Reflective Synopsis:

Throughout my eLearning Journey, I have seen a wide range of Digital Tool demonstrations and also tried a lot myself. ELearning digital tools can be used to support and enhance what, how, when and where students learn. Blogs, Aggregators and Wikis are all great recourse's for communication. They can be seen and used in the classroom for interaction with other classmates and to give and receive feedback on the information presented. These tools are also easily monitored by the learning manager and is easy to see where each student is at, and when they are posting.

Concept Mapping for learning is productive to consolidate and refine information. This exercise can easily highlight and allow the students to gain understanding of the 'Big Picture' of the topic your class is focused on.

When students are given the task to present their gained knowledge to an audience, it is likely that they will choose a simple Power Point presentation. This is why it is vital for Learning Managers to promote Higher Order Thinking for the students by demonstrating a range of movies, digital acts, blogs or Wikis for Collaborative Learning. A wiki will allow the students to give productive peer feedback and assist the Learning Manager to accurately track each students involvement to the assessment.

There are many different sites and programs available for Creating a Website. Creating a website or Webquest is a great project for individual or grouped students and can focus on almost all Key Learning Areas. Websites are created about anything and everything. For example, while the class are learning about Water Waste or Dinosaurs, the Learning Manager could also model to the students how to use a program such as Weebly.com. Towards the end of term the LM could assign the students a project to use everything they have learnt on the topic and present it as a website to teach others. An example of a Webquest I have created is on my Blog - Week 2 or click on the following link: http://www.water-wise.weebly.com/

A very useful presentation tool used by even the highest payed jobs is PowerPoint.
PowerPoint can be used simply to present graphs, images, test etc. The program can also get more complex, for example creating a question and answer game which makes sounds and uses hyperlinks to navigate the user to different pages. This is explained further in my Blog - Week 3.
Another great recourse to be considered in the classroom is Prezi.com. This website provides users to not only view movies and presentations that people have created on the site but also make their own. Basic step-by-step instructions guides the user to put everything together and provides new ideas for aspects to include, for example grouping and layering. Prezi.com would be great to use in classrooms from grades 4 and up, depending on the students abilities.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a software application for the tracking, documentation and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, eLearning programs and training content. LMS is used in the classroom to manage students subjects and exchanging information between each other. LMS's are more designed for the upper schooling such as high school and university, for example Moodle.
A focus for each LM is to meet our students individual learning needs and to develop students higher order skills and creativity. Images will assist most visual learners to connect and find relevance to a topic.
The Pedagogy of teaching with images is vital in eLearning as the rules are very different and often strict. Students enjoy copy, pasting, saving and hyperlinking images to their projects or activities, however it is important they are aware of copy-right and how to do so legally. I have explained further about great sites to access a range of free images and the rules of copy-right in my Blog - Week 4.

Podcasts are a series of digital media files which can include audio or video. These files are often downloaded from the web using a program, most popular being iTunes. Due to the rising popularity of the iPod, these days almost every students no matter what grade owns an iPod or evidently can use one. Because of this, it is vital that Learning Managers incorporate this recourse into the classroom and extend their knowledge. As I have explained in my Blog - Week 4, Podcasting is a great, legal recourse for downloading certain media files such as, documentaries which can be a great recourse for students and can cover almost all topics of discussion. Keeping 'up-to-date' with these programs is vital and will assist in our students to become Life Long Learners.

Digital Video is the type of videos we record and view most commonly today. It is important to mention to students that it was not always so easy to record and broadcast videos ten or more years ago. Once upon a time when you wanted to record a video, it involved inserting a large tape into a camcorder and not having many options when it came to adapting the finished product. This was called an analogue video.
Digital Videos allow the user options and is as easy as recording then uploading to a PC, with a connection cord, blu-tooth, USB or SD card etc. From there, we can personalise the video in programs such as Movie Maker and upload to the internet using the most popular site http://www.youtube.com/ , to name just one.
Broadcasting live video using WebCam is also possible with a website called Skype, and can be great for students to talk to, for example a soldier in Iraq.

When giving projects or assessments to students, it is vital to develop their Higher Order Thinking skills and creativity. The LM can scaffold this for the class by giving them a range of ideas, for example different and fun was of presenting. This is where a LM can introduce Animations and Simulations. I have given a great example of a Simulation using the website Voki.com in my Blog - Week 5. After viewing my example, it is easy to see that the LM would have gained the attention and interest of the whole class, which is a great way to start.
When presenting assignments of different information, it is great for students to know how to add an Animation. These can be added to PowerPoint's, word documents and hyperlinked to wikis and blogs. This is mentioned again in my Blog - Week 3.
The potential it gives students, is that not only should they take pride in the work they have researched but also in the presentation.

By far, the largest search engine used in the world is Google.com. They provide searches for many different categories such as web, images, maps, video, earth etc. Google Earth is an excellent recourse to be used in schools. It provides access to 3D images as if you were standing there and allows you 360 degree vision just about any where on earth.
Learning Managers can use this for a great range of SOSE activities for example, looking at how busy and commercialised the main street of Brisbane or Sydney is compared to New York or Tokyo. This will extend and support students who find it difficult to imagine how it looks from only verbal explanation.

Google Maps is an easy to use program which can show as much or as little details as you want. The program is great to use for SOSE, English and also Maths skills. They days where every student had to purchase a full colour Atlas at the start of the year is over. Students get much more enjoyment from hands on, interactive maps which also provides the option to zoom, show marks where different places are and calculate time and distance from one location to the next.
It is vital for students to become familiar with digital maps and how to navigate around and work them, as the days of a large 1metre by 1metre paper map are going out and 'Nav Mans' are coming in. Students will adopt a life-long learning approach to these new Digital Tools which they can also use to then teach others.




References:

Department of Education. (2010). Resourcing the Curriculum: Podcasts in the Classroom.
Retrieved on August 20th 2010 from:
http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/podcasts/


Queensland Departmant of Education and Training. (2004). Productive Pedagogies.
Retrieved on August 23rd 2010 from:
http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/html/pedagogies/pedagog.html


Prenskey, M. (2005) Engage me or enrage me: what today's learners demand.
Retrieved from CQUniversity moodle, FaHe11001 Managing E-learning,
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm


Waterhouse, S. (2005). The Power of eLearning: the essential guide for teaching in the digital age. Boston: Pearson Education.




Appendix: Comment Links
Please click on the following links to view my comments:

http://shannonselearningjourney.blogspot.com/2010/08/blog-post.html

http://belindaselearningjourney.blogspot.com/2010/08/vokis.html

Resizing photos:

This is a photo we took of the uni car park. It was far too big to upload to my blog so I have resized it to an appropriate size.

This is handy for students to know, as they should all be familiar with uploading files to the internet and will find if they do not resize the photo it can take much longer.

Week 6:

This week we tried creating our own short movie with PlayDough.

It was great fun for myself so I can only imagine how much fun students could have. I made a playdough person and took photos of him moving on the desk. All up I took 55 photos, however the uni computer would not let me save them all due to insufficient memory on my desk top.

Note to self: always remember to bring my USB to class...

It would have been great to put the photos into Movie Maker and watch the end result but there is always next time. It is definitely a time consuming activity.

Week 5:

This is a Voki I created on http://www.voki.com/create.php
It is an easy to use resource which I see is going to be a great tool for engaging the students or giving them short amounts of instruction. I can see a Voki being used as the introduction to an assessment for example; a news reporter instructing the class to research information and to write a review on it.



Get a Voki now!

Week 4:

This week kicked off by exploring through Google-Reader and discussing a few queries people have had about how to comment others blogs. It is vital that we comment each others blogs and give the appropriate feedback to ensure we are enhanced each others learning.

We then used Flickr.com to brows pictures and were taught how to determine which pictures we had the right to use for ourselves and which were protected by copy right. The guidelines for these copy right rules include: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works and Share Alike. Attribution means you give the right for others to copy, display, distribute and perform your work on the agreement that they give you credit. Noncommercial means others can copy your work but only for noncommercial purposes only. No Derivative Works means you give the right for others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
For example, this is how we reference an 'Attribution License' picture.
We were also introduced to podcasting in today's lesson. Podcast can be a voice recording or video that people can access on, for example iTunes. I tested for myself the series 'Dog Wisperer' (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/dogwhisperer.html) First I searched it then clicked 'subscribed to iTunes' and it downloaded strait to iTunes.

Podomatic is also a great site for subscribing podcasts - http://www.podomatic.com/
And finally we learnt to re-size photos, which is quite important when uploading to the internet. This reduces the amount of pixels in the photo which, in term, decreases the time it takes to upload each photo onto a web page. For this we looked briefly at http://www.mobaphoto.com/ and http://www.picnik.com/home for photo editing.

Week 3:

I'm beginning to realise how vital it is for learning managers to teach with and provide students with a wide range of ICT's. Being ICT literate is becoming almost as important for studnets to understand, as it is for them to know how to read and write. The eLearning lesson this week was focused on some Microsoft Office programs including "PowerPoint' and 'Windows Movie Maker'.

First we used Power Point to brows a range of pictures and sounds from ClipArt. We then saw how easy it was to break down the picture into its individual shapes and colours. This is an example of one of the pictures I rearranged.

We also explored a creative way to make our own question and answer game on PowerPoint. This involved writing a question and supplementing the page with buttons with can also have sounds when you click on them. This was great and I didn't realise how easy it could be. To retrieve the answers it was as simple as hyper-linking each button to a page which said you were correct or to try again. These pages could also have a sound such as a cheer if the student got the question correct. I believe this can be very helpful to personalise a computer activity to the individual class interests and topics.

Finally, we had a brief look at Windows Movie Maker. We imported a photo ready to make a movie and added some music. We were also shown how to finalise the movie, before we ran out of time in the lesson.

Week 2:

This week kicked off with a great discussion on the topic of legal and ethical implications of using ICT's in the classroom and for personal use. It was brought to our attention that there are many rules and regulations of which we must abide by when useing ICT's.

As a learning manager, it is our responsibility to teach our students of these regulations and show them what we can an dcan not use. This includes certain music, pictures and videos that may be protected or copyrighted. We were alerted that we must take extreme caution when posting anything to the internet, even if it is only on there for a day or two. Even after deleting, it is still possible that it will remain somewhere up in 'cyber space'.

We were briefly shown some interesting ICT frameworks which can be used for our assessment task two, which included TPACK, Big Six and the LEarning Engagement Theory. I have not yet invstigated further, however the Big Six looks quite appropriate for what I will need in AT2.

Towards the end of the lesson we set up a Wiki account on (http://wikispaces.com/) which I can see will be an excellent recourse for the classroom. Finally we looked at (http://www.weebly.com/) which I was happy to have already worked with last year for SOSE. Our assignment for SOSE was to create a Web Quest by building a webpage on an environmental issue in our commnuity. This is what I created: www.water-wise.weebly.com
I cound Weebly was very simple for a first time user with step by step instructions of how to do everything, from adding a video, to hyper-linking my documents.

So far Managing eLearning has been a great subject with an endless supply of fundamental information and recourses.

Until next time.