Course reflection

The Blooms Digital Taxonomy Map is a great way to use IT to develop higher order thinking skills that are purposeful and relevant to students. From remembering through the use of mind mapping, understanding through the use of Wikis and creating through Second Life. This map is is a great tool to complement a working classroom program.


Reflection:

The iLearn Model has been a great learning experience for me both as professional development and as a learning facilitator. It was and still is exciting to find so many free applications on the web that can be applied in the classroom and integrated into my teaching and learning experiences. Teaching Stage 2 is the perfect platform on which to explore, learn and create together. This course has given me the opportunity to explore at my own pace web tools that I never knew existed. I can now blog and know what it means. Without this course I would not have had the opportunity to explore and stay in touch with the 21st century. I see the web 2.o tools as complimenting my learning and enhancing my teaching. I want to stay in touch with the 21st Century and evolve with the many online communities on the world wide web.

The blog I commented on was Louise Toigo's blog.


A big thank you to all the team behind Web 2.

Module 10

I have seen how our Year 1 buddy class have used wikis which are a collaboration on a topic to which any member can add. When used with discretion they can be a hugely useful tool. In the Stage I am teaching at the moment, the children are using Wikis as part of a research project on People and their Beliefs and it has been very useful and interesting for us as the teachers to reflect upon. The children have really enjoyed adding to and commenting on each others wikis.

I have learnt a lot in taking part in this course. At times I have felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new content and required skills, but I am sure that with time and more exposure to this content and tools I will become more competent and confident.

Regarding the tools and the children at our school I have no doubt that they will embrace them with the same amount of gusto and enthusiasm that they display with all things computer based. They are fearless and interested learners.

On the whole, I have enjoyed learning new skills through the WEB 2.0 course and I intend to use a lot of them to make myself a more effective classroom practitioner.

Module 9

I found Scootle to be a very useful and attractively set out tool. I'll be asking Deanne (our clever ICT teacher) to explain how I can set up the scootle learning paths so that my students can access the activities. Because there are a variety of different ideas and broad range of topics it allows students to access open-ended learning.

Second Life was a fascinating concept and I guess a logical next step in online learning. What I viewed was aimed at high schools but I can see Primary school applications and hope that soon we can access tools like this that would be relevant for us to use in our curriculum.

Module 8

I like anything that saves me time so I like RSS reader because what I'm interested in can now come to me. Even better is the fact that I will be able to include class wikis in this way (Ihope) and view what my class has done in an instant!

Module 7

delicious is useful in accessing the many bookmarks from anywhere particularly from a public or network computer. It helps share things that I like with others and find out new sites to discover.

Module 6

Glogster was an interesting and attractive presentation for digital scrapbooking. Mindmapping is a great tool that has many uses for pre-testing, post-testing, data collection etc but I really don't think that doing through glogster is that necessary. Smartboard tools would be just as good and is more user friendly!

Module 5

Podcasts, vodcasts, youtube etc are all useful tools to use in the classroom to cater for student's individual learning styles. It would be really great if there were podcasts saved somewhere for teachers to share. If this exists could someone let me know?