Week 4

We started the workshop by having a look on the wesite http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ and we saw an interesting  video  named "Wagalak Sisters" on the interactive whiteboard.

 We can use this website for the classroom activities. For that we need to go to the study guide and in this section we can get the whole story with pictures and we can also get worksheets related to the different stories that is really helpful for the students in the classroom.

Then we got the task that with the help of "Inspiration software" we need summarize the story with the help of images. I did the story 'Bat and Butterfly' and here is the sample of my work.

It was very interesting and educating.

Then Greg started the activity with the help of graph. It was the blend of ICT and Mathematics and Greg make it more clear that how we can use the Interactive whiteboard to teach Maths with the help of M n M chart.

With the help of M n M we can do chance activities and other chart activities about the different colours of M n M and also we can have a look on M n M website.  that is http://www.m-ms.com.au/

I made the graph on the colours of cats. that's here

 I tried the data with different types of graphs as well.

During my practicum I have seen that teachers keeps on playing children's films  out of CD's if they have a wet weather timetable or any free time due to any certain reason but I think children can use computers at that time and can do the similar activities in groups as we did today. We can also play Internet sites that we came to know during this course with the help of G. Powell and make the best use of Internet in the classroom.

I use the interactive whiteboard in the classroom to make some graphs during my practicum and we all loved it. 'Dust echoes' is very interesting website to be used in the classrooms. I have also done a Maths activity based on M n M in my class, children loved it and also enjoyed eating M n M later. I also started doing  the computers activities in each maths session for different group.

Most of the schools have computers in the classroom but some schools are still struggling to bring enough computers in the classroom. it is hard when we don't have enough computers in the classrooms.

Vels Reference :-

Some sophisticated software is available to assist students to present the results of investigations, their considered views about an issue, and their understanding of a topic. Basic software tools like word processing and publishing can produce effective information products such as reports, charts, newsletters. Students can use a combination of ICT tools to create their products.

Students will learn the functions of some software relatively quickly but the skill to apply those functions to design an effective product requires practice. Effective design occurs when students apply the accepted ICT formatting styles (statistics are formatted in tables or graphs as these are easier to read than prose) and ICT conventions/rules for the layout of the information (graphs should have a title, axis labels, and key), as shown below in Figures 1, 2 and 3, along with appropriate graphic elements and imagination.
The more frequently students use ICT tools to create information products the more efficiently they will create them. To develop effective products they need to learn the ICT formats and presentation conventions for designing products for different purposes and audiences.

Week 2

Week 2

In today's workshop G.Powell gave us a lot of information about how to apply jobs, how to attend interviews, what is appropriate and not appropriate to talk about, how to dress up for the interviews, body language, use of cigarettes before the interview and much more. It was a great session from our point of view and very knowledgeable because anyways we have to look for jobs when we finish and more and more information about how to approach jobs and job interviews or making a resume is very important.

I learnt the different uses of MS Publisher.I created a brochure with the help of MS Publisher. I copy the images and information from the Internet about the topic I wanted to make the brochure. But it is very useful activity with children in the classroom as well . We can ask children to create the brochure of their own town or suburb or city or on any topic. In this way first of all children learn the various uses of MS Publisher.Along with that children learn to find more and more information about different topics on Internet.

Here is the brochure I made in the class.

Then G. Powell taught us how to make an e-portfolio. It is made with the help of MS Publisher as well. First we have to go to MS Office and choose MS Publisher and out of the options choose websites, there will be some question tick all of them except 'sell products'  and press 'ok' and now we would be able to work our e-portfolio. Here is the e-portfolio format I made in the class.

The whole workshop was very interesting. G. Powell also showed us few E-Portfolio's for applying for jobs.

E-portfolio is very important because of increasing use of computers and Internet in the Education and recruitment of teachers. Now we can see most of the jobs are published online on DEECD website and we have to submit the application online. So making an e-portfolio is not only challenging but making a very good e-portfolio is very important to get selected for an interview.

I went through the additional information provided on LMS about e-portfolio and gained a lot of information about it.We can make portfolios for students as well.

Students portfolio are also very important.Student portfolios are collections of student work that are typically used for an alternative assessment grade in the classroom. Student portfolios can take a couple of forms (http://712educators.about.com/od/portfolios/g/student_portfolios.htm ). If we want to spend some extra time or want to do more hard work we can design portfolios for the smaller grade like prep, grade one or grade two. Student's potfolios can help in keeping record of where students are at their learning or what students like to do the most in the school or various information that is helpful for the school, teachers and parents as well. In the bigger grade like grade 3,4,5,6 etc. students can spend some time every week to make and update their potfolios with the guidance and help of the teachers. "The multimedia portfolio is a multifaceted tool which can be used to fill several different purposes, but the most important is that it promotes learning among both student and teachers. This type of portfolio will be an important asset to school and individual as society heads into the Digital Age." (Hartnell-Young & Morriss 1999, p. 105).

There can be two types of student's portfolios: One type of student portfolio contains work that shows the student's progression through the course of the school year. For example, writing samples might be taken from the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. This can help show growth and provide teachers, students, and parents with evidence of how the student has progressed.

A second type of portfolio involves the student and/or teacher selecting examples of their best work. This type of portfolio can be graded in one of two ways. In many cases, these items are graded normally and then placed in the student's portfolio. This portfolio can then be used as evidence of student work for college and scholarship applications among other things. The other way that these types of portfolios can be graded is to wait until the end of a term. In this instance, typically the teacher has published a rubric and students collect their own work for inclusion. Then the teacher grades this work based on the rubric. If we have permission of putting some pictures on student's portfolio we can put some pictures on.

We can look at the various benefits of portfolio :-

• Encouraging self-directed learning.

• Enlarging the view of what is learned moving towards a world view.

• Fostering learning about learning.

• Demonstrating progress toward identified outcomes.

• Providing a link between instruction and assessment.

• Students value themselves as life long learners.

Vels Reference :-Students use ICT to:
•design and create effective information products such as websites, brochures, reports that meet audience needs
•create solutions to problems in a range of contexts presented in all areas of learning.

Students apply their ICT visualising thinking knowledge and skills when:
•analysing problems
•understanding concepts, relationships and processes
•formulating and organising ideas in all learning areas.
(http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/approaches.html#show_hide1)

ICT for creating
In this dimension, students use ICT to demonstrate their understandings. This entails students learning to:
•process (manipulate using software) data to create solutions to problems and to produce information products such as reports, brochures, websites and charts
•manage their stored files
•manage their time and resources by creating project plans using ICT.
Some sophisticated software is available to assist students to present the results of investigations, their considered views about an issue, and their understanding of a topic. Basic software tools like word processing and publishing can produce effective information products such as reports, charts, newsletters. Students can use a combination of ICT tools to create their products.
(http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/approaches.html#show_hide3)

Week 1

In the very first week, we learnt how to make mind maps.It is very helpful  to enlarge a topic and  and find different words related to that topic with the use of mind maps. It helps children to build their vocabulary and a very useful source for teachers.

I went through the definition of mind maps on the wikipeadia and I found out a lot of information about the mind maps, that is, a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Mind maps may also aid recall of existing memories.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map).

We can also say that mind maps are the geographical way of representing and sorting out the ideas and  words related to a same topic. They are a tree format of topics and we can use different colours to differentiate the terminology.

 Mind maps are very useful in the school. It is a visual presentation of ideas and helps children to enhance their visualisation skills about  different topics. During my practicum I use mind maps to brainstorm different words for different topics like season, under the sea and farm animals and farm life on the interactive whiteboard in my class. For writing, I used the similar pattern as well. Children loved to make mind maps actually and they did well.

Here is the mind map that I made during the class session. 

VELS Reference :-

Why use ICT rather than pen and paper?

Benefits include:

•the immediacy of results (the effects of changes in a thinking strategy are seen almost instantly).

•the ease of modifying work in response to changes of thinking. This encourages flexibility, risk taking and perseverance.

•the greater impact of onscreen visuals (using colour, different fonts, symbols and animation) encourages persistence and deeper thinking.

•the possibility of dual coding, for example, using two different data types such as sound and text or numbers and animations to systematically assess ideas. For example, through the Level 4 Economics standard students develop understanding about the role of budgeting and saving. A learning activity utilising a spreadsheet could assist students to develop this understanding.


Categories of ICT tools for visualising thinking :-


Generally ICT tools may be classified into three broad categories.

Graphic organisers (Doc - 102KB) are created using any ICT tool that enables students to link symbols (words, shapes, images) in such a way that constructs a visual representation of the thoughts, ideas, patterns and associations they are forming in their mind. Examples include:

•mindmaps (http://axon.hst-fan.co.uk/t_creative.gif)

•fishbone diagrams

•spidermaps (Doc - 68KB)

•venn diagrams (Doc - 24KB)


These might range from simple 2D diagrams to sophisticated hypermedia documents containing hyperlinks that open up more and more associations for complex ideas.

The spider map for example, can be used to provide scaffolding to students new to graphic organisers as it presents a structure for them to begin with. The example below identifies six aspects of a project students need to consider when preparing their response. The ‘spider body’ contains the project name and the ‘spider legs’ have blank horizontal lines attached to them to encourage students to think about at least two elements they must investigate or learn about. The students’ responses are displayed in the boxes.

Week 5

Today we have a bit of fun playing with different websites and some of them can't be used in the classroom beacuse of sexual references or other such reasons.

We started with the adult video https://www.dfilm.com/ but not for use in the primary schools.We enjoyed making some videos as well. Some of the work I did in the classroom is here :-

we used another website http://www.zimmertwins.com/movie/create

Then we used another website that is http://www.buildyourwildself.com/ and I created wild myself and. I find it very interesting because if we use it with the students in the classroom they will enjoy  doing this activity. I think children would love doing this activity in classroom.

Then at home I log on  to http://www.sketchswap.com/  this website was on LMS and I got this

It is very useful to use this sort of websites in the class.

 

week 3

We started the workshop with an activity based on frog.In the activity we used a rubber band, picture of a frog, piece of a cardboard and sticky tape. Using this material our activity was to create a jumping frog in groups. First of all,we stuck the frog on the piece of cardboard with the help of sticky tape. Then we folded the cardboard from one side and wrapped the rubber on the the bent area. Now if we touch the cardboard from the top the frog is jumping. We enjoyed this activity and I think this activity helps children to build the skills of problem solving.Lovely hands on activity for kids!
Then whole class shared their ideas how everyone worked this activity out. There are various ways to resolve this activity.

Then we log on to http://www.quia.com/web on the computer, it was an interesting website where we created new quiz.
I created a quiz on Dinosaurs and my url for the quiz was http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513165.html.

It was really interesting to design this activity and then exchange and resolve the quiz designed by peers.

Then we learnt to create activities on the same website. I created an activity on jumble words and the url for the activity was jumble word
http://www.quia.com/jw/386915.html.
The whole idea of creating this sort of activities and sharing with peers was really interesting and very useful for the children as it enhances their creativity skills. I like this activity of jumble words for kids it helps them to recognise words and spellings. I think all this sort of websites and activity with creating games on words and pictures is useful for children and we as teachers can use them in classroom easily.

Vels Reference :-
Students become more proficient  with the use of ICT for the purposes of sharing knowledge and acquiring information. They use ICT to visualise their thinking in order to make sense of ideas, concepts and issues from all domains, and to reflect on their learning.
Students progress by devising planned approaches to problem solving. This involves documenting the order of, and time allocation for, individual tasks within extended projects. Students use a wider range of ICT tools, techniques and functions to support their thinking processes, to model systems, to solve problems and to create information products for a variety of purposes. They use the equipment’s operating system and software functions to manage their files.
Later on,  students become more proficient in the use of Internet research tools to locate and download information from a range of sources, and they judge the quality of information, based on set criteria. They conform to accepted codes of practice when using ICT, and discuss the consequences of ICT use in a range of environments and contexts in the community. Students create and maintain digital evidence of their learning in all domains, the evidence exemplifying the progress made in applying ICT knowledge and skills.