Week Eleven/Twelve
Posted by Amy Panté on Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Hello fellow bloggers,
Well another massive week has flown by! We had a really interesting lecture on Wednesday for EDN113. Guest lecturer Rob Phillips, spoke to us about the impact technology has on classroom teaching. He also spoke about different situations where multimedia can be usefully used within a classroom. For example if the experience is too expensive or dangerous to conduct within the classroom. Or if a concept is too hard to visualize. He then asked volunteers from the audience to go up to the front and take control of the computer to conduct two computer simulations.
The first one was about digestion in the body. During this simulation the students get given a range of foods to choose from and get to choose when the cartoon person in the simulation gets to swallow and so on. It has a section on the screen which gives facts about different stages of digestion and underlines important words.
The second simulation he showed was a science experiment game (couldn't find the site for it) where the students had to follow certain steps, and write in answers. They then would be shown by a pre-recorded video what they're prediction would create.
Rob Phillips spoke to us about a research he conducted with students using this digestion simulation and the science experiment one. His research showed that the children were engaged and interacting more as a group when using the digestion simulation and even the 'unruly' students were participating and interacting with fellow students. Where as the children seemed to rush through the science experiment one. Once they realized that the computer didn't analyse what they wrote as their predictions, they would just type anything so that they could get to the video which demonstrated the reactions of the different acids.
From this we spoke about effective multimedia. There are several things to take into consideration when choosing multimedia for a classroom setting.
~ Less text is best,
~ Gaming techniques,
~ Animation,
~ Opportunities for exploration,
~ Clear learning tasks,
~ Clear connection to classroom context.
During our tutorial this week Jenni came round to all our groups and asked us about our ideas for assignment three. After we explained ours to Jenni she said we were on the right track but it wasn't quite authentic yet. Our idea was based around nutrition (still is) and we had decided that our students would take a camera and a worksheet home with them take photos of their dinner and answer the questions on the worksheet. When they come back to school they are given time in class to use the computers to create a power point presentation. They would then use this powerpoint to present their findings to their peers. After speaking more to Jenni about how we can create our task to be more authentic, we have altered it slightly. It still comes under the topic of nutrition but instead of focussing on their meals at home and if they follow the food plate recommendations or not. The children are required to conduct research on healthy snack foods and then create their own recipe. Once they have, they then type their recipe up on Microsoft word. The students will be given a day to prepare their snacks, a photo will be taken and added to their recipe procedure and then a healthy snacks cook book will be created by the class to be sent out to parents for ideas on healthy snack ideas. This is just a brief outline of our authentic task. It was a bit daunting after having this discussion with Jenni and my fellow group members in the tutorial as we had already done so much work on our first idea. At least we have stuck to our original topic so that is one positive. And after re-creating our task, we had to give a brief outline to our tutorial class and to Jenni. Jenni was pleased with our 'tweaking' of our task and pointed out how it was now more of an authentic task.
Looking back at how difficult this assignment has been mainly to organize and find meeting times where all group members could attend. Made me wonder how external students were coping with this assignment. I thought if we're having trouble; we're all local to each other and all internal. How on earth were the external students dealing with this? So I posted a comment on the LMS asking just that:
I received quite a few replies saying that they mainly communicate via skype, texting, emails, facebook, and phone calls but meeting each other in person always makes it easier. Good to know that they all seem to be getting through it.
Well that's all from me for now....
Well another massive week has flown by! We had a really interesting lecture on Wednesday for EDN113. Guest lecturer Rob Phillips, spoke to us about the impact technology has on classroom teaching. He also spoke about different situations where multimedia can be usefully used within a classroom. For example if the experience is too expensive or dangerous to conduct within the classroom. Or if a concept is too hard to visualize. He then asked volunteers from the audience to go up to the front and take control of the computer to conduct two computer simulations.
The first one was about digestion in the body. During this simulation the students get given a range of foods to choose from and get to choose when the cartoon person in the simulation gets to swallow and so on. It has a section on the screen which gives facts about different stages of digestion and underlines important words.
The second simulation he showed was a science experiment game (couldn't find the site for it) where the students had to follow certain steps, and write in answers. They then would be shown by a pre-recorded video what they're prediction would create.
Rob Phillips spoke to us about a research he conducted with students using this digestion simulation and the science experiment one. His research showed that the children were engaged and interacting more as a group when using the digestion simulation and even the 'unruly' students were participating and interacting with fellow students. Where as the children seemed to rush through the science experiment one. Once they realized that the computer didn't analyse what they wrote as their predictions, they would just type anything so that they could get to the video which demonstrated the reactions of the different acids.
From this we spoke about effective multimedia. There are several things to take into consideration when choosing multimedia for a classroom setting.
~ Less text is best,
~ Gaming techniques,
~ Animation,
~ Opportunities for exploration,
~ Clear learning tasks,
~ Clear connection to classroom context.
During our tutorial this week Jenni came round to all our groups and asked us about our ideas for assignment three. After we explained ours to Jenni she said we were on the right track but it wasn't quite authentic yet. Our idea was based around nutrition (still is) and we had decided that our students would take a camera and a worksheet home with them take photos of their dinner and answer the questions on the worksheet. When they come back to school they are given time in class to use the computers to create a power point presentation. They would then use this powerpoint to present their findings to their peers. After speaking more to Jenni about how we can create our task to be more authentic, we have altered it slightly. It still comes under the topic of nutrition but instead of focussing on their meals at home and if they follow the food plate recommendations or not. The children are required to conduct research on healthy snack foods and then create their own recipe. Once they have, they then type their recipe up on Microsoft word. The students will be given a day to prepare their snacks, a photo will be taken and added to their recipe procedure and then a healthy snacks cook book will be created by the class to be sent out to parents for ideas on healthy snack ideas. This is just a brief outline of our authentic task. It was a bit daunting after having this discussion with Jenni and my fellow group members in the tutorial as we had already done so much work on our first idea. At least we have stuck to our original topic so that is one positive. And after re-creating our task, we had to give a brief outline to our tutorial class and to Jenni. Jenni was pleased with our 'tweaking' of our task and pointed out how it was now more of an authentic task.
Looking back at how difficult this assignment has been mainly to organize and find meeting times where all group members could attend. Made me wonder how external students were coping with this assignment. I thought if we're having trouble; we're all local to each other and all internal. How on earth were the external students dealing with this? So I posted a comment on the LMS asking just that:
I received quite a few replies saying that they mainly communicate via skype, texting, emails, facebook, and phone calls but meeting each other in person always makes it easier. Good to know that they all seem to be getting through it.
Well that's all from me for now....