Okay, so I have stumbled across this little gem and thought I would pop it up here for two reasons:
To help others stumble across the same; and
So that I can stumble across it again!
Laurenn7 explains tool belt theory so well in her Bob the Builder styled blog! I think sometimes as a student I forget to take note of all of the little gems that come my way in order to test them out on prac and add them to by own pedagogical tool belt! You can never have enough tools to help you handle situations as a teacher, what worked yesterday might not work today, and whay works today might not work tomorrow!
In reading this blog post from aaronnduke I really starting thinking about how a PKM can help me become a better educator. I must admit, as soon as he mentioned juggling studying online and full time work he had me well and truly hooked on his post. I must admit I initially thought of PKM as just another thing I have to do to pass my subjects and get qualified, another tick in the box to be forgotten about as soon as I move along to my next semester of study. The more I look in to it though, the more exciting or interesting things that pop up for me to explore, the more I realise how much it has the potential to save me time! I love that I can see what has or hasn’t worked for others, what they recommend! I am still working out how best to use these tools…I guess it will be something that I am forever working out as technology keeps progressing!
Whilst creating this website I tried to imagine myself as a classroom teacher and have designed a tool to communicate with parents. I am hoping that with some tweaking I may be able to utilise this artefact to communicate my teaching philosophies to the parents and caregivers of my students whilst on professional experience later this semester. I am planning on utilising this concept in to the future as a tool to communicate with the families of students in my class and others that may be interested in my perspective on integrating ICT in to my pedagogical practice.
I have been looking in to ICTs that I can incorporate in to my daily pedagogical practice once I begin teaching full time. A resource that I have found particularly interesting in relation to classroom and behaviour management is called Class Dojo.
This tool allows you to track students positive and negative behaviours during the day in real time. Having this open during class means it only takes a few seconds to acknowledge positive behaviours and to redirect and take note of negative behaviours. This system not only provides students with a visual reminder of how they are going during the day, it also provides the teacher with information at a glance to see trends in behavioural data including individual and whole class statistics. This can allow a teacher to identify pattern behaviours early in order to address them.
Class dojo is more than just a tracking system for behavioural information, it also allows parents and caregivers to register and keep track of their child’s progress and communicate directly with the teacher online. This is an ICT resource that I am excited about trying out in my own classroom when I graduate…can’t wait to find some more!!
I thought that it might be a good idea to pop a copy of my concept map up here (and I am practising some of my ICT skills – export, save, upload, publish 🙂 ).
Embedding and hyperlinking are working well for me so far so lets give this image uploading a whirl shall we?
Mission accomplished!
On another note, I found the process of sitting and constructing a concept map quite helpful as a bit of a brain dump to get my ideas down. I have never thought to create one digitally before so usually have them scattered around half finished in various notebooks, on the back of receipts, on post-it notes and even on the back of my hand on the odd occasion where paper was a scarce commodity on my household! I love that the bubble.us site allows you to save and edit these in one location. This revelation is likely to mean that my mind/concept mapping is not only more meaningful, but also more likely to be utilised in planning outcomes instead of accidently ending up in the rubbish bin (or disappearing as I wash my hands).
I was a bit relieved today when I came across this post by Chloe Sims which echoes my own misconception. I have long thought text to encompass written communications; particularly in the form of poetry or prose. A piece of writing.
Changing my mindset to incorporate other modes of communication under the “text” umbrella is a little bit unsettling to the part of my brain that refuses to accept change to its fundamental understandings. It’s screaming at me “When will this madness stop? What happened to calling a spoon a spoon?”
Anyway, that’s enough of an insight in to my crazy for right now…glad to know I was not the only person thinking along these lines.
I am a digital native. I grew up surrounded by technology and had multiple computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles in the house at all times throughout my childhood. By the time I was twelve, I was talking to my friends online almost every night (when I wasn’t grounded anyway). By age thirteen, this became talking to strangers and interacting with people from all over the world in chat rooms. Whilst most of these were harmless, I did have some interactions with unsavoury sorts which for the most part I found hilarious as I pressed the block button to remove them from my digital world.
Even growing up with such a deeply embedded technological mindset, I am still surprised at the issues surrounding online privacy. I came across a blog post by Daniel Exelby  on this topic that not only made me think, but also concerned me. What can people find about me online?
I started with a basic google search and the first picture that appeared was from my myspace account that I have not used since I was about fifteen. This has been enough for me to revisit my privacy settings!! Sure is some scary stuff…
The question was asked during a learning path and I think that there isn’t a yes or no answer, in reality it is much more complex than that. Technology is making it easier to connect with a wider range of people from more far away places than it ever has been before. So in many ways, we are more connected and more social. At the same time however, we are definitely finding more distractions and electronic stimuli that are causing detachment from those around us.
Reading a blog by Kerrynkeehn has made me think that maybe we always had excuses, such as reading a book, however these new alternatives are less familiar and therefor less readily acceptable means of avoiding those we live with.
I have also been considering the implications this has on people with communication difficulties and/or language barriers. ICTs are allowing messages to be instantly relayed without the need for verbal communication. As a Special Education major the implications for my future students are exciting to me.
I have been looking at technologies to help students communicate – these assistive technologies can help students to not only have a voice in face to face interactions but can help them to put their thoughts in to a written form which can be interpreted by others. I found this video on youtube by reallookautism really interesting.
Theory washing is not something that I have ever thought about however I have just found out it is something that I am a bit guilty of doing quite successfully. For the last few years I have references theory upon theory in order to bolster my grade in many an assignment with remarkable results. I thought that was just how to get good marks on assignments!
Looking back on my teaching practice and lesson plans not once have I sat down and started with a theory that I agreed with and based my pedagogy around it. I have always just pulled a lesson out of the air and then found resources which seemed to agree with my decisions. I have just looked back over a number of old assignments and noticed that every single one of them has the same article referenced. A piece by Howard Gardner on the theory of multiple intelligences. Whilst this is a theory that I agree with on principle, I have never looked in to the research supporting it. I have blindly referenced this simply because it suits my pedagogical approach….
I think I need to reassess my methodologies although to be completely honest I am reluctant to do so in case it is detrimental to my overall grades. This approach is working for me very well at university (although I can see obvious flaws with implementing this in the real world!). This is a little disheartening to consider and makes me wonder what lecturers and examiners are looking for when marking assessment tasks.
Interesting to ponder, however I’m not sure if I will ever have the answers…
I love it when I come across little sparks that make me consider things that I have never paused to look at before. I have often pondered whether learners who struggle with a task are more proficient at teaching it then those who didn’t…purely because in order to learn it they had to think about how they were learning and break down the process. I have never thought about the flip side of this coin…are teachers who easily form understandings of tasks and concepts at a disadvantage when it comes to teaching it simply because they have never had to break it down? I looked in to this a little closer and found this video on Youtube by Nick Reese. It is from a sales/business perspective but a lot of what he says is transferrable…sift through it a little bit and substitute the word “client” for the word “student”…feel free to tune out at about 4 minutes.
This post might seem to be a bit unstructured and all over the place; this is because this idea has boggled my mind! I didn’t struggle with many things at school, some would call be an over achiever, however sometimes maths really got me stumped. I hated it and it did not come easily to me at all. On my first placement when I had to actually teach a maths class I felt overwhelmed and underqualified to be imparting my limited mathematical knowledge to the next generation. I surprised myself when the lesson (whilst not sticking to the lesson plan I had spent a few hours working on the night before) was a roaring success! I loved teaching this subject that I had always hated!
My first goal on my next placement is to consider the steps I might gloss over when teaching things that come naturally to me…I am going to be conscious of this curse of knowledge and work to overcome it in my classroom.
leehillasedublog 