Week 5

This week we examined a set of tools that could be used to present, collate or share learning or information. These tools are all interactive as well as multimodal which make them ideal for digital natives who are non-linear learners or thinkers and not linear learners or thinkers like students of the past who were taught primarily with books.

PowerPoint

This week I used PowerPoint for one of my assignments. I created an inquiry model for teachers and students to teach year three students how to write a recount. My PowerPoint guided them through the task in ten easy steps. I included hyperlinks in both my text and pictures to take the students and the teacher on a journey while exploring the task of writing a recount.

You can find the PowerPoint here; I converted it onto a PDF file and then converted it into a Prezi. 

Here is a PMI that I created about my PowerPoint

Plus

·         I created a safe environment for students to explore this topic independently because they were directed to specific sites through my hyperlinks.

·         All of the necessary tools for exploring the concept of writing a recount were all on one page

·         The tool is able to be used by students and teachers

Minus

·         The PowerPoint would have to be checked often to make sure that pages that were hyperlinked did not expire.

Interesting

·         This tool could be used independently as well as interdependently with a teacher or a small group of students.

Prezi

The next digital tool that I explored was Prezi. I have watched Prezi’s created by other students before but until now I had never created my own.  It was incredibly easy for me to convert my PowerPoint that I created earlier into a Prezi. I watched some YouTube videos about Prezi that might be helpful to beginners learning to use Prezi.

 I think that Prezi would be incredibly helpful in the classroom as it is a visual representation of learning. Jones (1988) maintains representations can help students select important ideas and details that enable learners to develop new skills they acquire to complete a task. .  Graphic representations are particularly helpful for visual learners and for those who struggle to understand information presented primarily in a linear fashion.

Glogster

While exploring Glogster I created a pin board glog from the many templates available to me. I explored the many learning benefits of Glogster on my pinboard as well as including a picture and a YouTube clip and I was then able to save it and upload it here:

The group 4 technology that I chose to talk about this week is Google Docs. I have used this tool many times when working on group assignments.

Advantages of this tool include:

·         Ability for all group members to access the document

·         Negates the need for the group to constantly meet

·         Group members can build on each other’s ideas

Disadvantages of this tool can include:

·         While digital natives are quite comfortable with this sort of technology, I can’t imagine my Mum as a digital immigrant using something like this.

·         Other group members can accidentally delete information that was added.

Until next time bloggers.

References:

Jones, B. (1988). Teaching Students to Construct Graphic Representations. Educational Leadership, 46(4), 20.