Preparing for assignment three!

Hello,

The finish line is so close….

My professional experience was amazing and even though it was exhausting, I definitely think it wasn’t long enough. Something that my mentor pointed out to me is although ICT can enhance and transform student learning, there is also a lot of simple offline activities that also are great at enhancing and transforming student learning. This is something that I reflected on a lot, as my mentor wasn’t what you would say ‘tech-savy’, so it was very interesting to combine her ‘old school ways’ with my knowledge and understandings from this course to have a three week program of completely transformed learning for the year one students. I definitely have to say the Bee-bots were the most exciting and seeing the joy the students got from them was very rewarding. The teacher also learnt how to use them so it was a win for all parties.

Preparing for assignment three, it was interesting to use this this Excel spreadsheet to calculate what marks I have received so far and give me a goal for what I would like to receive in assignment three. I have been disappointed in the marks I have received so far (considering the work I put into the first two assignments) so hopefully I can do alright in this next assignment.

Till my next post,

Skye

Interactive Whiteboards

Week 11 discusses IWBs and CLEM. I thought it would be a good idea to learn more about IWBs and I found that the Wikipedia page on Interactive Whiteboards provided a useful description. Something I learnt is that two blog posts ago I wrote about how the IWB uses a program called ‘ActivInspire’. Turns out it’s not the program the IWB uses, the IWB itself is known as a Promethean ActivBoard 300 Pro. The things you learn! There is small and large ‘pens’ that we use to touch the IWB at my professional experience school however sometimes it is challenging as you have to press the screen a few times to draw on the drawing board!

Tahnee has introduced me to Smoothboard Air, a program which enables students to insert data up on an interactive whiteboard through the use of their tablets/iPads. I have already downloaded this program to use in my lessons next week. I think my mentor will also benefit from this program as she has been trying to find something similar that does the same thing! Win-win situation! Jodie shared the site Starfall, which has a systematic approach, in conjunction with audiovisual interactivity and is perfect for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL). Jodie also shared a site which I have explored called Amazing Classroom which gives you access to Promethean flipcharts!

Till my next blog post,

Skye

Scary stories

I participated in an activity called Take this lollipop http://www.takethislollipop.com/ which is an activity for entertainment purposes that pretty much demonstrates the information that people can access online. I shared my Facebook details and let’s just say I was a little freaked out to say the least. Due to being more interested in the activity I participated in, I read through this blog post which provided some background on the “Lollipop” project and what it portrays.

I think it’s very important to be aware of the information you have made available on social media in particular. I guess it doesn’t help when you have the ‘share’ feature on Facebook which allows friends of friends to view personal photos or information that you have shared to only YOUR friends on Facebook. There are privacy setting each time you post anything though which I use regularly depending on what it is that I am posting.

The lessons I will take from this learning path (week 10) is it is really important to be careful of the information you share online – in my case, Facebook.  I have been made aware how easy it is for random people to access your information online (even though my profile has very strict privacy settings). It is more than people accessing your information though – the section on Alex Gallart who has been created by reusing photos shared by Dr Alec Couros highlighted how easily scamming and cat fishing occurs in the 21^st century.

As part of (continuing) to prepare for Professional Experience and formulating my preparation and planning essay (Part B) for Assignment 3 it is essential to become familiar with the policies and processes that are appropriate to my Professional Experience context. The following resources are relevant to my professional experience context and I will take time becoming familiar with them after learning the importance of safe and ethical ICT use:

• Cybersafety in Queensland state schools | Education and training | Queensland Government
• School policies | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner
• Safe Schools Hub
• The National Safe Schools Framework | Department of Education and Training
• Implementing policies | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner
• Safe Schools Hub : School Audit Tool
• The Australian Government’s “Stay Smart Online” site
• Budd:e a “Cyber security education package” provided by the Australian government.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

Digital Citizenship

On the week 10 learning path we were encouraged to write a blog post that discusses our answers to the following questions:

Briefly outline your knowledge and experience with digital citizenship and the safe, responsible, and ethical use of ICT in your personal and professional lives:

With my work in a long day care centre I have recently completed a professional training that all employees are required to complete which had sections that focused on bullying and cyber-bullying. I have been in situations particularly in high school where I have seen cyber bullying occur as well as heard of incidents of spamming and phishing happening. In terms of my person life, I feel I am always cautious with anything online ESPECIALLY if it has to do with personal details or money (bank details etc.). You think it will never happen to you, but scams happen to innocent people daily.

Summarises your results for each of the quizzes you’ll be asked to complete soon:

I got 2 questions wrong in the quiz – the one about cyber bullying being the most common form of bullying as I believe it occurs a lot and the other question I got wrong was question one as I personally believe that SOME people who bully others have problems with low self-esteem. This is why they chose to pick on somebody else.

Includes your critical reflections on those quizzes, their content, and what it says about what you thought and wrote for point:

Reflecting on getting 2/4 for the quiz, I believe I need a little bit more information on digital citizenship to be able to feel comfortable with the concept. This will include looking at the National Safe Schools Framework literature review website.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

One week down of prac!

Hello everyone,

Due to being on prac, I am a little behind on the past couple of learning paths as well as blog posts. A little background on my prac to set the scene before I write posts about my prac experiences – I have just completed my first week of a three week block teaching in grade one. My school is a P-7 state school located in south east Brisbane in the Redlands bayside area and follows the Australian Curriculum. My mentor happened to teach me when I was in primary school so it is safe to say she is loaded with experience and I am fortunate enough to have built a fantastic professional relationship with her over the past week.

In the grade one classroom I am in, ICT is incorporated to enhance learning in many ways. Students have access to six standalone computers, six Ipads (a variety of different sizes and each filled in educational apps categorised into every subject – ‘Literacy’, ‘Numeracy’, ‘Geography’, ‘History’ and a folder called ‘Creating’ which contains apps for transforming learning by using ICT to create projects etc.) and an interactive whiteboard. The teacher has a laptop that is connected to the interactive whiteboard which is used daily to enhance student learning. Something I really like about my mentor is that she not only uses ICT for learning but encourages students to USE the ICT as part of their learning. I have so much I could share about how ICT is used which I’m really excited about, but in this post I will only mention a couple of main things. The teacher uses a website called Class Dojo to communicate with parents, send information and take home letters to parents, remind parents of school events, discuss specific student needs and manage students behaviour. Each student has a little monster as a character and the character is used to collect each students’ ‘bee stings’ which is part of a whole school behaviour management plan. The whole class can receive a bee sting and the individual as well as the group bee stings are calculated and there are prizes for reaching a certain amount.

I will expand on ICT use in more blog posts to come but I want to highlight the program my mentor uses daily that not only enhances student learning through ICT but gives students the opportunity to learn using ICTs. Every interactive whiteboard in the school has this program installed which is from Promethean Planet and the program is called ActivInspire. I was able to download the program on my laptop which allows me to create flipcharts for my lessons and put them on a USB to plug into my mentors laptop and access easily. I HIGHLY recommend downloading this program which you can do here because you also have access to a whole heap of FREE resources (flipchart templates, resources etc.) that are divided into subjects. This has saved me SO MUCH TIME. This Promethean Planet website also has a section called ‘Blogs and Forums’ where you can network with other teachers to discuss creative ways of using the program on your interactive whiteboard as well as share resources and ideas. I have quickly had a browse at some of my peers blogs and Tahnee’s has highlighted that week 11 of our learning path discusses interactive whiteboards and she has also suggested some programs that I definitely want to further look into. ARGH too many things to do!

Till my next post,

Skye

Lesson Planning

As part of the week 9 learning path we were asked to share what we know about lesson planning. I believe a successful lesson plan addresses and integrates these three key components:

• Objectives for student learning
• Teaching/learning activities
• Strategies to check student understanding

The first step would be outlining a learning objective – what you want students to learn and be able to do at the end of class. To help you specify the objectives for student learning, I would be answering the following questions:

• What is the topic of the lesson?
• What do I want students to learn?
• What do I want them to understand and be able to do at the end of class?
• What do I want them to take away from this particular lesson?

The next step would be developing the introduction – designing the specific activities I will use to get students to understand and apply what they have learned. Like Chloe, I also believe that activities included within lessons need to be engaging and purposeful. I would consider the following questions when planning my introduction:

• How will I check whether students know anything about the topic or have any preconceived notions about it?
• What are some commonly held ideas (or possibly misconceptions) about this topic that students might be familiar with or might espouse?
• What will I do to introduce the topic?

The third step would be planning the specific learning activities. These questions would help me to design the learning activities I will use:

• What will I do to explain the topic?
• What will I do to illustrate the topic in a different way?
• How can I engage students in the topic?
• What are some relevant real-life examples, analogies, or situations that can help students understand the topic?
• What will students need to do to help them understand the topic better?

Next, I think you will need to check for student understanding – how will I know that students are learning? A lesson plan includes a conclusion that summarises the main points of the lesson and it is very important to REFLECT on what worked well and why, and what I could have done differently.

I found the following resources very helpful with lesson planning: Strategies for effective lesson planning, Why teachers need to plan lessons and Write lesson plans.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

Planning for ICT-enriched lessons

The week 9 learning path discusses the planning process that should be adopted for professional experience including consideration of what can go wrong. These steps included:

1. What ICT are available in the classroom?
2. How reliable are they? How do they break?
3. What strategies does your mentor currently have for dealing with those breakdowns?
4. Are those strategies working?
5. Are there additional steps you can take to minimise or remove the chance of failure?

The EDC3100 lesson plan template includes a section titled “ICT plan b” which is for students to identify how the ICT being used in the lesson might fail and what will you do if it fails. Reflecting on this part of the learning path, I think it is good to think about a ‘plan b’ before actually going ahead with the lesson especially when you are not 100% confident in planning an ICT-enriched lesson in the first place. Abigail provides an example of a reflection she conducted on a task. The reflection allowed her to identify changes that she would make before delivering the task again to another group of students.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

Preparation for Professional Experience

Our EDC3100 prac is coming up and one thing that I feel is critical for this experience is to be organised. There is nothing worse than going to a prac and not being aware or taken time to break down what is expected from you and your mentor during the three weeks. This morning I took a significant period of time to do the following:

• Double checked inplace for the school and specifically my mentors details;
• Emailed my mentor to arrange a time to meet next week to go through EVERYTHING (this includes school policies, parking, what is expected of me, tips and words of advice, timetable, meetings I need to attend etc.);
• Downloaded the forms I will need during my prac: the 2016 Professional Experience guidelines, the 2016 Professional Experience book, the EDC3100 ICT Statement and the Professional Experience report;
• Signed up for Trello to create a professional experience checklist;
• Made a checklist of things I am wanting to go through with my mentor;
• Listened to a VoiceThread made up of previous prac students’ experiences;
• Read over the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs) particularly focusing on APST 2.6: Implement teaching strategies for using ICT to expand curriculum learning opportunities for students;
• Read through this observation booklet;
• Post to the forum the following responses to the questions we were asked to answer about EDC3100 professional experience:

How many days long is the EDC3100 Professional Experience?

15 days (3 weeks).

How much teaching must you do?

Week 1 – teaching for one-third of each day.

Week 2 – teaching for one-half of each day.

Week 3 – teaching for two-thirds of each day with one full day.

Where is the lesson planning template must you use for all your lessons?

It can be accessed on the main page of the EDC3100 study desk. You could also download the template provided by EDC3100.

How many of the lessons you implement on Professional Experience must you submit for Assignment 3?

5 lessons.

My mentor is helping organise the school’s cross country and has to be at school at 7:30am on the day. Do I need to be there?

YES.

What feedback on my teaching should I be gathering and what should I do with it?

Written feedback from mentor that includes:

·         Interim reports at the end of each week – this will be used to reflect on the weeks teaching practices and plan for the following week.

·         Written feedback on lesson plans – this will be used for assignment 3.

·         Written observations from mentor – this will be used to improve practices.

·         Written feedback on professional experience report – this will be uploaded to prac portfolio.

·         ICT statement – evidence for APST 2.6. and will be uploaded to prac portfolio.

Daily verbal feedback – reflect on this to improve practices.

There are very, very few ICT resources in my Professional Experience context, how can I possibly develop ICT-rich lessons?

Discuss with mentor implementing ICT into the classroom. Access digital resources that can be used in classrooms. Explore the different ways ICT can be used – don’t just rule out not being able to use computers or the IWB if they are not available, have an open mind.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

Biggest challenges on professional experience

As part of the week 9 learning path, we were asked to identify:

1. the top 2 challenges/problems/mistakes you have faced or made on prior Professional Experiences.
2. the top 2 fears/challenges you have about your EDC3100 Professional Experience.

Here are my answers:

1. Two challenges that I faced on prior professional experiences were behaviour management and managing my uni assessments on top of what we were expected to do on professional experience.
2. One fear I have about the EDC3100 professional experience is that I will get a mentor that is not passionate, caring or inspiring. I am also a little nervous about teaching at least 5 ICT-based lessons to enhance/transform student learning.

Let’s elaborate about number 2: the top 2 fears/challenges you have about your EDC3100 Professional Experience. Meeting my mentor is something I am nervous about before every prac because this experience is so valuable as a pre-service teacher and something I will learn from and remember for many many years to come. Mentors are very significant in shaping a pre-service teacher’s practice. This article makes a great statement: cooperating classroom teachers (mentors) and preservice teachers in the school context (mentees) are pivotal to education advancements. Preservice teachers are potential implementers of education reform. These future teachers implementation of reform measures will depend on two key educative processes, namely, university education and field experiences (practicum). The information I have just brought up explains why I am nervous about my mentor teacher. HOWEVER, it is important to note that no matter who we get as a mentor, it is important to respect and acknowledge their feedback, advice and suggestions. There is so much to learn from teachers who are working in the field. I am looking forward to working with my mentor and to be opened up to new ideas and challenged to continuously learn and improve my practices. I really value the mentor/mentee relationship and thrive off a mentor who facilitates, demonstrates and uses active listening skills with a broad/deep base of applied knowledge. I am hoping that I will be able to use my knowledge gained from this course so far to help with the implementation of the ICT-based lessons!

I have noticed a few people such as Chloe and tturner96 who like me, have been previously challenged with behaviour management whilst on prac. It’s nice to know you’re not alone especially when others face challenges in the same area.

Just doing a bit of reflection – probably the best things I have done in my previous pracs is from day one going in with an open mind, learning to be ok with making mistakes – acknowledging them and learning from them, using initiative in the classroom, being organised and making effort to form relationships with the students, teachers, other staff involved in the school and the families.

Till my next blog post,

Skye

I have a PLACEMENT!

So if you read my previous blog post, I wrote that I have not been placed for prac yet. After I published the post I thought I might have one more look on inplace just to check and there it was! 15 day confirmed placement from 16/05/16 until 03/06/16!! What I’m even happier about is that the school that I have been allocated to is walkable distance or about 2 minutes in the car from my house. Living in the Redlands bayside area (about a 45 minute drive from Springfield campus) I was a little worried that I would be placed further away. This has just taken a huge load of stress off and I am feeling very happy!

Till my next blog post,

Skye