Month: April 2017

For this blog I am reflecting on the talk from visiting lecturer Darren Savage, “The Future of the Web”. The main points of the whole presentation is how fast the world’s new technologies are advancing.

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” – Eric Schmidt: Google CEO

Predictions indicate how much the world of technology is advancing shown here:

A couple of ideas I could see from an educational standpoint:

Nest – 

This technology is currently being used in homes to monitor energy consumption and the house temperature as a thermostat. Similar to Hive and other companies, there is an app that can be used to turn the heating on or off from wherever you are. For example, you are out at work and want your home to be warm when you get in so on the commute home from work, you open the app and turn the heating on.

For potential use in the classroom, a similar product that monitors light levels in the classroom to turn up or down the lights, open/close windows based on classroom temperature and the heating being controlled automatically based on temperature sensors through the school and classroom.

Estimote Beacons – 

These bluetooth-activated stickers can be used by a smart device to scan and transfer the data from the sticker. Practical uses at the moment are HUGE! However, the technology is still very new so not many practical uses are happening yet. In the real world Barcelona’s football stadium uses them to send information to tourists visiting, restaurants could use them to send menus and offers to people walking near the restaurant and shops could also use them to send offers to potential customers.

For potential uses in the classroom, teachers could use them to send reminders to parents as they drop their children off to school; almost like a daily newsletter. Advertising school events to the local community like a cake sale or school play could use beacons for people walking past the school.

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/linfootj/files/2017/04/Students-as-Creators-203vam7.pptx” download=”logged” viewer=”microsoft” ]

Transcript:

Slide 1 –

The topic of my presentation is about students having the opportunity to use a range of technologies to create things in the classroom as their learning journey.

Slide 2 –

The whole debate of it is best to have a child-centred approach or a teacher-led approach.

Due to the rise of mobile apps like Snapchat and Instagram, students have the chance to be frequently creating photos and short videos.

If teachers were to hone these creative skills in the classroom environment then it could lead to deeply engaging learning experiences through investigation, storytelling and production.

The use of game development to nurture learners as inventors by them making and programming.

With pupils being more likely to be active producers, the topic of fair use needs to be addressed by the schools. This I will explain later in the presentation.

Slide 3 – 

Ourselves as practitioners can design creative environments with the support of the school leadership team, so we can experiment, improvise and innovate.

When students see teachers taking risks in the classroom, students themselves are more likely to take creative risks themselves.

However, the current National Curriculum is very knowledge focused so making time for creative projects may be challenging.

To support students taking an active role in their learning and setting personal learning goals, some teachers are working with their class to co-develop their lesson plans.

An elementary school in Arkansas believed this approach promoted creativity and engagement.

Kahoot, Nearpod, Google Forms, just to name a few platforms that can be used to capture and store evidence of learning progress with the option of allowing feedback from teachers to refine a student’s ideas.

The National Science Foundation promotes a 3D view on learning and includes both summative and ongoing formative assessment.

Informal assessment could be the students self-reflecting and self-evaluating their work.

Slide 4 – 

Even though the ease of access to internet technologies makes it easy to create media and products and then share them to the world, there can be heavy lawsuits associated to fair use.

Educating staff and students is very important for schools.

More than 40 countries’ copyright laws have fair use or fair dealing provisions; however, only eight have a flexible fair use limitation on copyright infringement and the rest rely on fair dealing, where an action is fair only if it is directed toward a predetermined list of purposes.

To raise awareness #FairUseWeek2016 was used on social media.

There are organisations that can be partnered with such as Big Picture Learning. They have developed a network of more than 60 schools across the US where self-directed learnings can allow children to gain experience managing a yearlong project like producing a film.

There is a wealth of information out there so teaching students as creators to properly evaluate and take advantage of credible sources to support their projects and goals.

For example, some students used Minecraft to create visual representations and simulations of concepts they are studying while learning problem-solving skills.

As a final point, creative tasks can empower students as they gain confidence in applying knowledge toward real life scenarios.