I have been trying to put a picture I copied onto my blog. I used the snipping tool and copied a picture and saved it in paint but now I cannot put it onto my blog. I will keep trying.

Making a Fodey

Contributing to a wiki this week on "Should we have mobile phones in the classroom?" was a collaborative way to find out other peoples viewpoints and to give my viewpoint was a great way to have a discussion.
I think it would be good to have students in the classroom participate in a wiki and it would give everyone in the class a voice and have a say on a certain topoic.

http://www.fodey.com/

Engagement Activity 4: Blog reflection on wiki activity

I think all 4 learning theories were used in the Mobile Phones wiki because The  Behaviourist learning theory has its place where we are given information to learn and we learn it. There is no thought process that goes into it. There is no thinking outside of the square. It is like Edward De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats, we have previouse knowledge of this way of thinking and we do not have to learn it. The 6 thinking hats  is a process in which to gather information.
Cognitivism is how we mentally process information. Our sensory memory takes in information and we transfer that information to our working memory and the rest will disappear. We take in what information we want in chunks and store it in our long term memory, so for this wiki we have memory of information to use for our discussion.
Learning through Constructivism is learning through our own experiences by observing and participating in life we build our own knowledge (John Dewey). The wiki was set up with a question "Should mobile phones be used in the classroom" and I think we all have had life experiences and understanding of what that could mean for students.
The teacher has set up a great learning space for us to reflect and show our knowledge on a subject.
It is through Connectivism that we all work collaboratively through the wiki to share different opinions, ideas and knowledge. We have different experiences. We can agree or disagree. There is no right or wrong answer and there are many different ways of seeing the question through Edward De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats we can answer the question either through a positive, negative, critical, creative, intuitive, objective or a process approach.

Retrieved from Moodle www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802 papers/mergel/brenda.htm

I had mainly a positive approach to the question, but there were some negative concerns that I  put up as well.  This way of learning was beneficial as I could see that people  have many varied ideas to the question. The issues will be when someone disagrees with someone else but that will be good healthy discussion. The drawbacks are that sometimes we do not like what people have to say and it can be very personal so when our opinions are out there for everyone to see it can be very confronting.  I think it would contribute to the  learning of my students because it would take them out of their comfort zone and give everyone a chance to have a say. The scaffolding worked well. It was clear and you could see how people participated and was easy to follow.

Making a Wordle

Wordle was fun playing around with. I think this would be a great site for students to play around with for headings or pages of assignments. It has many different functions to play with to get the picture you want like fonts, size, upper-case, lower case, colour, vertical, horizontal, certain languages and many more things to choose from to create it. If you choose one way of doing it you can just redo it and redo it till you get the one you want.

Blooms Taxonomy

There are 3 types of learning

1. Cognitive - brain
2. Affective - what affects us likes feelings
3. Psychomotor - physical

Another way of saying these 3 is knowledge, skills and attitude.

I have been trying to embed a picture of Blooms Taxonomy onto my blog but have not been successful yet. When I can I will but for now Blooms Taxonomy is broken up into 6 categories and these are the Cognitive areas

1. Creating
2. Evaluating
3. Analysing
4. Applying
5. Understanding
6. Remembering

The affective Domain is made up of:

1. Receiving Phenomena
2. Responding to Phenomena
3. Valuing
4. Organising
5. Internalizing Values

The Psychomotor Domain is made up of:

1. Perception
2. Set
3. Guided Response
4. Mechanism
5. Complex Overt Response
6. Adaptation
7. Organision

Retrieved from Moodle

Week 2 Productive Pedagogies

TPACK is The Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge framework.
As a teacher I need to have a good knowledge of subject matter.  Understanding the deep knowledge of a subject and knowledge of the Curriculum Development. It is important to find out what students know about a topic first. Then they might be more likely to get hooked onto new ideas.
Practice and Theory together seems to be a good way of being most productive in the classroom. Training in inquiry can assist teachers in how to look at the world from many different perspectives and to encourage students to see the bigger picture (Shulman, 1992).

Different technologies can be used for specific purposes like the utube videos on grammar done through the web 2.0. It helped me to understand the way technology, content and pedagogy together can be good teaching.
Moodle

I have been engaging with these readings and activities but I am finding it hard to do what I want to do with them like embedding the table on shoe laces onto my blog and embedding a copy of the Blooms Taxonomy table. It would be good if some could help in this area.

Out of the mouth of babes

This was sent to me through facebook. It reminds me of my grandaughter. 2 year olds showing us oldies how to do things digitally. I love it! I am just glad I want to learn.

Legal, Safe and Ethical Practice

There is a 10% rule or 1 chapter of a work may be copied for educational use.  The written work I do should be my own, not anyone elses. If anyone who owns an image or material and has requested it to remain their own work should not be copied.  As a teacher I need to model and teach ethical and legal behaviours in this regard to my students.
All material I am using should be referenced if it is not my own work.
http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=12575

Schools should implement guidelines for web publishing. They need to skill staff on web publishing. As a teacher I need to supervise students and make sure they are doing the right thing when using the internet.
Teachers should be skilled up on removing inappropriately published material. Teachers should be able to help parents with different programs to help keep their children safe when at home doing homework on the internet, like NetSafeKids (Queensland Government, 2002).

It is my job as a teacher to make students aware of child safety in areas of cyber bullying. Students need to be aware of speaking appropriatley and not sending rumours or sending unwanted messages.
http://www.stopcyberbullying.org/

I have embedded my voki, finally (fantastic).  I think this is a great tool to use when you know how to, for children to use when doing an assignment of their own. They can use the voki to speak what they have written and it is very interactive. It is also fun and you can make it your own, nobody elses.

Activity 3.

I have made 2 voki's but have not been successful in embedding them in my blog. I have tried to do what is on the Voki site and then I have tried to do it the way Kat Howat posted but I am still missing something. I got one of my vokies to speak from a recording I did on Connectivism and this is what I recorded.

A video on Connectivism on the Moodle site shows us how it is a way of learning information as we don't know everything. People can participate in different activities using different systems such as ICT's so people learn through contact. Siemens (2005) states we can get lots of feedback from many sources and it is a quicker way of gaining knowledge than doing it by yourself.

The article on connectivism was interesting. The little video was a great way to explain what Connectivism is. Having teachers there to guide us through the course is wonderful because they have lots of knowledge and I cannot do it all  by myself. Realising that people have lots of different opinions and lots of different ways of doing things is exciting. Through ICT's we are learning many ways to access knowledge and different ways to display the knowledge we find.

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

Activity 2

Students of today have spent their entire life surrounded by computers, video games, the internet and digital music. I really like the name of Digital Natives. I am not a Digital native but am fascinated by the connection we have with the world around us.
I do learn differently from my kids but I am open to new things.
 Reading Prensky's (2001) artice I found out I am what you call a Digitial Immigrant. I do not agree however, that students cannot learn successfully while watching TV or listeing to music because I cannot. I know they can because all people learn in a different way and that is one way. Sometimes I can concentrate better with some background noise and sometimes I cannot. I have seen that way of learning from my own children.
I am interested in coming up with ways to help my students learn but I think we can learn together. Coming up with ideas that are relative to their connection to their world is important to them. Children need to be engaged or they will not participate.

http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Activity 1.

I researched different learning styles by Felder and Solomon and discovered my learning style is more of an Active learner than a reflective one. I retain and understand information best by doing something active or by discussing or applying it or explaining it to others. I would rather try something out and see how it works and work in a group. When I am physical I learn better. I am a Sensing learner more than an Intuitive learner. I like to learn the facts where intuitive learners often prefer discovering possibilities and relationships. I like solving problems by well established methods and like memorizing facts and doing hands on work. I am more practical and like learning things that connect to the real world. I am more of a Visual learner and remember what I see through diagrams, pictures, films and demonstrations. I seem to be a Global learner more that a sequential one. I dont always get the information straight away then if comes to me. I can solve a problem but not always know how to explain myself.

Http:// www.engr.nesu.edu/learningstyles/submit.php

My First Blog

I already had a google acc set up so I made my new blog. I was unsure if what I was doing was correct but had a go anyway. I set up 2 with the same name then decided to make a new one so this is it. It was not as hard as I thought it would be.
I am looking forward to becoming more confident as I work. It feels a little strange writing down what I am doing. It is great to have fellow students on line to help me out if I am not sure of something.
My hope is to be able to contribute eventually.