Week 3

Digital Technologies 1

Creating a Blog

Over the last three weeks we have been introduced to many new concepts and technologies. After having some problems getting my blogger account up and running it has been pretty smooth sailing. Blogging allows us to summarise and reflect on the week’s engagement activities along with adding videos, images, web links, etc that enhance our learning. Being a distance student the biggest advantage blogging provides to me is the ability to read other peoples thoughts on the activities, which increases my knowledge on topics and to note points that I may not have considered myself. Blogs are a great tool to be utilised by university students however there is also potential for their use in the classroom with school students. In order to examine the effectiveness of blogs in the classroom a PMI (plus, minus, implications) chart will be used.         

Blog facts

·         Generally maintained by one person

·         Entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order

·         Includes text, photographs, links, videos

·         People that view the blog can leave comments (Fasso 2013)   

PMI chart – The potential use of blogs with primary school students 

Plus (all of the positives)	Minus (all of the negatives)	Implications (the potential outcomes whether positive or negative)
Motivate student input and learning	Requires internet connection – some students may not have access at home	Students can improve on their learning with the feedback of others
Receive feedback from people all over the world	Students could publish nasty or non constructive comments  about another student or their work	Improves students ability of summarising and writing reflections
Gets students to reflect on what they have learnt	Some students may not be computer literate enough to use blogger effectively, hence missing out on learning benefits	Entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order, making it easy to follow
Easy to use		If the blog is updated regularly then students can go back to something they have previously learnt to review the topic
Cost = FREE		Informal learning
Students can select a template, font type, size and colour making each blog individual		Student centred
Add links to images, videos, web pages, YouTube clips and much more		Teachers can scaffold blog activities to enable students the best learning outcomes
Able to be accessed from school, home or anywhere with internet connection		Students can view their peers blogs to seek different opinions on a topic and to increase their knowledge
Students are not going to lose their blog like they may lose their homework that is on a sheet of paper
No one else part from the author (you) can edit or delete your work

After completing the PMI chart it can be seen that there are many more positives than minuses for using blogs in the classroom. A person’s blog can be referred to as a reflective journal. In the case of school students they can share their school work with their classmates, parents and teachers seeing them end the school year with one big summary on what they have learnt and achieved thought-out the year long learning process (WestEd 2013). The feature of commenting on other people’s blogs provides teachers and peers to give constructive feedback on the students work. For parents concerned about the safety of their child and their child’s work being displayed on the wide open web, there are actually privacy settings that only allow other students in the class, parents and the class teacher to view the work (WestEd 2013). The use of blogs in the classroom sees the learning become learner centred instead of teacher centred. Most blog activities are very cleverly scaffolded by teachers to coach the students learning in the correct direction. When blog activities are taking place the teacher becomes a facilitator more so than the knowledge tree (Fasso 2013).

Studying primary school teaching, one of the ways in which I would use blogs is for the student’s homework. As we all know most children despise doing their homework, therefore by having to write their homework answers on their blog and possibly find some images that relative to their homework children would be more willing and keen to do their homework.   

Another example of using blogs in the classroom is to get students to write a story on their blog. Before writing the story a PMI chart or mind map could be used to induce the student’s critical thinking skills and get their thoughts following to provide a basis for their story. The PMI chart or mind map can up uploaded to the student’s blog as a draft to their story to allow the teacher to understand what each student is thinking. When it comes to writing the actual story students are more motivated to produce their best work if it will be published on their blog where their peers and possibly parents can view and comment on their stories. If a similar activity is provided to students throughout their schooling year the previous stories will have been archived in their blog, therefore teachers are able to go back through each activity to see how the student’s styles of writing and critical thinking have improved over the year (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill 2006).As well as teachers, students can also revisit previous work to justify, elaborate by entering their newly learnt knowledge (Fasso 2013).

Legal, safe and ethical guidelines for working in blogs

·         10% of a work can be copied for educational purpose

·          All material that is not your own should be referenced appropriately. This includes text, images, video and audio  

·         Public access should not be allowed to student blogs to prevent stranger danger

·         Password protection is a must   

·         Cyber bulling is not acceptable and will not be tolerated

·         All schools should have a content filter in place on students computers to prevent the risk of children being exposed to inappropriate material e.g. pornographic, violence or illegal practices   (Fasso 2013)

The legal, safe and ethical guidelines for working in a blog are similar to that of working in a wiki. All students must be aware of these protocols before being allowed to work online. After going through the guidelines with your students this online quiz would be a great way to test their awareness of cyber bulling, stranger danger and viruses that can occur online. 

Creating a Wiki

After conquering blogs I set out to set up my own wiki space. After setting it up I played around with a number of different tools to familiarise myself with how it works. If you visit my wiki space you can see some of the tools I explored, including adding text, pictures, YouTube videos, creating a new page and changing the look of my wiki. Wiki spaces provides you with many more tools such as adding slide shows, polls, spreadsheets and Google docs to name a few. The wider range of tools available in wiki spaces compared to blogs allows students to be more interactive and creative with their work. I found the site ‘50 ways to use wikis for a more collaborative and interactive classroom’ which had some great ways of incorporating wikis into lessons. In order to examine the effectiveness of wikis in the classroom a PMI (plus, minus, implications) chart was used.            

Wiki space facts

·         Type of website

·         Allows the author and visitors to add, edit and remove content

·         Users can contribute whenever they like from any site with internet access (Department of Education 2013)

PMI chart – The learning potential of students with the use of wikis in the classroom

Plus (all of the positives)	Minus (all of the negatives)	Implications (the potential outcomes whether positive or negative)
Increases student input	Students work can be on purpose or accidently deleted when another student is adding to the page	Can be used for group activates – everyone in the class can add their own part of a task to one page
Engaging and interactive	A group page can only be edited by one author at a time	Information can be edited, modified, added or removed from a page
Has more functions and is more interactive than blogs	Potential for bullying to occur among students using a group wiki	Students must have etiquette, be respectful and follow class rules when working in a group wiki
Students can share ideas, experience and knowledge with their peers		Functions include slideshows, polls, spreadsheets, Google docs, YouTube clips, photos and many more
Great ICT for collaboration		Brings out the creativity in students
Teachers can scaffold group activities, however most activities become student centred which is great

As seen in the PMI chart above there are many more positives than negatives for the use of wikis in the classroom. Wikis allow students to be actively involved in building their knowledge making them very effective in helping students learn content (Department of Education 2013). When allowing students internet access for their learning it is essential that the teacher explains the legal, safe and ethical requirements so that the students do not get done for plagiarism, delete other student’s hard work, add non-relevant content or use the class activity to bully other classmates (Department of Education 2013). To develop good habits in student’s online learning teachers need to set out strict protocols for participation in each wiki activity. When editing a group wiki students should be taught to check what material is already present, add their work and check everyone else’s contributions are still present after saving their own work. Material can be deleted by accident in which case students should get in the habit of saving all of their work that they put in the wiki in a word document to prevent total loss of hard work (Fasso 2013). For students to achieve effective learning through the use of wiki spaces the activity should be monitored regularly and scaffolded by the class teacher.      

Overall, I found that the group wiki on mobile phones that we participated in earlier in the course was very beneficial in introducing us to the workings of wiki spaces. It allowed us to participate in an activity while demonstrating the problems that can occur when a group wiki is not monitored by a nominated person/teacher and there has been no protocols put in place for an activity. At the end of the day our students will own their own wiki spaces with their learning experiences guided by us, their teachers.        

Creating a website

The third and final digital tool to create and analysis this week is websites. We created our own website using the program Weebly, which is free and has many great tools and features. Websites allow you to add many features including text, images powerpoints and videos (Fasso 2013). Please have a look at my website to view the tools that I have experimented with. After creating and adding to my website I used a PMI chart to analysis the effectiveness of websites in the classroom as a learning tool.   

PMI chart – The learning potential of students with the use of websites in the classroom

Plus (all of the positives)	Minus (all of the negatives)	Implications (the potential outcomes whether positive or negative)
Anyone can make a website	Expensive if free site is not used	Can insert powerpoints, images and videos (YouTube clips)
Free sites e.g. Weebly	Not interactive or collaborative for class activates	Link from one page to another
Visitors cannot alter or delete information from your site	Students cannot get instant feedback or comments on their work	Could be used for individual student assessment –e.g. creating a website on planets
Exciting for students to build their own
Many tools available when creating and adding to your site
Site can be published and updated at a later date

 
As seen in the PMI chart above, websites have some diverse features in comparison to blogs and wikis. A teacher can use a website to provide frequent updates of student’s progress in the classroom to their parents. If the parents know how their children are progressing in the classroom, the parent-student communication can be improved and parents can become more helpful with homework and general class activities. Along with student progress, teachers can provide parents with assignment due dates so that students have limited excuses for not having the work done by the due date (HubPages 2013). Informing parents by the web reduces the amount of paper schools need to use and is a more reliable transport of information in comparison to giving a child a note to give to their parents.  Websites can also be used by teachers to provide students with helpful course materials such as assignment task descriptions, links to good learning resources and their homework tasks. If homework is available online students cannot use the excuse of leaving it at home or they were not at school when it was given out (HubPages 2013). A website would also allow teachers to put their student’s grades and report cards online for their parents to view.  

Teachers can make day-to-day classroom activities available on a classroom website where students have the option to read, listen or view a diagram of the activities instructions. By providing instructions that would engage the different types of learning styles could see a better response and interest to activities.       

The other two digital tools that have been explored, blogs and wikis created collaborative learning activities with student-student interaction working together and helping each other build on their knowledge. Websites are more of an individual activity that could be used to assess student’s knowledge without the input of their classmates to provide the teacher with each individual’s progress. The teacher would help students develop their websites and then provide them with a question or statement, such as ‘Create your website based on what you have learnt this term on the different cultures around the world’. Giving the students free rein with the topic in mind would allow them to demonstrate their knowledge and creativity within the same activity.     

Looking forward to learning about the new digital tools next week!

 

References

Commonwealth of Australia. (2013). Cyber smart. Retrieved from http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Kids/Have%20Fun/How%20cybersmart%20are%20you/Kids%20Quiz.aspx

Department of Education. (2013). Wikis in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/wikis/

Fasso, W. (2013). EDED20491 - ICT's for Learning Design: Study guide. Rockhampton, Qld: CQUniversity, Australia

Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. (2006). Education Up Close. Retrieved from http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/47

HubPages. (2013). 10 Tips for an A+ Classroom Website. Retrieved from http://karelia.hubpages.com/hub/10-Tips-for-an-A-Plus-Classroom-Website

WestEd. (2013). Blogger in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//educators/activities/pdfs_GTA/CribSheet.Blogger3.pdf