Apprentissage sur internet de gestion

Mahara View:

Here is my Mahara View for Managing E-learning FAHE11001.

http://cqu-mahara.netspot.com.au/view/view.php?t=vpc5YYtcV1pCEsN0xPfD

Your feedback would be most welcome.

My e-Portfolio is being created using Mahara. (http://mahara.org/)
Very shortly I will make the View public and share it in this blog.

Mahara logo

Here is a link to the PowerPoint Quiz I developed.

I borrowed the questions from the Assessment 1 quiz.

There is a Powerpoint add-on called Adobe Presenter (see: http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/)

Presenter creates a Flash (SWF) file which can be easily shared and posted to wikis for use with your class. I will try and get a copy of Presenter and develop a quiz/presentation and post this to my blog.

Mediafire link to my quiz  (http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=41934fb90d879e5ab64026cfc0611236e04e75f6e8ebb871)

Synopsis of Technologies

This posting is a reflection of the technologies I investigated and have used in my teaching and which ones I would use in the future to enhance student learning and make my teaching more efficient.

One of the advantages of these technologies, when applied to teaching, is that they allow enhancement of learning regardless of the students location. For example, in my previous teaching position I created wikis to be used for a number of purposes. (http://www.kcit.wikispaces.com) The first was to provide students with a means of accessing resources when they were off campus. The students were studying Information Technology at NSW TAFE and did not have way of connecting to the resources unless they were physically on campus and logged into the network.

The second purpose of the wiki was that students could use the Discussion Board where they could leave comments and ask questions if they were unsure of something covered in class.  The Discussion Board was also used for an assessment task. This assessment used the scenario of students working for an IT helpdesk. They were given a problem and they had to make contact with the client(me), introduce themselves and use probing questioning techniques to determine a resolution. All this discussion took place in the Discussion Board. Each student had to create a wiki page within the main wiki  and Discussions took place via their page. Some students worked in pairs, others worked individually but they could talk and collaborate with each other in trying to resolve their own problem.

Without knowing it at the time I had been employing aspects of Kearsley & Shneiderman’s Engagement Theory (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999). “These three components, summarized by Relate-Create-Donate, imply that learning activities:

occur in a group context (i.e., collaborative teams)

are project-based

have an outside (authentic) focus”

While I didn’t specify team work I did encourage discussion and collaboration with fellow students as they would in the workplace. The activity had an authentic focus, an IT helpdesk, which students may have sort work later. The students had access to the Internet in class for research.

As the task was on an a wiki they could access from anywhere it meant they could post to the Discussion Board when an idea or a question came to mind and not have to wait till the next time we had a class (once a week). I was able to keep track of these postings by using the RSS Feed within the wiki, this sent notification to my email account, which was much quicker than going into the discussion board and searching to see if a student had posted to their wiki page discussion area. Wikispaces provides feeds of page edits and messages in discussion areas.

I encouraged students to use RSS Feeds, so they quickly know when web pages, blogs, or discussion areas have changed. I found RSS Feeds invaluable in this exercise as it helped me keep track of students discussion postings.

I found from the exercise that Kearsley & Shneiderman’s (1999) statement to be true

“Teachers will need practice in organizing and conducting collaborative activities, …And both students and teachers will need training and support in the use of all online communication tools.”

Students needed initial instruction on how create their wikipage, modify the page, how to use the discussion area and also how to use RSS Feeds (eg with Google Reader).

Kearsley & Shneiderman’s (1999) statement about teachers needing to practise in organising and conducting collaborative activities I found to be accurate. I had a class of 20 students and found this number a challenge and because this was a “pilot” class I was not sure of the problems or issues I would face. So, I learnt a lot and hopefully, the students did too!

I believe the exercise was successful in terms of engaging students in an active learning (Williams & Chinn, 2009) task, although it suffered from the time delay of post-response. I could have used Instant Messaging to communicate with students but then I would have been only able to communicate with one at a time so that would have posed other problems.

Two other technologies I have employed are Animato and Powerpoint. This exercise was with a group of Year 8 Science students. Being “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001) by the time students are this age PowerPoint is very familiar to them. What they did for me was, using Internet resources, research “a technology that extends out senses”, put their findings in a PowerPoint, and then we uploaded them to my Animoto account and they could “mash it up” with music and effects of their choice.

They had to follow certain criteria when creating the PowerPoint (eg font size, number of lines per slide) so that the text could be read in the video that Animato creates. Animato lets a free account create a 30-second video. Animato worked well for this group of 13-14 year olds.

A problem I encountered was that Animato was Blocked by the NSW DET so students could not upload the files themselves instead they had to store on a network drive so that I could access them. Restricted access to some of these Web 2.0 technologies needs to be investigated by teachers before going into the classroom and finding students are blocked. YouTube is another site which is blocked for secondary  students. Teachers wishing to use videos from YouTube either need to embed them in PowerPoint, use additional software to download the video or they use a Mac and Safari web browser they can save the video from the Safari. Essentially when using Web 2.0 technologies, teachers need to be well prepared as do the students. Teachers need to make sure students have training in using the technology before they are given the task. Just because they are digital natives (Prensky, 2001) does not mean depth of knowledge (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008) and it may take some time to teach the student how to use the technology so that they can do the task you have set.

Other technologies are described and ideas for use in teaching are found on the Delivery Technologies page.

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. 39, 775.

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Engagement Theory: A Framework for Technology based Teaching and Learning Retrieved 28/07/09, 2009, from http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm

Williams, J., & Chinn, S. (2009). Using Web 2.0 to Support the Active Learning Experience. 20, 165.

I have added some information about Audacity – a delivery technology you may find useful in your teaching.

Audacity is free! Which makes it even better, especially for schools on a tight budget – which is probably 99% of them.

Audacity is available at SourceForge.net

Have a look at my Delivery Technologies – Audacity.

Here is a nice slideshare from Richard Byrne (FreeTech4Teachers.com)

Here are the results of my answers to the Learning with technology profile tool.

Learning With Technology Profile Tool

Results look pretty good. The reality is that there are always local (school or college) issues to deal – lack of technology access, technology breakdown, a number of different issues face teachers when trying to incorporate technology in their teaching plans.

Technology can play an important role in engaging students, particularly “digital natives”.(Prensky, 2001)

Get a Voki now!

Hi! Have a look at the Delivery Technologies page to find out what’s available for use in your classroom.

Q. What is more engaging? Reading this post or listening to my Voki friend?

I had a go at the Netiquette quiz a few weeks ago. I only go two wrong! But they are serious questions: when is the first assessment due? and the other – what referencing style should be used in assessments?

After a quick check of the Course Profile I found the answer to the first question – 21st Aug

According to the Course Profile, Education uses Harvard. But, a closer inspection of the Faculty Style Referencing page revealed Education actually uses APA 5th.

Maybe the Course Profile should be more specific.

Speaking of Referencing, I use the program EndNote to keep a database of references. It also integrates with Word and generates your reference list for you.

You can get EndNote from here

Happy Referencing!