Week 4 Excell and Inspiration

My First Excell Graphs!
I've always had a bit of an aversion to excel.. I think I was asked to do a timed assessment using the program for a job interview once and failed miserably. After today, I'm not so scared. I like the way it's relatively simple to represent data in so many different forms using excel.. bar graph.. pie graph.. colouful or not.

We used M & M's in a chance and data activity to discover how many of each colour M&M's were in a packet? This would be a very engaging activity - kids love hands on learning and all the better that they get to eat the experiment! Of course it is important to keep in mind allergies when facilitating this activity.

Excel can be used with infinite learning activities. It's use is applicable to numerous curriculum areas, including literacy, numeracy, and ICT.

On my last placement, the kids in my class had done an assessment of themselves based on Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligenceshttp://www.multipleintelligencetheory.co.uk
You can do the test here:
http://www.mypersonality.info/basic-vs-pro/multiple-intelligences-test

Using the information they had about their individual learning styles, the students created a pie graph in excel to show where their 'intelligences' lay. The graphs were printed in colour, and pasted onto coloured card along with a written reflection of the students' own attitude to learning, and hung up on a line across the middle of the classroom. Of course, some students said they were awesome at everything, and so had a very evenly cut pie graph, but others had really thought about their answers. As soon as I walked into the room , I could see the individual learning styles of these students, and understand where their strengths and weaknesses lay. This use of excel related the students learning directly to themselves, and also looked great.

We visited a fantastic website today http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ It is a collection of animated dreamtime stories from Arnemland. Each story is accompanied by a Study guide, teachers notes, and classroom activity sheet to help teachers design lessons around the animations. As there

is no sound on the computers in the menzies lab, I found the story a little hard to understand at first, and needed to watch it a couple of times to fully understand the plot. We used Inspiration to find the main parts of the story, and copy and paste the pictures into a document, labelling them with what is happening in the story. Greg had a great idea to challenge students to keep breaking down the story into fewer and fewer main ideas, until they had only three or four main points of the story. I like the idea of this for a comprehension activity - it requires a deeper level of higher order thinking than those outlined on the accompanying classroom activity sheets, and also develops skills in ICT.

Week 3 Design brief

Design briefs

This was a fun, engaging task. I enjoyed observing the way different people in our class responded to the challenge - some cheated, some came up with great concepts.
Greg showed us how in technology, old design briefs were based upon:

Investigate design produce evaluate (IDPE)

This has now been revised with VELS, to become Investigate/Design, Produce, Analyse/Evaluate (IDPAE), shifting the importance to getting the process right, with analyse / evaluate being present at each process stage. This adaptation of the brief has created more scope for developing higher order thinking skills.

The task was:
Make a frog jump.

Resources: Carboard, frog, rubberband, stickytape, scissors

To do this task well, students would need hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, cooperation skills.

I think that when running this, or any, task in a classroom, it is important to make sure that students describe the process of their design brief. The task would be fun and engaging without this process of describing, but in order to develop higher order thinking skills, students should be able to discuss the means they used to get to the end. This translates into any subject area: For example it's no use getting a correct answer in maths if you have no idea of how to justify your answer - how can you be sure the answer is correct?

My partner and I chose to photograph our process on a mobile phone, and post it to our blogs. We also took a short film of the frog jumping, but enabling the video to be imbedded to the blog proved harder than we anticipated. Pairing design briefs with multimedia such as this would be a good way to encourage students to break down the steps they took, and describe each one. The design brief could be filmed in stop motion format, with students recording a soundtrack which analyses and evaluates each step of the process.

There are many design briefs out there which require readily available resources. http://www.enchantedlearning.com has some good ones. Or why not come up with your own?

Week 3 Online games development: Quia

http://www.quia.com/profiles/ebarrow17

http://www.quia.com/hm/668248.html

Try these quizzes we learned to create in the workshop today on quia

What a great program! I had no idea this sort of thing existed. I had heard of survey monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com , but this takes it a step further, giving more room for creativity in the type of quiz that is created. This is a fantastic tool, not just in terms of assessment, but also in empowering people in sharing what they know, and also finding out about their areas of interest and knowledge in a fun way. I can see this being used in a unit of inquiry - perhaps a teacher written quiz to begin with at the tuning in stage, which is revisited later on in the unit to find out what students have learned. Students could also develop their own quiz at the sorting out / going further stage to show how much they have learned.

I can imagine using this software in the first week of school at the 'getting to know you' stage. I would ask the kids to write a quiz for the class on something they know about, or are passionate about. It would be a step outside the square of writing a traditional story about 'me', and engaging too. It would give the teacher a good idea of where students interests lie, and points of interest for connecting with students on a one to one basis.

This is also a rich tool for assessment. It is easy to use, and provides the educator with easily accessible data of how students are performing.. I like it.

Week 1 Mindmapping

A Mindmap of Vegetables

This is the first time I've used a computer to draw a mindmap. I see mindmaps as a really useful tool to organise and clarify my ideas and thought processes. Mindmaps are a great resource to incorporate into all kinds of work and study. Often when drafting an essay I begin with a mindmap to brainstorm ideas and arguments. This helps me to sort out where things fit, and what ideas follow on from another. As I am a creative person, mindmaps 'speak' to me a lot more than notes. Looking back on a mindmap, I can get an immediate visual representation of where my brain went, and why. I contrast, notes can get a little unorganised and hard to understand - I often wonder.. 'where did that idea come from?' Using a mindmap shows me where.


At this stage, I'm unsure of the real value of using computer software to draw a mindmap over a hand drawn one. I suppose as one gets used to the program, using Inspiration, or some other mindmapping software, would be a quick and easy way to get ideas down. It would also be of use for those who are still developing their fine motor skills, or like their work to be very neat. Admittedly, the mindmap I began to draw above is a lot neater than ones in my diary.

http://www.buzan.com.au/learning/mindmapgallery.html I came acoss this link while doing a little more research on mindmapping.. It was a bit frustrating trying to put the hyperlink on the blog.. I can see it at the top of the page, but had to type it myself into this text..

I really like this mindmap. I think what draws me to it is that it's not confined to one medium of communication. It uses drawings and diagrams paired with text. It shows me at a glance the way the mind wanders.

Week 1 Concept maps

Concept maps using Inspiration 8IE..

How does your garden grow?

In the beginning, I wasn't really sure of the difference between a concept map and a mindmap. Now I understand that a concept map shows the relationships among concepts, while a mindmap reflects what I think about a particular topic. The concept map I've drawn here shows the interrelationships of how a garden grows. This sort of mapping would be really useful in getting kids to understand cause and effect, and the relationships that things have with eachother. Off the top of my head, what about creating a concept map about bullying, if this were an issue in your classroom? Kids could come up with all off the knock on effects that bullying may have, helping them to understand the consequences their actions may have on others - and not just those immediate to themselves.

http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theorycmaps/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.htm

I came across the link above when I was trying to understand more about the difference between concept mapping and mindmapping. ( I'm still having trouble knowing if these links are working.. it's the one that begins with cmap - theory underlying concept mapping) It goes into the psychological benefit of inquiry based learning through using such tools as concept mapping, as oppposed to rote learning. Basically, it explores the theory that developing skills such as concept mapping and learning through inquiry can open up the doors for real, meaningful learning, while rote-based, overly guided learning does not always encourage or enable the learner to develop higher order thinking skills. I agree. In an age of such readily available information, it is incredibly easy to source information, but it takes higher order thinking skills, such as those developed through concept mapping, to begin to draw links and relationships between different sources of information available, and to analyse this information to draw conclusions.

Again, I wonder about the real value of using ICT to develop a concept map over creating one on paper. Absolutely, incorporating ICT into the learning curriculum is an excellent way to engage students, and to develop skills which are integral to today's society, but is it really necessary to replace already functioning fine motor and thinking skills with computer software? I am not saying that I'm against ICT, in fact I'm a big fan, but in some cases I think that it tends to replace what is already well and functioning just for the sake of it. In my eyes, a way to incorporate ICT into concept mapping would be to use online tools to research the inter relationships between different concepts, and to discover further links that weren't originally thought of.. I suppose what I'm saying is.. do we really need ICT to do everything?