Final Course Reflection

This has been a great opportunity to become familiar with concepts, tools and aspects of I learning that I kept hearing about but remained largely ignorant of. If nothing else it has created an awareness of a world of educational tools that I can take tentative steps towards fully utilising as a part of my teaching practice. I must be really conscious of actively going back and exploring each of the aspects covered in this course so I will not lose the knowledge and skills I have developed over the semester. My digital vocabulary has certainly expanded and I have found myself referring to googledocs, tagalaxy and wikis in my general professional conversations.
I realise that students need to develop skills and sensibilities (guidelines) before using the Web 2.0 tools - otherwise the educational value will be overtaken by novelty/entertaining/game-playing mentalities that could undermine the learning experience. These are TOOLS to be used alongside more traditional methods of pedagogy as part of a whole learning experience. As mentioned in previous blogs, primarily students need to ne aware of privacy issues - that anything posted on the web can be there for a very long time. Students USE the skills developed during their educational experience - skills of analysis, communication, reflection, collaboration, literacy, creative thinking, etc. Web 2.0 is a pathway to new understanding, to organising knowledge, to utilise and further develop skills.
I can easily see the application of Bloom to the digital world - in fact an application of the taxonomy places the tools we have explored in perspective. We need to encourage students to move well beyond the basic ideas of just listing and recognising. A proper application of these amazing tools will assist students climb the ladder through explaining,comparing, organizing to critiquing, judging and, hopefully, to the point of actually designing and planning.

Module 10

This unit covers digital learning communities that are available for us to use for educational purposes. Wikis have the advantage of allowing each student to set up a page within the wiki created by the teacher. I accessed ulearnceo.wikispace to see an example of how a range of contributors can create a page within a specific wiki (in this case a teacher representing their school on a conference held in New Zealand). An obvious application would be to set up a sample response to a past paper question and get students to contribute modifications that would build the response to a higher band level. Obviously a relatively high level of monitoring might be necessary so student contributions are relevant and accurate - but students commenting on each other's suggestions in this format can create a more active and non-threatening learning community.

The payment aspect of Nings may now seem prohibitive but the Facebook like interface might make it appealing to students - just the use of images makes the site more visually appealing.

I will explore the role of the wiki "creator" further as it would appear that I can then moderate the contributions - but this could well be self defeating as it restricts the freedom of contribution that seems to be one of the most valuable aspects of wiki and the use of constant emails to get you to accept the modification too time intensive.

Wikispaces seems easy to use and set up.

The use of blogs as a classroom tool could involve setting up a topic blog that is followed by students who may be out on work placement and incorporate hyperlinks for revision purposes. Students could even create a blog as a journal if they are lucky enough to travel overseas - informing others in the class about their experiences.

I really like the idea of creating a "Fakebook" at fatewall.com - where students could create a facebook like page for an historical personality and give background details, a list of "friends" and even an imaginary dialogue.

Module 9

Scootle seems particularly impressive because it relates so specifically to a community of educators. The very fact that it is not "free" is encouraging because it limits the nature of postings and accessibility. This is geared to Australian curricula and even from the few resources I have accessed so far the sections on "educational details" and "educational values" are relevant, practical and well composed.
The concept of the "learning paths" very much keeps the teacher as a guide in collecting the most suitable resources for your individual class into a specific folder - perhaps not just for individual topics, but concepts within topics (such as Augustus' building programs, the growth of the Roman Empire and the imperial family). Scootle has wide applications because it gathers the resources into interactive learning objects, collections, videos, podcasts, etc).
To see the resources gathered from Australian museums and galleries can encourage students to visit locations like the Museum of Ancient Cultures, the Powerhouse and the Nicholson.

Module 8

I always like the icon attaching itself to an obvious word association - and Really Simple Sindication has the newspaper image and the semi satellite that makes it east to remember. I mostly envision RSS Feed as a time saving tool that allows me to get updates from the blogs that I am following without going to each blog separately or even on a regular basis. Although I am only following a few blogs at the moment, as this expands it will create a great opportunity to maintain links with colleagues (professional sharing of ideas and research for example) and keeping abreast of new information and comments on blogs associated with my teaching subjects as well as education generally.
From a classroom perspective, I can see a great application in getting students to follow the developments in a particular topic - such as new postings relevant to an archaeological site.
The google reader seems very user friendly - and I was pleased to see how easy it was to "unsubscribe" when the updates from the Sydney Morning Herald started to overwhelm the window.

Module 7

Delicious seems like one of the most useful sites studied so far. As I move across several computers (home, PC and the Mac) it is remarkably easy now to link all the sites I have found relevant and tag them in such a way that I can locate individual topic areas or whole course/subjects. Already, this exercise has led me to three great sites for Ancient History - including one that analyses the prima porta statue of Augustus (images and written comments on symbolism). The interactive site on Pompeii appears to be one that is very student friendly and I can envision sharing a range of site explorations with my students. This is also a great way to encourage students to work together and share valuable sites that are found when researching for assessment tasks and homework assignments. I am very pleased that I have become aware of this tool before moving to the post trial HSC exam intensive study period. During this time students tend to somewhat isolate their study/research/revision. With Delicious I can more actively encourage the sharing of sites, resources, insights and points of focus and analysis - a real learning community that has the potential to benefit the results of the whole class.
This is my Delicious link: www.delicious.com/markgwyer

Module 6

Some major frustration due to internet slowness not allowing me to upload photographs - and also not being able to see full application of taggalaxy - but the concepts were apparent so I will "imagine" what Fickr and taggalaxy would be like in terms of class applications.
Very pleased to see content filters. Although the examples of "moderate" would not seem suitable for our students. Interesting, however, to contemplate how partial nudity in ancient statues, reliefs, frescos and pottery might be judged (for example, the murals from Pompeii). Perhaps the "Content Type" would make allowances for art works as falling under "community guidelines".
Also noted that the default position for Safesearch is ON and that the initial listing of one's birth date may assist in the prohibition on "restricted" for those under 18.
Students need to be warned about the terms and conditions of both Flickr and taggalaxy - that all images posted on these sites become the property of the site owner to be used as they so wish. Obviously with millions of images posted, the likelihood that one's images could be "on-sold" to an advertiser (etc) is extremely slim, but I believe we need to constantly remind students that internet privacy is a consideration always to be considered.
From an educational perspective, searching for tagged images via taggalaxy could be used to assist the visual learner to define key terms - and for the gifted student to explore connotations and associations of terms and concepts. This is a great opportunity to not only assist with basic research (offering a far wider selection of images than the commercial dominance of a google image search) but to get students to think in a way similar to a dictionary thesaurus - fine tuning definitions, constructing mind maps by seeing links and associations and exploring cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary links.
Sharing images from excursions or taken as part of a class exercise would be an obvious use of Flickr. Whether that was a class presentation of drawings, Adobe manipulations of images (visual reconstructions), a dress up day (Year 10 decade study of the 1960's), or sharing images of family history (Year 10 study of a migrant group).

Module 4

The concept of digital storytelling is fascinating - and the parable about the teachers feeling that the use of books and writing would undermine a student's real learning was poweful. However, I need to start slowly and I focused on the aspects of basic audio podcasting. For several years we have used the term podcast as a generic name for students submitting an audiofile on a given question in the year 12 Studies of Religion course. Basically it was the old oral task simply bypassing the handing in of tapes, discs, etc. Complications arose with the different types of files and whether we could open all these files on the college server. With the advent of our Year 11's in 2011 having personal Macbooks, we will be able to significantly refine this task when they come to Year 12 in 2012. We can actually start assessing the effectiveness of the presentation in real terms. As the task is on a key personality, we can encourage dramatic readings from the writings of the person (even by way of voice manipulation a student could present the readings at a different pitch or as a "male" voice), expect the use of sound loops to heighten effect and possibly suggest incorporating extracts from news bulletins or academic lectures as secondary source material.
I have thought of applications for a teacher produced podcast as well. Voiced feedback when returning tasks could be archived so students could tap into the comments again when they use these tasks for revision purpose later in the year. When we know that a number of students might be missing from a lesson due to sport/excursions/meetings, we could simply record the lesson and edit highlights so that those missing can confidently assess what they might have missed. Producing a podcast of material that enriches a topic could assist in diversification for the gifted and talented.
Listening to the US podcast on teacher use made clear that multi-media podcasts (vodcasts) were likely to be limited for a while to come due to the data space required when video components are introduced. However, it is great to know that this dimension of podcasting is ready to be utilised - and if not always available as an active download, could be produced through the tools of garageband and saved via disc or ipod or ipad.