my-blog

Week Fifteen

Tue, 29 May 2012 00:48:07 +0100

Hello hello,

I have applied to change from primary education to secondary. Meaning most of my units will be up at the South street campus because Rockingham doesn't offer them. So Dani and I went up to South street on Friday to check it out. I have never been there before and was a little nervous about the idea. I couldn't believe how big it is! It was absolutely amazing! But I have to say that I love Rockingham because everyone knows everyone there and it's easy to find your way around.
As we parked and were walking through the car park we came across a familiar car, Jenni our tutor. So we left her a little note, it was nice to 'see' someone we knew.

Of course we stopped and had a drink at the pub there. I can't believe they have their own pub.

So it is study week before exams begin. Today I am going to focus on studying for the Technology exam and working on my answers for each question. So much study to do! I'm relaxed about the EDN111 and EDN113 exam but it is my EDN110 exam that I am worried about. Possibly because we have had the least help in preparation for it compared to the other two. And it is my weakest area so I'm negative towards it automatically.

Have a great week...

Week Fourteen

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:14:45 +0100

Hello all,

What a great first semester I have experienced. I have really enjoyed all my units this semester and cannot believe how much help they have given us for our exams! During our lecture on Wednesday, Jan went through the 6 possible exam questions and gave us hints on how to prepare for each of them!

I thought it was generous enough of Jan and Jenni to give us these questions (screenshot above), stating that three of the six will definitely be in the exam with the fourth remaining unknown. So I was overwhelmed when our final lecture was devoted to giving us hints on each question and although the fourth question is not mentioned they informed us it would be about our blogs. A massive hint! The lecture slides had a question per slide with book chapters recommended to study, phrases to type into search engines and areas that the question relates to. I am feeling so much more relaxed about the exams now! Knowing that I will be so prepared going into the exams lifts a giant weight off of my shoulders!

More from me soon...

Week Thirteen

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:47:17 +0100

Hello,

Well I just have to say I’m glad this week is coming to an end! I submitted my assignment 3a last night, and am happy to say that I am proud of what my group and I have created. I started to stress a little yesterday when I tried to upload our video that Dani and I created (for the group project). You tube was saying that it couldn’t play the movie. Firstly let me start off with explaining how we created it. We created a PowerPoint presentation and then used my ipad to record it, with Dani clicking to animate the presentation whilst I was narrating. I created a you tube account and attempted to send the video to you tube and I’m still not sure why it didn’t send through properly. Any way I turned my ipad off and on, sent it again and it worked. All I had to do from there was embed it onto our wiki by copying the embedding code from you tube and pasting it on a form to embed on our wiki.

And then there it is on our wiki, not as difficult as I had anticipated. =D

I found this assignment really hard to get into at the start. Especially being in a group of four; having four opinions, different ideas and very different personalities. Made it challenging to get the work done at first. I am a very easy going person and am open to every ones ideas. But not everybody is like that which is when conflict can start. Luckily we all agreed on nutrition as our chosen topic and from there it was just all the details that needed work on. Our first idea I couldn't quite see the connection between some parts of the task and it didn't just flow together nice and smoothly as I believe it should. So Dani and I focused on creating the Task over view page and the teacher info page to 'fine tune' them so that they did have this 'flow' that I am talking about. As a group we all contributed to the home page, Sarah did an enormous amount of work on the teacher resource page. And Leah worked on overall impression and proof reading the wiki.

We were lucky being internal students for this assignment as we were able to talk about the assignment after lectures/workshops for other units that we share. When we had online lectures/tutorials for EDN113 we met up on the Wednesday still and used that time to work on our assignment. Our Group name we created is LADS = Leah, Amy, Dani, Sarah.

I am so glad that we pulled through and created something to be proud of for this assignment and am looking forward to our result!

Ciao for now.

Week Eleven/Twelve

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:48:28 +0100

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....

Week Ten

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:04:43 +0100

Hello,

This semester is going far too quick! I feel like all I have been doing the last few weeks is assignment after assignment after assignment.....! I thought I had finished assignment 2 for EDN113, I did a last check through the assignment details and realized that I needed one more reference! I thought we only need five references but upon re-reading the brief it actually says more than five! :( So that is what I am going to do now, find another reference. I found it extremely difficult and time consuming to find a conference paper on my chosen topic. So I will probably be looking for something more like a journal article, website or video.

One reference that I used for assignment 2 was a website that talks about interactive pop-up books. For my topic, history, I believe they would be a great tool to use with students. They can create/re-create moments in history and present it to their peers. Here is an example one which is linked to the main web page.

As you can see the pages turn like a proper book and the images pop-up. The students are able to click on the exclamation mark in the speech bubble to see what the characters are saying or for more information.
You can see the full example on this link

I am feeling happy with my efforts for this assignment, it truly proved to be more interesting than I had first thought. Then to get a crack on the third assignment...it has proven extremely difficult to get started on this one because my group and I have trouble finding the time to meet up and organize things. Also with all the other assignments that have been due, and thinking that we have ages before the third assignment is due has set us back a bit! But I have great people in my group and our idea is great!

Until next time...

Week Seven/Eight

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:27:43 +0100

Hi all,

Week eight already, I can't believe it! Looking through my study plan for the semester I have discovered that my next three assignments are all due in the same week! I really want to give myself enough time on each of them to make them the best they can be. So this morning I have started working on assignment two for EDN113 when looking at the overview of the assignment, I didn't think it was going to be too difficult but I have quickly changed my mind. I have found it extremely difficult trying to find a conference paper that is relevant to my topic I have chosen. One of my peers in my workshop for this unit had said that she was having trouble also finding information on her topic. Jenni my tutor said that sometimes you will get different results on google if you type in the words in a different order. I decided to look for a video source and website first which was much more effective and I was able to start writing my report, but now I have to go back at looking for a conference paper which I am not looking forward to.

For the assignment we have been asked to choose an educational topic of interest, I have chosen history. We then have to research how technology can be used to teach this topic in the classroom. Once researched we then have to write a report about our findings and include at least five references; a book, a journal article, a refereed conference paper, a website and a movie or podcast (one of each).

I have already found this assignment to be a lot more interesting and challenging than I was expecting it to be. Just goes to show never under estimate.

That's all for now :)

Week Six Continued....Again....

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:58:47 +0100

HURRAY I FIXED IT!!!

I possibly did it the long way but I did it in the end. The page continued to not respond so I double checked that I had all my blogs saved on file and deleted the whole blog page. I then one by one re-entered all my blogs, copying them from word, to note pad and then into the blog form. I then had to go through and re-create all my hyperlinks and upload all my screen captures again. You will notice if you read through my previous blogs they have two posting dates. I made sure to leave the original dates of my blog entries for my tutor so she can see that I have been blogging on a weekly basis. Especially with today being our 1b assignment due date I did not want her to go through my blog ( which is 5% of our mark) and think I had sneakily written a months worth of blog entries today :). Oh I am so relieved that I was able to fix that little problem (massive problem to me!) I think the reason it happened was because of the comment box html. I must have copied it wrong or the company that created it rejected my site for some reason. What a stressful morning. Now that I have dealt with that I am definitely ready to continue working on my assignment 1 for EDN110 that I spoke about earlier this morning.

I hope you all had a better morning than me!

Week Six Continued.....

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:16:01 +0100

Posted by Amy Panté on Friday, March 30, 2012

Hello again,

Well what an eventful morning I have had with this blog. When I log onto my yola account and select my blog page it will simply just not load, and the only thing I can do is post a new blog by selecting the new post button at the top of the page. My entire blog page is frozen and just continues to say reloading. So I immediately went to the help button and they said it can be caused by copying and pasting from a word document or an incorrect html. I have not done either of these that I know of. I write up all my blogs straight onto the yola site and then copy and paste them to a word document. So it couldn't be from copying and pasting from a word document. I also have not copied a html code onto my site, except for when I added the comment box on my blog but that was ages ago now. I wouldn't think it would affect it now if it hadn't already. So I have no idea how to fix this. I will jump on the LMS ( a site for Murdoch students which holds all of their unit information, guides, chat rooms for students and tutors, and much more) and ask some peers for their advice, surely I'm not the only person this has happened to. I'm hoping that once I post this blog entry it will correct itself and I will be able to edit and post as I usually do.

Hopefully you can see from the screen capture below my blog page is faded out while it is trying to load.

On another note, while I am here. I got my assignment one back for EDN111 (Language for Learning and Teaching) and I got 70% = Distinction, pretty happy with that but am still aiming for a little higher in future assignments. I also realized during the week I have an assignment due on Monday for EDN110 (Mathematics for Teaching) which requires a lot of detail and have only done about a page. So a bit stressed, it is not like me to leave things to the last minute. I have been getting all my assignments done with at least a week before the due date. Giving me time to continue reflecting over it and if any areas need work, time to fix them before submitting. Doesn't help that I haven't been feeling my best (having my tonsils out last week) but I am feeling re-energized and ready to tackle it today.

Wish me luck with my blog dilemma, here goes.....

Week Six

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:16:44 +0100

Posted by Amy Panté on Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Hello Hello,

Wow week six already and I feel incredibly hopeless this week. My tonsillectomy went well last Thursday but I am still in a lot of pain and am not yet back at uni, which I absolutely hate the thought of! These next few weeks are some of the most important weeks with key concepts being taught and I am having to follow on at home like an external. Which even when I am feeling 100% I am not very good at I am a better learner in the classroom, hearing and seeing what is being taught! Hence why I decided to be a full time internal student. Enough complaining though, my peer completed her review which was extremely helpful! She gave me some great constructive criticism. Things like extending my introduction to the social context I had chosen, and writing a bit more about my interactions with peers and tutors for this unit within my blogs. I really like how we were given, and had to conduct a peer review for this assignment!

I finally did my second math quiz for EDN110, I left it pretty late actually I did it yesterday morning which was the last day to do the quiz! I got 70% a lot better than what I was expecting so I am quite pleased with that result.

I am really hoping that I will be well enough to go back to uni next week! Otherwise I wont be back until after our second non-teaching week. I will just have to really keep up with the readings for each unit and study at home and make sure I am listening to the lectures!

I submitted assignment 1b for EDN113 yesterday, I cannot wait to get my result for it. It isn't actually due until the 30th of March so I will just have to wait!

Fingers crossed....

Week Five

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:44:07 +0100

Posted by Amy Panté on Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Hi all,

Well it is Tuesday of week five, a non-teaching week! It is nice having some time off from uni to be able to catch up on my readings and get through some more assignments. Yesterday I completed assignment 1b for EDN113, I felt so relieved once I had put it up on my site and checked that it was all working, just a draft at the moment but it's up there! It took me so long to put it all together. I was really trying to put as much detail in as I possibly could. Just when I thought I had finished I realized I had forgotten to put the part in about creating the actual social event. How silly of me! So now I am waiting for my peer review, and am actually really looking forward to what they say, so that if I need to make changes I can before I submit the assignment.

I have my second math quiz this week which is based on topics three and four. Not feeling as confident in those areas as I was with topics one and two. So I think I might leave the quiz until later in the week, leaving myself time to get some extra study in on those topics! But keeping in mind I am getting my tonsils removed Thursday, which I am really not looking forward to. So it would probably be best if I did the quiz Wednesday....which is tomorrow! :|

So I finally had a look through the recommended readings found on the companion website. I had a look at the world’s worst website and it truly is but gives some great ideas and tips on what NOT to do. Things like putting up horrible flashing pictures and texts that distract the surfers, choosing soft and simple backgrounds, being aware of spelling and grammatical errors, and so much more. Check it out if you are thinking of making your own website or already have one and are not sure on what not to do.

I got my results back for assignment 1a for EDN113 and am very very happy with my mark. I just hope I can keep it up.
I handed in my first assignment for EDN111 on Friday and cannot wait to get my result back for it. That was the assignment of the personal recount. Actually I'll upload it to my site as it is an e-portfolio and I can use it to display my work not only for EDN113 but for my entire course. You are welcome to have a read of it, it will be under the tab EDN111.

That is all from me for now. Have a great study break all!