Monday 15 April 2013

Assessment 2: Reflective synopsis - Analysis of Digital Technologies

Introduction
This post is a reflective synopsis of a series of analyses of selected learning technologies. The post begins with a brief discussion of my teaching context and the characteristics of a contemporary effective learner in order to contextualise the use of the digital tools examined in this blog post. This is followed by a description of my (emerging) personal framework for e-learning design. The first reflections and conclusions are based on participating in two learning activities: Mobile Phones Wiki; and Learning Theories Quiz Wiki. The next four reflections are a synthesis of the exploration of four groups of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the selection of one tool from each group to support learning in my teaching context.  Each reflection is organised around three main components: my exploration of the tools; learning theories and thinking routines (scaffolding activities); and application to my teaching context.  These reflections are followed by a brief discussion of the legal, safe and ethical guidelines that should be employed when using digital tools in a school environment. This blog post concludes with a discussion on the implications for my praxis. The reflections and conclusions are based on a series of blog posts at http://joluck.blogspot.com.au/


Teaching Context, Contemporary Learners and Digital Pedagogies
Mishra and Koehler (2008, p. 2) argue that designing “solutions that honour the complexities of the situations and the contexts presented by learners and classrooms” is an important factor in successful e-learning design. At this point in time, I have very limited knowledge about the context within which I will be teaching. All I know is that my teaching areas are Information Technology (IT) and Mathematics and my first prac experience will be teaching year 8 & 9 students at an all girls school. My engagement with the digital tools for e-learning design is constrained by this limited knowledge. Until I fully understand my teaching context and my learners I will not be able to effectively integrate the technologies I am reflecting on in this synopsis into my teaching praxis.

I have examined the complicated nature of modern schools and classrooms and what is meant by the concept of a contemporary effective learner in this ICTs in Queensland Classrooms in the 21st Century blog post. This post highlights the complexity of teaching in modern classrooms and that I have much to learn from my mentor teachers while I am on prac. The reflections in this blog post about the uses of digital technologies for teaching contemporary learners will be a work in progress for many years to come.


Personal Framework for e-Learning Design
Please read my Personal Framework for e-Learning Design blog post where I reflect on what I have learnt in this course and how it will influence the ways that I use digital pedagogies in my teaching.


Working with Wikis There were two wiki exercises undertaken in week 2. The first was based on developing a group discussion on the use of mobile phones in the classroom. The second was participating in a discussion about learning theories and using ICTs in education. The mobile phone wiki exercise used de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats to scaffold the discussions. Each coloured hat representing a different perspective was given a separate space and students colour-coded their entries, creating an organised space for collaboration. This learning activity supported the constructivist theory of learning, as ideas were gathered from a group of students.  Within the wiki, students were able to build on each others’ comments and suggestions to interpret and evaluate the use of mobile phones in the classroom demonstrating how Wikis could be used as a constructivist collaborative learning tool. ­The scaffolding ensured that the students’ varied perspectives were presented rather than just description or opinion, which moved us to use our higher order thinking skills (HOTS). I know that I was pushed into my Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) during this exercise.


The learning theory quiz was the second wiki activity completed in week 2. For this activity we were asked to self-select into smaller groups and post our thoughts on how best to answer four multiple choice questions (MCQ) on the topic of learning theories and using ICTs in education. There was little scaffolding in this exercise and some people chose to insert their comments into the MCQs themselves and others wrote their thoughts and responses underneath the relevant MCQ. Some people used coloured font and their initials to indicate their comments and others just wrote theirs using the default font. I found this a little frustrating as I was late in completing this task and in the first six quizzes I looked at I found it hard to work out what words represented the original questions and what were added by other people. Being a sequential and sensing learner I had difficulty coping with this activity. As these MCQs were also preparation for completing assessment item 1 I felt I had to know the correct answers so pragmatically I cut and pasted the MCQs and my responses into an email and sent them to Wendy asking for feedback on my comments. I could not cope with this collaborative confusion!!! For more detail on my personal reflection, what I learned from participating in both these wiki activities and how I would apply wikis and deBono’s Six Thinking Hats in my teaching context please read my Working with Wikis blog post.


Though I recognize the value of using wikis for collaborative learning the activities we undertook were not completed without encountering some problems. These problems highlighted the possibilities of technology producing adverse effects on learning. For example, there were two problems that I observed: the instructions were unclear and ambiguous; and the students’ limited knowledge of the technology and its affordances. I have explained the confusing instructions in the Working with Wikis blog post. These problems had a negative impact on the attitudes and perceptions of many students, and as Marzano & Pickering (1997, p. 13) suggest, when attitudes and perceptions are negative, learning suffers. The limited experience among students of how to use a Wiki through collaborative authoring led most students to adopt approaches to the task that limited the benefits of the technology. For example, many people, myself included, wrote our initials/names next to our postings so that readers would be aware that we had participated in the activity. Furthermore, instead of editing and adding to what others had written (collaborative authoring) many of us just added an extra paragraph to what was already written. There was also little evidence of Connectivism at work as people contributed their own thoughts but did not link them to other sources on the Internet and elsewhere. Read more on Connectivism in my blog post.



Group 1 - Blogs, Wikis and Websites
In Week 3 I explored how the Group 1 Tools could support digital pedagogies (see my Blogs, Wikis and Websites blog post). Without a complete understanding of my teaching context it is difficult to argue for the use of one technology over the other two. I can imagine using all three as they each have affordances that would be appropriate for differing contexts. All three tools have the capability to demonstrate Connectivism in action for the students. Connectivism is based on the proposition that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections. Blogs, Wikis and Websites all have the affordance of helping the students learning constructing and traversing those networks of connections all over the world (Siemens, 2004).


The Group 1 tool that I currently feel most comfortable about using in my teaching is Blogs. A Blog, or Web Log, is a website that is commonly maintained by a single-author (but can be many authors) and usually contains regular entries of personal commentary on news items (ABC blogs) or other subjects (for example, parenting). Some people use blogs as personal, online diaries. Blogs can contain materials such as images, audio or video and link to other blogs or websites. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Interactivity of blogs is afforded through the ability of readers to leave comments on a blog post. This allows a dialogue to occur between individuals. The ability to leave comments and make hyperlinks on other students’ posts encourages self-learning as it creates a learning community that goes beyond the classroom (Downes, 2004). If using them for teaching Blogs are owned by the students. They have full control over the content and therefore ideas expressed in their blogs. I have critically reflected on my experiences with using blogs using a PMI tool and examined their affordances as teaching tools in my Blog post for Week 3.


One thing I would like to add to the reflection on Blogs is that when using Blogs in class or for my own use in the future I will move to the WordPress platform. I found the editor in Blogger to be problematic and unforgiving at times. I have experimented with WordPress and I think it would be a better tool to use in my personal reflection and my teaching.


One teaching strategy that I would implement when using Blogs for teaching is to encourage the students to work with a small group of Blog Buddies. Being overwhelmed by the expectation to read more than 100 student blogs in EDED20491, I invited five of my fellow students to be my Blog Buddies. The Blog Buddies post has been the most read and heavily commented post on my blog to date.


Other Group 1 tools that I explored were Wiki’s and Websites. I did not choose Wikis because at the present time I don’t feel confident in setting up a Wiki to use in a secondary school class. As discussed in the preceding section of this post I had mixed feelings about the use of Wikis in EDED20491. I do however engage with Wikis on almost a daily basis through Wikipedia. I have set up my own Wiki site and I plan to encourage my fellow students to add to so that we can use it as a resource for the use of ICTs in Education while we are student teachers. My critical reflection of my experiences in setting up a wiki and how I would employ it in my teaching is available on my Wikispace site.  


I can foresee that I will use Websites in my praxis but more as a tool to store teaching materials for my students than getting students to create their own websites. As discussed in my blog post where I evaluated Websites, I see value in using websites as a ‘hub’ to store and link to interactive activities for the students to complete. Having said that I think getting students to create their own websites would be a fantastic way to get them working at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy where they would be their designing, developing, and creating skills to produce a new product from their original ideas.



Group 2 – Images, Audio and Video
We were tasked with examining the Group 2 Tools in week 4.  I have compared these three tools in a reflective blog post on digital images, audio and video. I also wrote three separate blog posts, Images, Audio and Video where I explored each of these digital tools, reflected on their ease of use and discussed the implications for my learners. Each post used a SWOT analysis to scaffold the analysis and each post includes a brief discussion of the ways each tool could be used purposefully in my teaching context.



I was asked to select one tool to further explore. As with the reflection on the Group 1 tools I found that without understanding my teaching context it is difficult to argue for the use of one technology over the other two. I can imagine using all three for differing teaching contexts. Nevertheless, the Group 2 tool that I selected for further exploration was Images. At first you might think that the images is the ‘least sexy’ option of the three tools. But I chose Images because pictures and graphics are easy to create or obtain and you can make them animated and clickable (interactive). You do not have use static images. I also believe in the less is more principle. Images (if they have been made smaller with a tool such as Mobaphoto) require less bandwidth and the tools to take images (devices with cameras) are more freely available. In addition, there are many sites on the web where you can obtain free images that you can use on a non-profit webpage—with due acknowledgement.



Images have a range of uses in education. They can be used as a topic for analysis, they can be used to illustrate a point. They can make teaching materials more engaging. If the Images are used in conjunction with a tool like Glogsters they can be made clickable and as such they can be used for interactive activities with the students. The uses of Images in education are endless and subject to the teacher’s and students’ creativity. When using photos of students care should be taken if the photos are placed on a webpage that is accessible to people outside the school, either obtain parental permission for the release of the photos or blur their faces.



Group 3 – Presentation Tools

The Group 3 tools investigated in Week 5 were all presentation tools: PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster. To choose one of these tools to over the other two was a difficult decision without a comprehensive understanding of my teaching context. I know that all three tools will be useful additions to my technology toolkit. I have explored each of these tools and critically evaluated them for teaching purposes using a PMI tool in my PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster blog posts.

Though I love Prezi and was completely rapt in Glogster (a tool I had not used before) I believe that I have to select PowerPoint as the tool that will probably be of most use to me in the classroom. I can imagine using it more for preparing my teaching materials than I will the other presentation tools. PowerPoint has the ability to make it interactive so if I design a task well enough I will be able to use PowerPoint in a manner that encourages students to use their HOTS (Bloom’s Taxonomy). I can also picture that PowerPoint is a tool that I can get the students to use themselves to create learning artefacts. The ability to add images, audio and video to PowerPoints mean that the students can use their creativity skills (HOTS) when designing PowerPoint presentations.

There are three reasons why I believe PowerPoint will be used by me in my teaching more than Prezis and Glogsters. Firstly, because I am a PC user and am familiar with MS-Office I find it easy to use PowerPoint as the menus are similar in all the MS-Office Suite of programs, hence using PowerPoints will save me time. Secondly, PowerPoint has an advantage because of its widespread availability. If the school is PC-based then they will most likely have MS-Office on all computers. Even if the students do not have access to PowerPoint at home they would still be able to download a free reader to be able to play PowerPoints at home. The third reason is because you do not need access to the Internet to use PowerPoint. To use Prezi to create presentations you need to be online unless you pay to use the software. Similarly Glogsters need access to the Internet to be created and used. You can read more about my comparison of the three presentation tools in my Presentation Tools blog post.

Group 4 – Word Clouds
The Group 4 tool I explored was Word Clouds or Tag Clouds which are weighted lists used as a visual representation of text data. In my Word Cloud blog post I explain how Word clouds are simple tools that could be used to great effect in my teaching and provide several examples of how I could get students to construct them in the classroom. Word Clouds could be used for a simple analysis of a block of text and to give feedback to students about their writing. As Word Cloud tools create infographics which visualise data they can be used as a tool in scaffolding student learning. Word Clouds could be used to motivate students to using their HOTS (analysing, evaluating and creating skill levels in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy). I tried several of the free tools for creating Word Clouds. My recommendation would be to use Tagxedo as it provided more options in the look and feel of the graphic image produced including making the Word Clouds appear in a shape of your choosing.

Gary Holmes made a comment on my Word Cloud blog post where he described the ideas I presented as “very timely…[at] my recent meeting with the assistant regional director in this EQ region. He really pushed the need for schools to focus on vocabulary and stated the link to research suggesting this was a way to improve our student performance data”. Hence, Word Clouds could also be used to create meta data about student learning and their achievements.

Legal, Safe and Ethical Guidelines
It is essential that as a teacher I create a safe, legal and ethical environment for my students to work within digital spaces. This will be achieved by me modeling good practice as I have done in all my blog posts and in the artefacts that I have created in this course. I have acknowledged my sources, cited people’s words using the APA referencing style and not breached any copyright laws. When writing my blog posts, the discussion forums and commenting on other students’ blog posts I have used language that is polite, encouraging and supportive of other peoples’ ideas. When teaching I will explicitly teach these skills to my students. In addition, I will set up safe environments for the students to work within and will teach them skills such as the THINK strategy so they can self-manage working in a safe environment. I have posted a blog entry where I critically reflected on creating a Legal, Safe and Ethical Environment for Online Learning. This blog also includes a list of resources that I can use when teaching.

Implications for my Praxis
One aspect of embedding ICTs in my teaching that concerns me is the amount of time it takes to do it well. There is extra time required in the preparation of teaching materials and ensuring the technology in the classroom is working, the time it takes to execute the lesson and the time it takes to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. In addition, there is the extra time needed outside of class to monitor work and provide feedback. When on prac I will be engaging my mentor teachers in discussions on what resources they use and how they manage their time when working in digital environments. I have also reflected on other aspects of teaching with ICTs in my Incorporating Digital Technologies into my Teaching blog post.

When reflecting on what I have achieved in this course over the last five weeks I can relate to opinions expressed in a recent blog post by Mark Fijor a Technology Facilitator in a primary school in Chicago entitled The Ugly Truth of Technology Integration. Fijor (2013) argues that “integrating any technology into the classroom can be messy, clumsy, challenging and downright frustrating” (n.p., emphasis in original). His blog post describes how when presenting new tools and concepts to teachers the presenters often leave out the stories of the struggles and learning that occurred when working out how to use the tool for “fear of not appearing as an expert” (n.p.). Fijor (2013) asserts that using the TPACK model provides a mechanism to provide educators with the essential knowledge needed to integrate a tool into the classroom. Fijor (2013) provides a list of questions that educators need to be able to answer before integrating a new technology into their classroom. As well as being a very helpful list of questions this blog post also actively demonstrated to me how TPACK can be used to increase the likelihood of success when integrating a new technology into the classroom. This connects with Mishra & Koehler’s (2008) description of an expert teacher as someone who is able to “flexibly navigate the space defined by the three elements of content, pedagogy, and technology and the complex interactions among these elements in specific contexts” (p. 10).

Mishra and Koehler (2008) describe an expert teacher has someone who has a “deep, pragmatic, and nuanced understanding of teaching with technology” that enables them to effectively solve the wicked problem of using ICTs in their teaching (p. 2). Through preparing for and writing this assessment item I have identified a number of future tasks that I need to complete:
1. Develop effective methods of using TPACK to determine the most appropriate technologies and pedagogies to teach content knowledge in my teaching areas of Information Technology and Mathematics.
2. Spend more time thinking about learning theories and thinking routines and relating them to my teaching.
3. Learn more about my teaching context.
4. Adopt a more exploratory approach to my use of digital tools in my teaching.
5. Learn how to use a Promethean Interactive White Board.
6. Explore what is meant by ‘Differentation’ in school and how I can employ digital tools to support differentiation in students.
7. Explore the use of videoconferencing such as Blackboard Collaborate as a tool for learning.

The last point I would like to make is that a bit of humour will always help to create a positive climate in the classroom for teaching. This French advertisement illustrates that technology will not completely replace paper...enjoy!

References

De Bono, E. (n.d.). Six Thinking Hats. Retrieved April 11, 2013, from http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm 

Downes, Stephen (2004, September-October). Educational Blogging. Educause Review.  Pp. 14-26. Retrieved March 19, 2013, from: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf

Education Queensland. (2013). Contemporary Effective Learner  Retrieved April 8, 2013 From https://staff.learningplace.eq.edu.au 

Fijor, M. (2013, March 18). The Ugly Truth of Technology Integration. Retrieved April 6, 2013 from http://www.newschooltechnology.org/2013/03/the-ugly-truth-of-edtech/  

Marzano, R. J., & Pickering, D. J. (1997). Dimensions of Learning (2nd ed., p. 352). Aurora, CO: McREL.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2008). Introducing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, New York) (pp. 1-16). Retrieved March 14, 2011, from
http://punya.educ.msu.edu/presentations/AERA2008/MishraKoehler_AERA2008.pdf.


Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivisim: A learning Theory for the Digital Age. April 4 Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Wikipedia (n.d.). Various definitions Retrieved March-April, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/ 

Incorporating Digital Technologies into my Teaching

What does the last five weeks of exploration, and trying out these digital tools mean with respect to my teaching? For me how to adapt and use these tools in my teaching is still a work in progress. My placement starts this week. As a Pre-Service Teacher (PST) I need to ‘play’ more with these digital tools and reflect on how they can be adapted or adopted to support the learning of my students. I am planning to talk with my mentor teachers and the e-learning support staff at my allocated school this week to ascertain the technologies that are available for me to use during my prac and then work out how to embed some of the digital tools I explored over the last five weeks within the technological constraints of my allocated school. My personal philosophy would be to introduce one new technology at a time. I was overwhelmed in this course when having to learn 3 or more technologies every week so I assume my students would be overwhelmed by trying to learn multiple new tools in a short space of time too.

What have I learnt in the last five weeks with respect to learning theories and pedagogy? I have a much better understanding of my own learning style and how that influences my approach to teaching and what pedagogical strategies I will feel comfortable using in class. I also understand better how learning theory and pedagogy frame e-learning design. But again there is the caveat that I do not fully understand my teaching context at this point in time so I am sure that there going to be a steep learning curve in the next few weeks as I move from classroom observer to teaching my first lessons at a high school.

What I will be asking when I start preparing lessons for prac teaching is when should technology be used? The use of digital technologies is only suitable when there are clear learning benefits for my students. Learning activities that utilise digital tools need to be framed in a manner that supports and transforms the learning and is not merely an entertaining distraction. Ideally I should use digital technologies to support learning that is unable to occur in any other way. If done well, my students will be more engaged, far less likely to be disruptive and will achieve fantastic results in their studies.

Personal Framework for e-Learning Design

When preparing my reflective synopsis for EDED20491 I found it useful to reflect on my personal framework (design principles) for e-learning design. This framework is still embryonic but this a summary of how I made sense of: my learning style preferences; learning theories; frameworks for understanding the relationships among content, pedagogy and technology; and thinking routines to scaffold student learning—and thought about how they may influence my teaching praxis.
My e-learning design principles are based on my personal learning style preferences and my engagement with the following Learning Theories (Fasso, 2013a):
Behaviourism (Mergel, 1998)
Cognitivism (Mergel, 1998)
Constructivism (Vygotsky, n.d.)
Connectivism (Siemens, 2004)

Through exploring these theories I have learnt more about myself and have improved my understanding of how and why everyone learns differently. Implications for e-learning design are that I need to provide structure and guidance so that every student can work through their own pathway to achieve the learning outcomes. These principles are examined in more detail in my Week 1 and Learning Theory blog posts.

Three frameworks of classifying learning objectives were explored that provide guidance as to how to select appropriate technologies to support the pedagogies I would like to employ to teach the content knowledge in my teaching areas. They were:


As argued by Mishra andKoehler (2008) quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content and pedagogy and using this understanding to develop appropriate context-specific strategies and representations. I have explored the implications of these frameworks on my teaching praxis in my blog posts on Bloom’s taxonomy, Productive Pedagogies and TPACK.

A new concept introduced in this course was the use of Thinking Routines such as Plus-Minus-Interesting (PMI) and Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analyses to scaffold student learning. I had heard of these techniques before but did not fully appreciate their usefulness in moving students to use their Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) to solve problems and create new learning artefacts. Though I am aware that I should not to be too prescriptive in my scaffolding as Wendy stated in an email:

“…in your classrooms, there may be the temptation to be prescriptive about assessment. Although scaffolding is important for your students, your decisions about how much scaffolding to provide may in fact limit the creative potential of the assessment. Asking your students to make decisions about the best way to present information, based on their knowledge of the purpose and audience of the presentation, is an open-ended design. It also makes a task more complex as they work in the upper domains of Bloom's taxonomy.” (Fasso, 2013b)

When working in with digital pedagogies scaffolding may be provided to the student in ways that incorporate some use of ICTs. Technology has the potential to contribute to the provision of scaffolding. Changes in the students’ capabilities may be achieved through the learner's competence with technology being used to expand independent problem solving, and technology-enhanced scaffolding may reduce the need for assistance and/or extend the range of assistance provided to the learner. In other words technology-enhanced scaffolding may increase the size of the students’ Zone of Proximal Development (what the learner is capable of doing with help).

At this point in time I am concerned about my limited depth of knowledge and experience in applying these learning theories, classification frameworks and thinking routines to my teaching praxis. Though I do acknowledge that these tools will be invaluable to me as I continue to construct my personal framework for e-learning design while I am teaching during my prac work.

References:


Concept to Classroom (2004). Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved April 11, 2013, from http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index.html


Fasso, W. (2013a). A brief Overview of Learning Theory. Retrieved April 1, 2013, from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491: ICTs for Learning Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au


Fasso, W. (2013b). EDED20491 Week 6 email sent April 8, 2013. 

Mergel, B. (1998). Instructional Design and Learning Theory. Retrieved April 2, 2013 From http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm#The%20Basics%20of%20Behaviorism

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2008). Introducing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, New York) (pp. 1-16). Retrieved March 14, 2011, from http://punya.educ.msu.edu/presentations/AERA2008/MishraKoehler_AERA2008.pdf.

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivisim: A learning Theory for the Digital Age. Retrieved April 4, 2013, from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Vygotsky, L. (n.d.). Social Development Theory – VygotskyRetrieved April 11, 2013, from http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development.html

ICTs in Queensland Classrooms in the 21st Century

This post is a brief discussion of the complicated nature of modern schools and classrooms. In class Gray Holmes provided a poster of Education Queensland’s view of a Contemporary Effective Learner (Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Contemporary Effective Learner (Source: https://staff.learningplace.eq.edu.au)

This poster summarises the view that students of the 21st Century are expecting that working digitally will “pervade and impact on every aspect of their schooling” and that they are demanding “seamless access between school, work, home and play” (Education Queensland, 2013, p. 1). Though I agree that this poster may be describing a situation that may occur in the future I do not think that high school students in the Rockhampton region are in that situation at the moment. This is why I disagree with Prensky (2005) as described in my blog post. While the youth of today may be very experienced with some technologies such as SMS, the use of social media technologies like Facebook and using Google as a search engine, they are not necessarily familiar with the creation and use of  other technologies like wikis (except for using Wikipedia), course management systems (Moodle) and RSS feeds and the like. My evidence for this is based on my experience with teaching undergraduates at university where I have observed that not all students are digitally or information literate. I have also read a blog post by a former colleague (now working at USQ) who has blogged about the limits of technical knowledge of his current students and his opinion that they are “neither digital natives nor digitally literate” (Jones, 2013). Figure 1 is a perceptive cartoon from http://xkcd.com/ which illustrates in a comical way how becoming digitally literate is NOT innate nor is it a process of ‘magic’.



Figure 2: Tech Support Cheat Sheet (Source: http://xkcd.com/627/)


Teachers utilising digital pedagogies (the integration of digital technologies into the classroom) must also be cognisant of two governmental frameworks on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom: ICT capability and the Australian Curriculum (Australian Government); and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Cross-curriculum priority (Queensland Government). A goal of these frameworks is to use ICTs (e-learning) to prepare the contemporary learner to be a life-long learner.

The Australian Curriculum (ICT) capability states that students need to develop ICT capability that involves students making the most of the “digital technologies available to them, adapting to new ways of doing things as technologies evolve and limiting the risks to themselves and others in a digital environment”. Figure 3 below illustrates this point.




One of the Queensland Studies Association cross-curriculum priorities is the embedding of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the curriculum. They have outlined a set of skills and knowledge to be achieved by each year juncture as part of the Essential Learnings curriculum. It is expected that ICTs will be integrated into all curriculums in a variety of ways within and across all key learning areas to support thinking, learning, collaboration and communication.


References
Education Queensland. (2013). Contemporary Effective Learner  Retrieved April 8, 2013 From https://staff.learningplace.eq.edu.au 

ICT capability and the Australian Curriculum (Australian Government);

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Cross-curriculum priority (Queensland Government).

(Jones, 2013). http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/more-evidence-of-the-limits-of-student-technical-knowledge/

Prensky, M. (2005, September/October). Engage me or enrage me: What Today’s Learners Demand, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40(5). Pp. 60-65. Retrieved March 1, 2013, from http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0553.asp.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Word Clouds - EDED20491 Week 5 Post #5

Group 4 tools - Word clouds
Engagement activity: Try anything you like! Anything that catches your eye, imagination or attention!

Some suggested tools for Group 4 are listed in the Learning Engagement section of Week 5.

The Group 4 tool that I decided to explore was Word Clouds or Tag cloudsThe words in a Word cloud are weighted and give greater prominence to those words that occur more frequently in the source text. Though at first glance they may appear to be a simple, one-dimensional tool I think that word clouds can be a really useful tool in education. They could be used to illustrate a point, for a simple analysis of a block of text and to give feedback to students. They are useful in the creation of infographics to visualise data. Word clouds can be used to quickly see and understand the most prominent terms in a given text. 

The only application program that I had heard of prior to investigating word clouds was Wordle. So I chose to explore Wordle which, according to the website, is "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide.  You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends" (http://www.wordle.net/).

During my exploration I found that they are several free Word Cloud generators that could easily be used in education.
  • Word clouds for kids - aimed at primary school age children.
  • Tagxedo - Word clouds with styles.
  • Worditout - also has the facility to print them on items such as cups.
  • Tagul - has the option to link every word to a Google search.
For more information on teaching with Word clouds you should check out Free Technology for Teachers.

The great thing about each of these tools is that you can upload words from a document or you can link them to a web feed. The image below was created in Tagxedo and I inserted my blog feed after I had posted my analysis of the three presentation tools. I chose the colours and the shape. It allowed me to limit the number of words displayed to 50. I then saved the Tagxedo cloud to the website and copied the embed code into this blog. I was impressed with how easy and simple it was to use. This process took me about 15 minutes.

Figure 1: Tagxedo cloud of my blog posts for Presentation tools in the shape of Australia

I tried to use Worditout as it looked interesting but after creating the word cloud it went into a loop and I couldn't save my example. So I can't provide my evidence of useage of Worditout in this blog post.

Wordle Exploration
The following video is a tutorial on the use of Wordle. Most of the applications have a similar format and the ability to change the number of words displayed etc.


Figure 2: Wordle tutorial (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL5D9nz5aI)

The following video describes how to create more advanced Wordles.

Figure 3: Advanced Wordle tutorial (Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czup64zYRGo)

My first Wordles are shown below in Figures 4 and 5. I entered my blog URL to feed words into the Wordle. My last two posts were on PowerPoint and Prezi as presentation tools (I hadn't yet published the post on Glogsters). In Figure 5 I refined the original graphic by changing the colours and the font and reduced it to displaying 50 words only. Original was 150 words. I think that the second Wordle is cleaner and easier to read.


Figure 4: My first Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564354/Jo_Luck%27s_Blog)


Wordle: Jo Luck's blog 50 words
Figure 5: My first Wordle after applying some of the (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564364/Jo_Luck%27s_blog_50_words)

The Wordle in Figure 6 was created by copying the words from the mobile phone wiki into Wordle. I reduced the number of words displayed to 50.

Wordle: Mobile phone wiki
Figure 6: Mobile phone analysis Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564389/Mobile_phone_wiki)

Critical reflection on using Word clouds
Pluses 
Minuses
Interesting/Implications
Free tools available on the web.
Does not understand phrases or multiple words such as 'educational technology' or names eg Barack Obama. Can get around this by joining words eg Barack-Obama

The visual impact of Word clouds can be very effective. Some of the websites will allow you to make the words clickable so the word cloud can be used as a starting point to investigate a topic.

Easy to create and manipulate the appearance of the word clouds. 
Common words are not displayed. If you are using word clouds to assist students with their writing you may want the common words displayed so that you can show the student that they are using some words too often or not enough.

Could be used to assist Visual learners to write better. If they enter their own writing into a word cloud they can see if the words they are using fit into the theme of the essay they have been asked to write. 

Visually appealing. By entering the text of an essay or poem visual learners will be able to quickly determine the main points or themes thus helping them to critically analyse the text.

May not appeal to verbal / aural learners.
I like the idea of using a web cloud to show students their own feedback. See example in discussion below.
Has the potential to motivate students to engage with reading and writing in new ways.

Because word clouds prioritise words by frequency of use, key concepts may be excluded because the words used to describe a concept appear infrequently in a text.


I like that Tagxedo allows you to create the word clouds in particular shapes. The chose of shape can add to the understanding of the word cloud.
A good way to summarise a lot of information in a graphic image.
Doesn't support collaborative learning on its own. Could be used as tool to link to/from another technology.

Your finished Word cloud can be output in either three ways.  Printout, link to webpage to be viewed in a public gallery or you have to manually screen capture it and create a digital image. 

It is annoying that some of the programs do not have a button to generate a Jpeg Image or something similar that you can insert into other digital tools. 




Personal reflection on creating word clouds and how to utilise them in my praxis.

Word clouds are simple and easy to use and thus give good value for minimal outlay of time. Something very important when we are all stretched for time. I can envisage using word clouds to teach concepts such as 'Compare and Contrast'. I would also use it to assist students to work out themes within a given text. A word cloud at the beginning of a long piece of text could help the student gain an overview of the text before they read it. I acknowledge that I am a visual learner and that does influence my opinion of why it is a useful technology to add to my digital teaching toolkit.

The following video explains some of the ways that Wordles could be used for teaching.


(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Pul5vyaNc)

Other Resources:
Wordle guide for educators http://edgalaxy.com/journal/2010/1/22/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordle-for-educators.html
http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=125422


Using Word Clouds in my teaching

My teaching context is to teach year 8 & 9 students in the subject areas of IT and Mathematics. The school is an all girls school. The following is a list of ideas on how I can use word clouds support student learning by visualising words and using them to support and extend students reading and writing skills.

  • Create a word cloud of the contents of an online discussion to extract the main ideas or themes.
  • Combine student introductions to illustrate how many things the class has in common.
  • From a mathematics perspective the algorithm that creates the word cloud could be explored to work out what weighting is given to words and why.
  • Condense survey data by dumping the responses to a questionnaire into a Word cloud generator.
  • Combine news articles, blog posts or RSS feeds on a given topic.
  • Turn an essay or report into a poster.
  • Use them to compare and contrast what is important in a given text.
  • Use them to introduce a topic:

One of my colleagues has used word clouds to illustrate a point of view. The image below was created by a Multimedia specialist at CQU to emphasise his view that technology is the tail wagging education. He has uploaded this image onto a website that prints them onto stickers, t-shirts etc. See, http://www.redbubble.com/people/rolley/works/9703402-edu-doggy
Edu Doggy
'Edu Doggy' Created by Rolley Tickner CQU (Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_jones/8235400311/)

A former colleague has used word clouds to provide a low level analysis of student feedback in a class (see http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/how-are-they-going/). What he did was to do a brief survey of students in the class to ask them what they learnt and how they were faring and what was concerning them. He then fed the comments into a word cloud generator which provided him with a good overview of how the class was coping with the course content. He then used that feedback to adapt his teaching the following week.

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***Tasks to complete at a later time

Group 4 Technologies

This group of technologies is open-ended. We have added some that have been shown to be valuable, and recommend strongly that you examine them regardless of your selection for this group. Knowing that they "are there" may open up opportunities for later work with ICT when it is required.

But you may have ideas of your own - please feel free to run any tool/techology/site past your lecturer and ask if it is suitable for your first assignment.

Digital Tool: Animations and Simulations

Animations and Simulations offer substantial advantages over print based material when it comes to complex interactions and abstract concepts. They can also offer a virtual experience where the real thing is too expensive or difficult to provide for the students. Animations and simulations are Web-based so they can be made accessible for the students use anytime and anywhere rather being restricted to the classroom.

It is important, as ever, to consider the learning purpose of these interactive resources. They do not, on their own, constitute learning. It is your wisdom as a teacher and learning designer to embed them into a larger learning context.

Engagement Activity 5: Interactive Learning Objects (optional activity

Engagement Activity 6: Adobe Flash (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 7: Google Earth (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 8: Google Maps (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 9: Google Docx (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 10: Online concept mapping (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 11: Online timelines (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 12: Zooburst (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 13: Museumbox (optional activity)

Additional technologies suggested by Wendy.
Tools to concentrate on if you wish to explore further, are Titanpad, Corkboard.me, Padlet and Popplet!