Flickr

Hi all,

• The children are asked to open an account on flickr, add their peers and upload some of their own digital pictures.
  
• They will also need to ensure these can be accessed by all their 'friends' on flickr.
• Students will need to search on flickr for imagery which they think illustrates the power of the weather and how that weather can affect everyday life.
• The students will need to describe why the pictures they chose illustrates the power of the weather and how that weather can affect everyday life.
• Students are required to use the pictures in a powerpoint presentation with the description of how the images present the power of the weather and how that weather affects everyday life.
• Each picture needs a seperate description. Each picture also needs relevant reference information.
• The students will be assessed on how well they can relate the pictures to the power of the weather and all that entails.
  
• The students are required to gather 10 pictures and describe how each picture shows the power of the weather and how that weather affects every day life.
• This experience is about involving the students in solitary use of flickr and powerpoint programs.
• Students also need to describe what the pictures they have chosen, mean and how the pictures reflect what has been asked of them.
  

Students are given a month to complete this assessment and drafts are due at the end of each week to ensure the students are on track to complete on time.

Some stumbling blocks the students may come across are:

• Inability to access the internet to start the Flickr account.
• Inability to use Flickr effectively and meet requirements.

I do not have access to a class of students therefore I am unsure what further stumbling blocks
they may come across.

Thanks, Stacy.

Students WIKI

Hi all,
My outline for a unit of work follows:
This plan is for grade 9 students. The students need to populate a WIKI based around the queensland education system and how it has changed since it's inception.
Records show that the state government started recording how the education system was run in 1824 up until 1981. The address following shows an outline of the education system in queensland and following the links on the page takes you into various parts of the chronology.

http://education.qld.gov.au/library/edhistory/state/brief/

The children will be required to ask their questions of how education has changed, the children can ask what they want to know about how the education system has changed.
They will work in teams of 4 children per team and they will need to do a certain era each.
The era's will be 1824- 1902,
1902 - 1920,
1920 - 1940,
1940 - 1960,
1960 - 1981,
1981- 2009.

The children will need to look at how schools worked in their era, who were the teachers? were they single women who had never married? were they males? were they married women with children? what types of punishments were enforced? what were class sizes like? what was taught and how was it taught? each group needs to pass as much information on as possible to help the rest of the group learn about how the education system has changed and what they may have been up against if they were at school in 1920, for example.

For the final group 1981-2009 they need to interview their parents, older family friends and teachers who may be old enough to know what the system was like back then. They need to find out how they think the education system has changed and how different the teaching styles are in the last 30 years.

Students need to Post their information on the WIKI and comments and posts can be added once the teacher has proofread them. All information needs to be referenced and cited.

Reference lists must be attached to the end of each post to ensure that information can be traced back to its original source.

students names and details must be included in each post to ensure marking is done efficiently and effectively.

Thanks, Stacy.

Synopsis of lesson plan

Hi All,
My lesson plan will be based around the alphabet and matching letters and sounds to each other.
The children will be asked to work together as a group before moving to the computer work. The children will be asked to match the letters on the board to the first letter of their own names. Once each child has matched the first letter of their names to the matching letter on the board they will be asked to name the remaining letters in their names.

They will then be asked to move to the computers and the quiz will be based around the same idea of recognising letters. We will start the quiz with the first half of the alphabet and children will need to match the letter with a picture which has the name of the picture underneath, by picking the picture and name up with the mouse cursor and matching it with the correct letter.

As the children finish a set of 5 letters they will move up a level, at the end of each level there will be a celebration on screen. Children will then be asked if they want to move to the next level, they can press yes or no and then follow the prompts.
If children wish they can go all through the alphabet and see how much they really can do on their own without help from other people in group.
Children can do this quiz time and time again giving them lots of practice to get the information right and be able to recognise all the letters in the alphabet correctly without prompting from other children or teachers.

To extend this experience i would plan the next experience to be the children finding the letters that make up their name out of a mixed bag of letters and asking the children to put them in order to be displayed.
Thanks, stacy.

quizzes

Hi all,
I have chosen to focus on the alphabet as I am majoring in Early childhood study I will be focusing any assessment I plan around that age group.
Within the alphabet there are many and varied experiences that can be planned.
I would plan the experiences so that preschool children can do the exercises on the computers and successfully complete them of their own accord.
The experiences would be matching letters, matching words and matching sounds with written letters.
The children would work either as a pair or on their own to complete these experiences and therefore learn about what works and what does not.
The experiences can be done time and time again to assist the children in learning through repetition.
Thanks, stacy

Digital storytelling

Digital story telling is an amazing way to get children involved in technology, reading and comprehension experiences.
Teaching the children how to make these digital stories themselves will give them a new understanding and appreciation of how much work teachers do behind the scenes when preparing lessons and the like.
The students would be in grade 5, I would ask the children to get into groups of 3-4 children and they can make thier own digital stories, each story would need to have video camera use, powerpoint use and music or voice overs.
The idea of this assessment would be to give the students the opportunity to use the various types of technology they have seen in action in the teachers digital stories, asking the children to use different types of technology in assessment form gives them feedback on how well they used the technology and in turn gives them new skills and ideas to explore.
This type of work gives the children a way to engage in assessment through a medium they usually have limited time to explore.
In giving children the opportunity to explore technology children will be engaged rather than enraged and therefore learning as much as possible through these experiences.

Blogs

Hi All,
Blogs are very interactive and a great way for students and teachers alike to communicate without necesarily having to see each other face to face. If the students are at home working on an assignment and they have questions or queries they can post them and both students and teachers can reply to them. A blog also gives the students a chance to post things that interest them and show more of their personality.
I am currently working with preschool aged children and I have very limited resources at work so I am unable to get my children involved in this experience. Their limited technological knowledge also makes this a stumbling block, though they are learning to use broadlearn and letterland programs for their general computer knowledge.
If I was working with children who were old enough i would give the children to activity of starting their own blogs, posting a picture of themselves if they wish, and they can post ideas, activities and respond to each others ideas and experiences.
Within the experiences they would be doing for their blog they would be asked to write short stories, poems, reports and use various files websites to look up and verify information when writing reports etc.
The students blog would be their way of expressing and discussing ideas and information.
They would also use the blog to respond to their peers ideas and activities.
Use of this blog would give the children a chance to see how they use words and descriptions and see what other children also do in the same situation.
Thanks, stacy.

Hi all,
Hyperlink for my powerpoint is below.
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=99fe21df4e494b78c2b435915e8821d7e04e75f6e8ebb871

I made the quiz reletively simple so I could focus on making sure all the links work and everything does what it should.
Once I got the hang of the links between pages it was quite easy to see how all the super dooper powerpoints work that they put in huge stage shows and conferences.
On the other hand I can also see how people can think they are difficult to do and do not generally try. I know that until I was given a step by step guide on how to do this I did not try either and now it only takes me half an hour to make a powerpoint with links, colours and pictures.
I feel at ease with majority of websites and programs I come across now and if need be I find a forum to ask questions.
Thanks, Stacy.

Final evaluation

Hi all,
The technologies investigated are many and varied which provides for all children to learn in ways that suit them personally rather than being taught in the way that most of the children seem to learn best. All the differenet technologies all teach in various ways, some teach through reading, some through listening and others by starting a debate, teaching the students also means assessing the students as well to ensure they are learning and can meet the requirements to pass the year level they are in.
The technologies I have investigated are many and varied and were alot of fun to play with, the technologies I enjoyed the most were, playing with the powerpoint and adding voicethreads, On the royalty free website, incompetech, I found a track called deliberate thought by the sites owner kevin mcleod and it is amazing, it is relaxing and definately a song that I now go to sleep to most nights. I have also used it as a rest time song at work with my preschoolers who rest and relax to this song easily.
Wikipedia was generaly not reliable and if used i needed to substantiate the resources myself which is time consuming and not generally on my list of priorities or within time constraints. I do not generally use wikipedia because of the above constraints.
Webquests are a great way to test learning and see if the children are taking in what is being taught. My favourite site we used within this assessment was google earth, i found the house i used to live in and both here and overseas. conversations with lecturers and peers were had about various technologies and i did receieve help when i was unsure of how certain things worked.

I would like to use as many different types of technologies in the class room as possible, things like webquests and the like will give the students a different perspective and understanding of how things work and how they can influence what they learn and help others if possible.
Post, to your Blog, a 1000 word (maximum) reflective synopsis of the technologies you
have investigated and the online conversations you have had with your lecturer and peers. If students are able to teach and learn among themselves this enables the teacher to help students who need one on one attention and therefore meet the needs of all students.

I love technology and i use it as much as possible to ensure teaching and learning is enabled in as many different ways.

Thanks, Stacy.

Hi all, the link for my pictures on voicethread is below, i have uploaded pics of the p!nk concert i went to, a couple of pics of me, pic of my house and one of my mums pieces of work, my nans butterfly.
some of my favorite things.
This type of site can be used to share various ideas, pictures, video files etc. basically another way to share information between people who are not necessarilly close in distance. pretty easy to use but if you try to upload lots of pictures/files it does take quite a while to upload them.

http://voicethread.com/share/586943/

thanks, stacy.

Hi all,
I found a piece of music that is calming and relaxing. At the moment I would use for rest time music to help the children relax and have a quiet time. In a school I might use it as part of dance piece if i was in a drama class, or as part of a class show to start the show and get everyone's attention and to quiet down.
really pretty, the instrumentation is electronic and a choir.

the music is made up by kevin mcleod and the name of the track is deliberate thought.

thanks, stacy.

This presentation has audio attached to it, yes it's me talking and i dont think i have a radio voice but thats all i've got, lol.
It is very interesting to know that i can now make those really cool talking powerpoints and i can add music etc. it is amazing to think that at one stage making all these different types of presentations used to baffle me.

i watched the other slidecast and i followed all the instructions given on moodle and it all worked exactly the way it is supposed to and i think thats really cool.

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Thanks, Stacy

Mediafire

Hi all,
My files are up on mediafire and this site i have found was really easy to use, the site told you what you needed to do and anything you wanted to do was at your finger tips.
This type of site could be used to upload readings, files anything your students may need for an assignment or class work could be put up on mediafire rather than printing everything out 30 times, this would save time and paper for both teachers and students.
An awesome idea and great time saver.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=99fe21df4e494b78c2b435915e8821d7e04e75f6e8ebb871

Thanks, stacy

Slideshare powerpoint.

Hi all,
My powerpoint has been embedded.
thanks, stacy.

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