Week 4

This weeks blog post will be about exploring images, audio and video tools.

Using Images as a Learning Manager:

In my job before Uni I was a Kindy Educator and had to resize images every day when updating our class blog, Facebook page and daily reflection of our learning every day to ensure that we did not waste time waiting for very large images to upload. This is a practice that I would like to continue when I finish my degree and move on to teaching in a school as I liked how involved the parents could get with the sharing of pictures of their child’s learning.

Using Images as a Learner

Gee (1991) states that we are better at what we acquire but that we know more about what we learn. By providing visual and written representations of procedural knowledge learning managers are combining the best of both ways of gaining knowledge and skills. Students should be provided with visual representations of their learning in order to consolidate what they have learned.

Here  is an image that I took on the weekend and re-sized. 

Exploring Audio tools

I was introduced to the Voki tool previously in this course and I created one for my blog last week. This week I created another and added my own voice to it using the microphone on my headphones that I use for distance courses. I recorded my voice with a reference to the Early Years Learning Framework (2009) that states that, “Children are effective communicators and engage with a range of texts and gain meaning from these texts when they view and listen to printed, visual and multimedia texts and respond with relevant gestures, actions, comments and/or questions.”

IMovie

When thinking about using video in an Early Childhood classroom I have brainstormed some ideas of how I think my students would be able to use video to:

Create – Creating Claymation or similar movies to produce their own short films

Present – Creating a short movie clip to present information learned in an integrated unit in a new and different way.

Communicate – Communicating with other schools and classes with recorded videos about shared learning or projects.

Summarise – Students could create a movie or series of still images in a slide show to summarise their learning in a term or a school year to present to parents.

Evaluate – Students could compare video clips or create two videos for comparison on a topic.

This is a movie that I created for a numeracy course to demonstrate real life use of numeracy in Early Childhood students, I created it using IMovie. I documented the learning journey through a series of still pictures and quotes about what the students said and then added them together, added text and a sound track and uploaded it to a shared Facebook page for a group assessment task.

Until next week.

References

Australia, & Council of Australian Governments. (2009). Belonging, being & becoming: The early years learning framework for Australia. Canberra, A.C.T: Dept. of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations for the Council of Australian Governments.

Gee, J. (1991). What is literacy? In C. Mitchell & D. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the other. New York: Bergin and Garvey.