Tools for the Modern Teacher...

One of the things I have been contemplating whilst walking this educational journey, is how much effort goes into preparing a lesson(s) in order to ensure effective and efficient learning takes place amongst your students. Not surprisingly, teaching strategies, tools, applications and gizmos are now available in abundance in comparison to the days when using different coloured chalk was as dynamic and exciting as the teacher could get. Here are a few of the applications I’ve been introduced to that you may find useful.

 

Hot Potatoes,  is a freeware application that includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. It is straight forward and quite easy to use, and something that gives you a few alternative options for review, assessment and feedback gathering exercises.

Socrative, is a very useful and versatile application for evaluating and assessing how much your students know or can recall. A cloud based application, where a virtual classroom is created and accessed by students via invite code. I felt that this application was an excellent for getting instant feedback, as data is available in real time by the teacher. The variety in questionnaires and quizzes you can create online is good and allows for flexibility on the part of the teacher, who can amend and keep things relevant to the current discussion or topic. The instant feedback is very usefully for highlighting areas and/or specific individuals that may need additional help or attention.

Kahoot, is a very similar cloud application to Socrative, yet I felt that its lack of question type options and flexibility in design make this a more simplified version of Socrative. Can be useful for use with younger students, but I will probably be giving this one a wide berth.

Wordle is fun, exciting and very simple and easy to use. It is basically an online toy for generating “word clouds” from any text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes. A fun way of providing key information to your students.

How you can deliver your Presentations... If you want to that is...

I would imagine that we've all been there, head nodding, eyes straining to stay open and mind wandering a million miles away from where it should be. Whether it be in a formal business, workplace session or sitting through a family presentation of their latest holiday snaps, some presentations can literally sap the life force out of you. So how as teachers do we prevent the same thing from happening with our students? Yes, it is important that we get the information across to them as how else are they going to learn. The trick is obviously to keep your presentations interesting and even entertaining, make them fun, interactive and vary how you do them.

I've recently been introduced to a few new options for giving presentations, and so I thought I would share my thoughts on some of them and how effective I feel they may be within the classroom. I do acknowledge that not everybody will agree with me and some have their own preferences, however, I would encourage people to try some of them just to have a go and make your own assessment.

OK, we all know about Power Point, as mentioned in my previous post, this is an application I have extensively used to great effectiveness for many years. I do like its versatility and ease of use. However, it can be misused, too many slides, over-cluttered slides, too much information, shockingly bad templates and backgrounds and over-exaggerated transitions can all attribute to the dreaded death by power point scenario. So what else is out there?

Prezi, is a fun and quirky application for presenting your information. It uses a different style of transition between your key points and when incorporated into a particular background, can make the presentation visually interesting. I liked it and will probably use it again. I’ve included my first attempt at a Prezi presentation here. Let me know what you think.

Nearpod is amazing, fun, interactive and very useful for getting instant feedback from the class. And what is more you can use it with existing power point presentations, as well as creating your own. I particularly like the instant feedback you can get from your students, highlighting areas of concern or assessment needed and that learning has actually taken place. Downside, the fact that your students will need a device to access the online ‘classroom’ to participate. This is dependent on equipment and connections status, so bear this in mind.

What does it mean to be Digitally Competent...?

I’ve been giving some thought to the concept of whether I consider myself to be digitally competent. Do I believe I have the necessary IT skills to be able to call myself truly digitally literate?

There has been much said since Prensky (2001) introduced the term ‘digital native’ to the World claiming that today’s generation of human beings require a digitally rich media learning environment to continually stimulate them, due to their continual exposure to digital technology within their lives. This is in direct opposition to individuals such as myself who would be classed as a ‘digital immigrant’ as I have been introduced to this new digital technology and had to adapt to its presence in my distinctly analogue world. Similarly, a ‘native’ is deemed to be more adept at using digital technology than an 'immigrant'; but is this true? 

A competence is defined as “a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge, skills and attitudes for achieving observable results” (CEN, 2013). This is a holistic concept directly related to workplace activities and incorporating complex human behaviours which are  expressed as embedded attitudes. Can you really say based on this definition that most young people today are digitally competent? I think not...well, with the exception of a few, such as the young teenager who recently held TalkTalk to ransom after his single handed take down of their digital network.

Jones-Kavalier and Flannigan (2008) defined digital literacy as "an individual’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment"; where digital means any information represented in numeric form in use by a computer, tablet or in fact any modern mobile device, and literacy includes the ability to read and interpret such media. To reproduce data and images through digital manipulation and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from these digital environments.

So from these descriptions, do I qualify? Do I meet the grade? Am I able to confidently call myself a digitally competent person of the 21^st century? Yes, I believe so. I am confident of my IT skills and achieved knowledge levels gained within the arena of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Suffice to say I can use digital resources to create, utilise, educate, inform and demonstrate as well as being able to continually develop my understanding of computers and IT skills to a standard where I can fix 99% of problems I encounter.

Interestingly, the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) version 3.0 provides a reference of competences in relation to ICT within the workplace, using a common language for the competences, skills and capability levels of a variety of roles, that can be understood throughout Europe. If your interested, check out those skills competencies they believe are relevant for anyone involved with Education and Training Provision (click here). 

Would you meet the grade?

References:

CEN (2013) European e-Competence Framework (e-CF). version 3.0 [online]: available: Here

Jones-Kavalier, B. and Flannigan, S. L. (2008). Connecting the digital dots: Literacy of the 21st century. Teacher Librarian, 35(3), 13-16.

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1 . On the Horizon 2001 9:5 , 1-6 

A reflection on the use of Microsoft Word

We were asked today to write about our experiences with Microsoft Office. Where do I start? Office is probably the most recognised piece of PC software on the planet and one I was introduced to back in 1995. Coming from a background of using a Unix based system and using word processing programs such as ‘emacs’ and other linux based programs, to which I had become quite adept at using, I did find the transition to Office quite smooth. The following are some of my views on Microsoft's Office. 

Probably, the most recognised application within the Office package. This versatile and what I consider to be, very easy to use word processing tool has been my primary application for almost everything I write on the computer. We have become very close friends over the years and as such, had some good and bad times together. Yes there have been times when I have ranted and raved at it sitting there staring at a blank sheet on the screen wondering where the last 5 hours of work has disappeared to. Similarly I have hugged the screen when worked I had thought lost into the ethereal abyss of nothingness, has been miraculously been saved as if by magic and handed back to me on a silver platter. 

Anyone who uses spreadsheets will probably agree that Excel is the most user friendly application for entering, storing, sorting, calculating and doing a multitude of other tasks with all types of information. Over the years I have used Excel to great effectiveness, from simple budgeting to simple database storage of information, transferring raw data into readable graphical formats, for use in hard copy reports and digital presentations. I personally like Excel a lot, its ease of use makes it the 2^nd most popular tool that I have within the Office package. I especially like its ability to search and filter through vast amounts of date, sifting out what is relevant for your specific purposes. I make no apologies for my fondness of Excel,  a staunch powerhouse of an application who does exactly what it says on the tin.

For anyone who has been involved with sales, marketing, education or pretty much any type of administrative role, Powerpoint will be a familiar feature within your lives. I can remember the days of having to produced slides from 35mm film for presentations, spending hours editing and updating. Then came Powerpoint, easy to use, fancy transistions, easily updateable and full of graphical enhancements to make your presentations fun and exciting. I can recall being wowed by the display of moving graphics and slides which for many of us today find tedious and painstakingly boring to get through. I an excellent tool within the Office package, but can be overused to the extent you begin to hate it.

Access is Office’s application primarily used to create desktop databases. It is an effective tool for quickly creating browser-based database applications, which can be tailored for personal, business and educational use, storing any data in in a secure SQL database.

I have used Access to create simple databases, for tracking customer usage of products, mailing lists even to monitor complaints. However it is not one of the easiest of tools to use, yet if being honest I haven’t had reason to for many years and so things may have changed since I used it last. It’s not something that I envisage using much as I feel that I can achieve most of what I need within Excel using spreadsheets, but I can see its advantage for other purposes.

Finally, the last I am going to discuss, Outlook. Where do I start? I can honestly say this is the one tool that I have never got on with, in fact I will even go so far to say that I actually loathe it. Despite its many updates in functionality and format, I can not get on with it. I really dislike the way it displays messages, folders and even the navigation within it frustrates me. Personally I think Outlook is very user unfriendly and whenever I can, I avoid having anything to do with Outlook unless absolutely necessary.

An Introduction - Welcome One and All...

This is something of a strange experience, I'm usually someone who knows what to say and how to say it. However, I'm finding myself in a bit of a quandary at the moment when it comes to writing this, maybe due to the fact that it's part of a current assignment that I'm having to do for my PGCE/PCET course that I'm doing at the moment.

I suppose I should start by introducing myself, I'm Tony, a recent graduate of University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Swansea, which is in Wales, UK. I successfully achieved a first class honors degree in Psychology and Counselling, a feat to which I was very proud, considering my age.

I have since decided to continue on with my education and am currently doing a postgraduate PCET course which will allow me to teach within my chosen field. This blog will form part of my assessment criteria for the ICT module, yet I hope that it is something that I continue with as I progress with my new career.

It's purpose is to record some reflective insight into what I have learned and found useful in my studies and hopefully share with anyone who is interested in my personal development. I will endeavor to discuss things of interest and areas that I feel may be useful for others. I envisage that there will be some difficulties, moments of despair and sometimes even panic as I progress with my journey. But I hope that anyone who reads this will be able to empathise and understand what I'm trying to convey to the reader.

I welcome any constructive feedback and comments, tips on what educational tools and strategies others have found useful and I will share valuable information that I have discovered along the way.

I look forward to this adventure with some slight anticipation, and I thank you for joining me into the unknown future.