Jane’s Blog

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I have just read a 2007 article from the Informit database called “Specifying causal relations between students’ goals and academic self-concept: An integrated structural model of student motivation” by Katrina L. Barker, Martin Dowson, and Dennis M. McInerney.

The quote I read that most interested me was:

“Impetus for all educators and parents should be the fact that students’ motivation declines rapidly for the first three years of high school and stoops to its lowest level in Year 9″.

This is bad news to me as a prospective teacher - although it is not a surprise as we all hear that Year 9 is probably the trickiest to handle as far as classroom management.

I found this good news as a parent. It is hard to remember what it felt like in Year 9 but with children between Year 6 and 9, it is reassuring to hear that though they may not seem highly motivated at this stage or interested in showing what they know to their teachers, things should be looking up in Year 10, 11 and 12. We can only hope!

I am also interested in Attribution Theory - that it is best to attribute success or failure of performance in terms of the effort you (the student) have put in, rather than your self-concept of your own ability. Teachers must design tasks that well-focussed effort will allow students to achieve success.

It is best if we, as teachers, create an environment with the major aim of “mastery” (achieving personal improvement as measured against previous performance) rather than “competition” (eg. don’t read out test scores in order from highest to lowest mark) - great for the top few but poor for self-esteem of others. I am sure there are cases where competition is motivating for a class - perhaps mixed ability group games - I still have to read up on that one!

Comments welcome!

A mindmap I created for Mathematics based on Jonassen’s types of thinking with technology and what we have learnt in this course.

I found the following on Ramneek’s Blog (from the International Bloggers Directory).

They could grab student’s attention and open up discussion about the Fibonacci Sequence.

Photos from Ramneek Kaur’s BubbleShare.

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I read the first 2 UTS Online mLearning Sample readings – Prensky “What can you learn from a cell phone” and FutureLab (see page 11). They discuss using mobile phones in education.

Here are my comments via podcast…

jane-morgan-mlearning

Here is a link to a TeacherTube video by Rachel Boyd about why we should let our students blog. The pictures look like mainly K-6 but the message is the same as if they were years 7-12.

Here is my “Wordle Summary” (Wordle is a fun easy tool)!! But I cannot paste in the URL as an image for some reason…

I wanted to try to make my own video and learn how to put it onto my blog.

I created the video with my webcam on my laptop. Then I editted it using Acer Arcade Deluxe to create an mpg3 file (if you use MovieMaker you would have made a .wmv file (Windows Media Video)).

Then I had to find somewhere to store the video and was recommended Blip TV by Matthew Kearney. You sign up and then bliptv will store your videos for you, just upload them (free).

Then I copied the embedded code and pasted it here…

The content is not to do with technology - I made a Maths Resource with cardboard and a set-square, a ruler and string - but it was an interesting process to create a video to be used for demonstration (”instructionist”  use of technology to be used to inspire construction) and learn how to share it.

So this is not a mathcast (see Madhu’s blog post and my prior post) as it does not involve an interactive whiteboard but does it classify as a Vodcast? It is “video on demand”.

When I was on Prac, my school gave lessons via SmartBoard and emailed marked up copies of the lesson to any students who were away. They were not mathcasts as they were not videos of the interactive lesson but were SmartBoard files that the student could read. Mathcasts sound like a useful tool if there is no teacher available.

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WebQuests have been around since 1995 as the brainchild of Professor Bernie Dodge and Tom March.

Lamb (2005) gives a good summary of the 1995 - The Birth of the WebQuest in

Lamb, Annette & Teclehaimanot, Berhane (2005). A Decade of WebQuests: A Retrospective. In M. Orey, J. McClendon, & R. M. Branch, (Eds.)”. Educational media and technology yearbook (Vol 30). Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Dodge thought of them as a way of encorporating the Web into classroom activities. They now make use of the Web and are becoming even more appealing to students due to the influence of the social nature of Web 2.0. This allows further embracing of student-centred pedagogies and constructivism.

Like all buzzwords, everyone claims to be able to create WebQuests but Tom March reviews webquests to find that less than half are “real WebQuests”.

Tom March’s list of Best WebQuests is a very useful resource.

A Real WebQuest must not just collect new information but the learners must transform the information.

One simple test for a Real WebQuest (March, 2003) is - Can the results be created by “copying and pasting”? If the answer is yes then it does not qualify.

You can find many useful WebQuest links on TeacherTap (Locate and Evaluate WebQuests).

Like all quality lessons, Real WebQuests should make use of authentic tasks and open-ended questions, collaborative learning.

WebQuests have their own search engines eg. WebQuest.org and here are the secondary maths WebQuests it found.

I think doing WebQuests for our Assignment 2 is a very good way to learn about engaging students with technology as a taken-for-granted, not-to-be-ignored tool!

One of the benefits of LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) and other LMS (Learning Management Systems) and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is that they increase teacher productivity in the long term. Once the teacher has captured the lesson online they can reuse it, remix it and share it, even globally!

This type of software provides an authoring platform for creating, storing, distributing and sharing online educational activities.

LAMS has 4 environments (profile types):

Learner (to participate in a learning task), Author (teacher authors the learning tasks - or you could get students to design tasks for their peers), Monitor (where you can monitor each student’s progress as they flow throught the task’s steps) and Systems Administration.

LAMS is based on the output from an EDUCAUSE project. It focuses on ‘context’ in that the tasks created should be activity-based and encorporate collaborative pedagogies.

LAMS differs from other LMS with its “graphic workflow model” - it is a bit like my old days of programming where you create a flowchart - but in LAMS it is done online and the students click on each component of the flow to work on each task with their progress and work recorded for the teacher to monitor.

Teachers can share lessons via the LAMS Community Website.

These are useful scaffolding tools where a task can be individual or collaborative (vote, discuss, debate).

I just read Bryan Alexander’s “Web2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning“.

He suggests the label “Web 2.0″ is unimportant as it suggests quantifiable progress from Web 1.0 but many of these tools have been around since the 1990s (eg. Wikis).

The major component of “Web 2.0″ is social software (eg. blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasts, videoblogs, MySpace & Facebook). In fact there are so many that there is an acronym “YASN” (Yet Another Social Network).

I thought it was interesting what he said about Web 2.0 - that it puts an extra perspective on the Web - it is no longer just a book (with web pages) but is all about “microcontent” and “openness” (more than just 2-way flow) and using the “wisdom of crowds”.

The article educated me in “social bookmarking” (eg. del.icio.us) and how “folksonomy” (metadata of user generated tags) can be useful in the classroom. Being able to personalise the way you categorise bookmarks supports collaborative information discovery and can help teachers assess their students understanding (by seeing what sorts of links, websites and blogs they have amassed as important.

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I found an article about “mathcasting” (digital recording of on-screen writing & voice narration to explain maths concepts or problem solving).

TeacherTube is a good place to host your mathcast once you are teaching and you can share it with your students using a wiki, blog or Moodle. The article recommends using mathcasts as an informal assessment tool as when the students do their own mathcasts it helps you understand their thought processes better.

The article recommends using graphics tablets such as InterWrite.

Some links: Mathcast Wiki - a mathcast wiki site with sample Scratch games for students and lessons in numerous topics eg. Algebra.