Reflection on blogs.

          
Before i started the E learning course, i have never created a blog.... Just never felt the need to share too much information online and also the substitute for that is Facebook in my opinion. one of the intersting things about the blogs is that it has got backwards chronological order and it displays the newest stuff first and you have to scroll down to view the older content. This is quite smart but at the start i wanted to try and arrange it so that the older postings come first and the newer postings come after.

I am a big fan of Bon jovi and i have found this blog: it looks so awesome

http://80sbonjovi.tumblr.com/tagged/Demo_of_the_day

This is quite cool and this blog has got many photos of Bon jovi that i have never seen before. I guess blogs are so powerful in a way that people get to express and share their own information, text, images, audio. The viewers can even contribute themselves.

It is awesome and now I am doing a blog about the blog! Inserting images, videos.

De Bono's hats and reflection on this activity.

        De Bono's hats strategy: the theories involved in this would be cognitivism and also social constructivism.

Students get to organise and share their thinking in distinct ways. Mobiles' wiki activity was quite interesting but I guess everything has got positives, negatives. I am going to use PMI chart to express my opinion on this Wiki activity.

                                       

 Cognitivism diagram:

 http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=12563

                             Social Constructivism

Constructivists believe that:"learners construct their own reality or at least interpret it based upon their perceptions of experiences, so an individual's knowledge is a function of one's prior experiences, mental structures, and beliefs that are used to interpret objects and events."


"What someone knows is grounded in perception of the physical and social experiences which are comprehended by the mind."

(Jonasson, 1991, cited in Mergel, 1998)

                                   POSITIVES AND POSITIVE THINKING

     

  + 1 PLUS- The layout is very effective, well organized and personalised: the user adds name on the side, can use different colour, font, be different. +2 PLUS- you can choose which questions you want to answer and add your name to those, if some of the questions you are not sure off, you can leave those out (I did). +3 PLUS- it is great for learning from your peers and see what everyone has got to say on each question. There are no limitations on your opinions. Students can add their references and resources and can further refer to the posts of others in the activity and express the opinion on their posts. +4 PLUS -the idea of the hat is cool and it adds some interest to the activity and some animation.

                                   NEGATIVES AND I GUESS SOME OF THE NEGATIVE THINKING

 -1 MINUS- it is possible to delete other peoples' posts, not that anybody would do that, but some people might want to do the wrong thing. -2 MINUS- this activity is good for expressing yourself but it is also very tempting to get ideas from other people and at times it feels like there is nothing else left to say because everyone already covered everything, it made me feel a bit intimidated but also made me think harder and use higher order thinking to come up with 'unique' answers. This activity done at schools could possibly create competition ' and my post is better' scenarios. 

                                IMPLICATIONS- POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE      

 Technology is about learning, there are always positive and negative but if you don't try and explore, you will not know. Wikis and De Bono activity is mainly positive and great for collaboration,  saffolding and brainstorming. it is not a secret and everyone can see your opinion publicly. It could be intimidating that some people seem to know so much and be so accurate and spot on but it also makes you realise that everyone is different and everyone has got different thinking patterns and different ideas for better for some than others.

I have enjoyed this activity,  i didn't have the patience to fill in all the questions but it certainly got me thinking on various perspectives, once i had my perspective, i didn't feel the need to fill in all the questions, some of them were similar and i was strating to repeat myself. I guess i should be more patient and see the MOBILE PHONE from more different angles, but i do honestly think that it is a big distraction if used at school!

Comment on Wikis:

 In wikis students get to share their own understanding of the question to construct their own reality according to what they think,and also Bono hats provide different perspectives on the subject, it definitely encourages higher order thinking and allows students to have different persepctives and provides the balance between thinking positively and negatively- nothing is black or white, there are always shades of greys.

Week 2 TPAC

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). See Figure above. As must be clear, the TPACK framework builds on Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.


http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/tpack/what-is-tpack/

Week 1- Prensky-learning styles.

I have found Prensky's articles and ideas very interesting. I would consider myself digital immigrant but i guess it depends on your personality and the money you want to spend on the technology, there is so much on offer everywhere. I am not natural with technology but after reading the articles and also after myself experiencing the situtaion at school, it is pretty convincing that things need to change.  I agree that the teachers need to adapt to kids and not the other way around. There are generally 30 kids in the class and only one teacher, so it is clear who is going to win, the teachers need to play according to the new rules. The students have a right to be bored and have a right to protest against something they no longer relate to. We, as teachers should be happy that the kids have courage to protest and express opinions, we only need to learn how to work with them and that way they will learn, we could also learn with them, kids will be more than happy to show us how to use some programs as long as they will see that are making an effort to communicate in their language. Why not learn something new?life is about learning, lets learn together with students, lets make a difference successfully and meaningfully.

Learning style activity.

I am still catching up on some of the week 1 stuff....
Ok-i have done the test on learning styles and it is great!!!i thought i know things about myself but i guess i didn't know all that much about my learning preferences....my score rested close on the first 3 columns but the last column showed that I am a global learner, it didn't come as a surprise, it is just hard to put into words, the parts of me i guess.... global learners absorb material randomly and that's me, sometimes it can be hard because i do like to see the big picture and the facts just don't do it for me...All the material on learning styles was very beneficial and interesting...Again computers are making it possible to complete these sort of tests, in the future the students could complete these tests and the teachers could make decisions according to the results.

I have also read some parts of the Sir Ken Robinson's Transcript and the line that stuck with me is: Don't be afraid to be wrong! That is so true...we miss out if we don't try! it is important to dare and be different.....nobody likes boring, identical teachers and there is no need to have more of them...let's be different!

This is an example of the embedded video....I haven't actually watched it yet but it looks cool...

Learning styles.

           I absolutely love learning.  I would say that I am an auditory learner. I love languages and listening to the right way of pronouncing the words is a a key. Visually it is important to get the spelling of the words right, I also find it easy to remember the way words need to look if they are spelt right. There are so many ways to learn things and it also depends on the subject that it is taught. ICT's and technologies are enhancing the learning for all learning styles. Viewing, listening, making something, solving problems with interactive activities and games. it is important to connect with the class. Computers are making it easy to upload, share and comment on information presented by students. The teachers have more options on creating a class, which relates closely to the students' ineterests.

Computers are great tools when they are used right, the right time and the right set up. The activities should be purposeful and promote higher order thinking. Sometimes disruption in the classroom is created due to the activities being boring or not challenging enough. It is important to challenge the students- always.

week 1 reflection on ideas about Learning Theories

The psychology and learning theories help students and teachers to understand more clearly the teaching process at hand.

Multiple intellegences- it is important as a teacher to assess and recognise all the different intellegences that students bring to the classrooms. Profiling the learners is vital and this method will provide more information about the students.

Cognitivism an sensory register are important parts of the learning theory and should be investigated and understood before organizing the materials for the class. Students shold find the new knowledge stimulating and wothwhile. Digital pedagogy can support the transfer through the use of the multimodal information sources.

Short term memory- Organizes the information for long term storage. ICT is important in supporting and chunking of information through interactive learning objects.

Long term memory- once students understand the learnt information, or schema, this new schema is compared to existing schemas and new knowledge is added. For the successful learning to occur the existing and new information should link and be built on in order to achieve the learning goal.