the basic record and trim functions then I wanted to do fancier and fancier things. Movie maker was fairly straight forward to use however some elements of its editing are counter intuitive. I ended up trimming everything except the parts I wanted to keep.

What took me the most time with this task was working out how and what format to upload the video.  I would have to do a fair bit of research on this before being comfortable using videos confidently in a teaching setting. In the end I had to upload the video to youtube and then embed it into the blog post before I could get it to work. I looked up technical support for blogs and found that videos over 5MB are a problem, this is a limitation on how and where videos could be used. 

Learning outcomes

·         Targets visual and aural learners

·         Used to promote public speaking and confidence

·         Groupwork

·         When students create their own videos the following topics could be introduced across the curriculum

o   Digital Ethics

o   Copyright

o    Technological skills

o   Cyber safety

o   Digital footprint

·         Can be used to support higher order thinking through explanation and creation

Supported activities

·         Distance education

·         Absent participation

·         Digital homework submission

·         Alternative form of assessment for learners who struggle with writing

·         Engaging way to present a lot of information

Substitution: A video of a powerpoint presentation with lots of text. This is no different than standing up in front of the class either reading from a text book or from a powerpoint.

Augmentation: Using videos to explain and demonstrate real life applications of maths problems. (this could actually be a lot of fun, and would be a great idea for a web series)

Modification: Students answer homework questions posed on flipgrid. Allows students to use video but there isn’t the option to customise the video.

Redefinition: Instead of maths homework, students are required to submit a video in any form they wish that explains how they arrived at their final answer to a question. The great thing about this is that if all the videos were shared among the class, some students might understand the concept better when explained by their peers.

Suggested implementation:

One of the biggest challenges I foresee as a maths teacher especially in the higher grades is using homework to assess students understanding of a concept. These days with great programs such as Wolfram Alpha it’s easy to find the answers to complex maths problems (that calculators don’t solve for you) while having no understanding of them.  Instead of giving students a THOUSAND maths problems to do as homework I feel it would be more effective to require them to submit a homework video explaining how they came to their final answer.  An example of which is uploaded here or embedded below.

Re-Sized Photo's from Easter Break 2014