Module 10

The Educational use of Wiki's.

Visiting Bookleads and 50+ Web 2.0 ways to tell a story was very inspiring. These wiki's were filled with so much content. The education value of these is tremendous as I could spend months exploring these and their associated links. Setting one up for a Class/Year level or for my own professional development has enormous potential.  They are always a work in progress so over time they just get better. It would be great to collaborate on one with a group of students or teachers.  I would like to see a wiki for each KLA in year 4 where students and teachers could contribute content. Wikispaces did however seem quite expensive to set up for classroom use so I guess, for now it would be best used as a professional collaboration as a free resource.  I loved the 50+ ways to tell a story.   

Many of the The Web 2.0 resources that I have been exploring through this course fit into the 'creating' end of Bloom's taxonomy. Second Life I would put in the creating box in the same way that I would put animation, video casting and podcasting.  Flikr I would put further down the taxonomy and it could be used in the Analysing or Applying boxes.  I like the application Tag Galaxy where you can search tags from flikr and it displays all the photos that fit the particular tag as a globe. It would be a wonderful tool for analysing a topic and instigating discussion around these images. Mind Mapping thorough bubbl.us could be used to evaluate or analyse any given topic.   

How can Web 2.0 assist in improving learning outcomes for all students?

I think the paradox of Web 2.0 is that it is both social and anti social. This, I believe when used effectively is a wonderful thing for improving learning outcomes for all students. The social aspect of Web 2.0 leads to improved learning outcomes in collaboration, communication and risk taking. Because of the huge audience that is created through Web 2.0, students have a very real purpose for sharing ideas and opinions. Students are inherently social, web 2.0 appeals to this and is a wonderful motivation for learning. On the flip side, the social dangers of Web 2.0 can be enormous. Misunderstandings, humiliation and bullying are very real. This flip side can be used as another motivator for students to perfect their visual and written communication, to analyse media sources and the impacts they have on individuals. 

The anti social aspects allow students to explore their own individual interests. Where the lecture style pedagogical practice of one source of information and many students fails to account for individual interest, learning styles, abilities and special needs. Web 2.0 allows for an individual to access many sources of information and direct their own learning. They can remain anonymous and take learning risks that they may not in standard classrooms. They remain and individual in a huge community. The flash mob parties are an interesting take on this idea where many people may gather in one place at one time for a shared purpose but have an individual take on that shared purpose. I saw an example of many people in the one spot dancing to the music of their own choice.  It would be nice to take this approach to pedagogy. Have many students together in one place, potentially collaborating on a shared outcome but making their own way there. Simultaneously thorough Web 2.0 reflecting, chatting and creating along the way. 

Web 2.0 accounts for individual need in ways a standard classroom could never do.  

Module 9

Scootle... The idea is great. Being able to have online learning object so that other teachers and students can access, comment and add their own content is great.  Sharing resources with other teachers in Scootle is easy and I like how the learning objects of other teachers from my school are easily accessible. The pedagogical approach is more relevant to today's students. To set up learning objects and let students explore them at their own pace, collaborate and dialogue about them is great. The fact that it is secure and the resources in Scootle are free to use is also good. As a teacher being able to monitior student's activity is a good way of modeling and teaching safe social networking practicing and also allows us to assess the students learning more easily than some blog sites.  The security of Scootle is its big draw card,  it seems to be replicating what many other web 2.0 applications are doing with out the some of the freedom, which in an education setting has its pluses and minuses.  

In practice Scootle seems to be time consuming, the layout for me is not intuitive and I had difficulty finding relevant resources especially for primary aged students. My school librarian got me onto Scootle a few months ago and at the time I created a Learning Path for my year 4 students which took me hours to find the resources and set it up and I never ended up using it. Today I thought I'd give it another go and create a collaborative learning space for year four for their poetry unit. I tried advanced searches, alphabetical searches and topic based searches and I came away wishing that I was teaching Year 9 because there was some great content for older kids.   

Very specific searches like 'Captain Cook' work well but not general ones like 'Poetry'. Scootle would be more use as inspiration for poetry though imagery.   I would like to spend some time creating a unit of work based on Scootle and experimenting with it in a classroom setting. I can see it potential but I seem to be drawn to blogging more at the moment. 

I feel limited with the resources available to me on Scootle and in time, I'm sure there will be more available. I seem to stumble across wonderful images, sound and movie files, I spend hours taking these in but I think You Tube and Teacher Tube and other sites seem to give me what I want quicker. The quality of the film and sound files on Scootle seems to be higher, its just that I can't get appropriate content to fit my outcomes.   I'll revisit it again in the future I'm sure. 

Module 9 had given me a lot to think about. Watching the teacher TV clip on Web 2.0 and the educational uses of social networking was fascinating. Seeing all of the positive uses of the social networking sites was inspiring. How students are often more confident and willing to take risks online that they wouldn't normally take. This is often seen as a negative aspect of social networking, but in the classroom setting it can lead to more successful learning outcomes. Risk taking is an essential part of learning and with a sense of anonymity children may be more able to take risks with their writing, their opinions and their creativity. 

Getting children using social networking sites early in Primary school can teach them many useful lessons before they reach their teens. It is important that they understand the size of their audience and make intelligent and morally informed decisions about what to put out into the world. It is also important for students to be taught about differences between written language and verbal language. This difference can have enormous social consequences for children and teenagers as they are mastering the use of language. When young children are using social networks such as msn they are often being misinterpreted by their peers and they are also sharing passwords so that their peers can hijack their accounts which has terrible effects on friendships. By utilizing social networking strategies in the classroom on closely supervised sites such as Scootle these lessons can be explicitly taught. Students have the opportunity to make mistakes and experiment with social networking in a safe environment. 

Module 8

I have just spent hours trying to remember all the blogs I like to peruse and adding them to my google reader. I firstly went through my email accounts hoping to clear out some of the subscriptions that constantly clog up my emails. This was mostly easy but there were a couple of mailing lists that I couldn't find an RSS feed option for and they will continue to come into my email. I feel like I am getting more organised as I sort by bookmarks with delicious and my blogs and news sites with google reader. I have even got an RSS feed of my delicious bookmarks into my google reader. This, I have to admit is somewhat confusing but I as I google reader more I'm going to find it clear (as mud) I'm sure.

It has also been great to revisit many of the sites I have stumbled across as I have been doing the course. On Learning Putty I was learning about safe uses of Facebook. There were a whole lot of ways of maintaining privacy that I was unaware of.  I knew how to set some of the privacy settings so that I didn't turn up in general searches. How.to.wired also was an interesting read, with handy hints on 'ungoogling' myself it i ever need to.  Also things that are useful to teach students and parents as well. 

Module 7

Delicious. As first I was hesitant to use delicious. I have been using igoogle for bookmarking to store all my bookmarks together and I can also access them from anywhere. After watching the tutorial on delicious i realised how fantastic it was. I love that I can tag and organise bookmarks so easily. I am about to invest in a new computer and I have been worried about loosing all the bookmarks that are stored on my old laptop. In the future if I can bookmark directly to delicious that will save all future problems in this regard.

I also am a big fan of the social networking aspect of delicious. Especially as a learning tool. I can't wait to get hold of the bookmarks of my peers as well as more experienced teachers who may have some wonderful online resources. Often searching the web for tools feels like such a time waster because of all of the bad teaching resources floating around. By using the social networks its a kind of quality filter and I'm sure I will be able to access so really wonderful stuff. I can't wait.

The other wonderful this is that students and parents could also access teacher's bookmarks as study tools. I'm often having parents and students asking me for online suggestions. It would be great to set up a delicious account for this purpose and send people to it. Wow.

Module 6

http://yunishigawa.glogster.com/web-20/

Here is my wild glogster page. It was lots of fun creating it and I could see the kids getting right into it... projects, book reports, open ended maths tasks and science investigations could all be "jazzed up" with glogster. The main problem I encounted for children was that they had to be over 13 to use glogster. Is there a version for schools/ teachers? I have been told that if you sign up as a teacher you get 100 free glogs. That would be no good for my 21 10 year olds though. I must investigate this more.

Bubbl.us is great. We have been using this with year 4 for shared reading contract work, HSIE brainstorming tasks and general brainstorming lessons. I have also been using it as a guide for public speaking tasks with a high school student who gets a little nervous speaking in front of the class. She puts bubbl.us brainstorms into her powerpoint presentations to help organise her thoughts.

The main thing i am enjoying with this Web 2.0 course at the moment is discovering all of the links between the different web based tools. For example how gloggster will recognise blogger which recognises Flickr etc etc.

Module 5

I am going to register with YouTube it is a wonderful teaching tool.  I didn't realise that i could bookmark my favourite videos. It has also been fun to discover teacher tube, I had a big giggle at the teachers who had created timetables raps for their students.

Students in my class are often telling me that their parents have uploaded videos of them for all to see. It really is quite a long way off the private home movie nights where super 8 films were projected onto Grandma's living room wall.  These children are growing up with a very public projection of their daily interactions and mishaps. Teachers of my generation perhaps are quite shy and guarded with their online presence. Students today, from a very young age have a very public online persona. As well as YouTube  videos, there are baby blogs, flickr sites and many other forums for parents to "upload their children".  In schools we should continue exhibiting the child's educational development online. It is really important as teachers, that we make use of this online confidence in our pedagogical practice as well as equipping the students with strategies to manage their online presence safely and ethically. 

Digital story telling, podcasts and vodcasts are great to use with students of all ages. It is a particularly valuable in our school with the high ESL population. Down loading podcasts for listening tasks during guided reading has been great as well as using vodcasts to create short animations for our narrative unit. The uses are endless, its just the access to the equipment that can be limiting.  

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