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.