deep thoughts on educational literature..

Over the semester I have learnt how to use various new softwares and programs i have not used before and am very keen to incorporate these into the classroom in my future teaching career. The fact that technology is continuing to change and advance, it is inevitable that students will know how use technology and computers and that they will be used a lot more in the classroom. This subject has helped me be more confident in using computers in the classroom and aided my lessons throughout my practicum experiences to help motivate and keep children stimulated and enjoy learning experiences. I still prefer to use the traditional method of teaching but strongly believe in mixing up the lessons to benefit students’ learning and make it enjoyable.

Here is a mind map i created on www.bubbl.us.com

It is so hard these days to keep up to date on everything going on in the world of TECHNOLOGY!
Here are a few ways I plan on staying on track:

* asking friends
* going to workshops and conferences
* subscribing to newsletters
* listening to podcasts
* university subjects on IT
* web eg: teachertube, blogs, networking, LAMS Community, etc

Have a look at my comic..

Hey,

Here is a short video on my views about constructionism.
Enjoy!

- Nikki.

The article How To Use Podcasts At School discusses different schools that have embraced podcasts within their classrooms and uses specific examples of teachers and classes to demonstrate the different uses and benefits of podcasting.

The article doesn’t explain too much about benefits of this but obviously this class project would have helped to encourage students in becoming more involved in their blogs and the class Weblog magazine. Another benefit is that it would help to improve their cooperation skills with class members and learning about online technologies. There are several other examples of teachers using podcasting to their advantage in the classroom, including World Language Teachers and the benefits of having the ability to listen to their lessons. Therefore, students can listen to a podcasts in other languages and learn that way. While there’s no information about how to actually create podcasts, this article uses specific examples to convince readers that online learning technologies are useful and beneficial for students.

Nikki and Alana’s report:

Seeing as we have started blogging to a much wider community through edublogs, we wanted to learn more about the ways teachers can use them in the classroom.

Sarah Fallon explores this through her article, All the World’s a stage: Teaching through Online Journals, where she states ‘blogs aren’t just for techheads and political cranks. They’re opening up classrooms, too’.

Fallon went on to share some of the ways educational blogs can be used. These include blogs where teacher’s post thoughts on each day’s work in the classroom (for ‘parents who want to keep up and to students who need to catch up’) or entire year’s assignments, handouts and extra information.

We really found Will Richardson’s (a supervisor of instructional technology at an American high school) input regarding blogs to be helpful. He suggested that teachers new to blogging should start small, for example, by simply posting homework assignments. One interesting way he used blogs in the classroom was by creating a mentoring program about writing between his year eleven and twelve journalism classes and year four and five students in Georgia.

The primary school students’ teacher, Anne Davis, said that ‘having an outside audience really made a difference’ and that the younger students ‘couldn’t believe that someone else would care what they wrote’. We agree with Davis and think that an outside audience would really help students’ self-esteem and encourage them to create blogs that were interesting and thought-provoking. Davis also suggested giving students a number of current-event links to blog about and encouraging them to choose different subject areas from week to week. Another good idea we liked was how Davis gave her students comment starters like, ‘I wonder why…’ or ‘Another thing to consider is…’

Overall we found this article very useful as Fallon, Richardson and Davis provided us with new and interesting ways of using blogs in the classroom.