Session 11: Reflection Blog for Seminar Presentation (Blog 13)

This blog is to share the seminar presentation I did on how Discord could be used for opening the line of communication between parents/carers and their school.

Discord is free voice and text chat software which can be used through a browser, you can download the desktop app or there is an app for iOS and android smartphones and tablets.

Released in March 2015 and by December 2016 it has accumulated over 25 million users. Predominately used by gamers, the CEO and founder, Jason Citron was a gamer himself and was sick of out-of-date software like Skype. Also there are some privacy issues with Skype, by which hackers can uncover your IP address.

For information on why Discord is so good – http://lifehacker.com/discord-is-the-voice-chat-app-i-ve-always-wanted-1785403197

My Presentation:

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/linfootj/files/2017/05/Discord-for-Education-2io74q7.pptx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft” ]

Link to presentation – https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11n5m4qyuhyjEN5coDEZEU78-iyvsvRu1PvbdowUfBq8/edit?usp=sharing

Setting up your own Private Server (Seminar Handout)

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/linfootj/files/2017/05/Discord-Tutorial-Handout-1o6g2mn.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]

Session 9: Reflection Blog (Blog 14)

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.

Session 8: Horizon Report Reflection Blog (Blog 10)

[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.

Session 3 Reflection Blog (Blog 4 & 5)

In this session we started by discussing the preparation reading on the impact of educational blogs on pupil’s writing. The main point I took from the general discussion with my peers was how important the setting up and managing the blog is to make children want to use it regularly. Because of the openness of blogging, I can understand how beneficial it can be to allow children to write more.

prep-reading-capture

 

School blogs can share children’s work and even give news all online. Originally, children would write a blog post and have only the children in their class comment and read each other’s. But the invention of Quadblogging eliminated the pitfall that could be noticeable regarding the number of comments on children’s posts. By linking schools together, it could be argued children were more engaged with their posts as they knew it would be more likely their peers would be reading one another’s and commenting. It allows for more learning than just the work that is set as children are able to converse with other countries and cultures.

quadblogging

As discovered from the report in the preparation reading, there are many children who wished to write creatively more. The 100 Word Challenge was created by a retired education practitioner to accommodate children in their wish. Similarly to school blog posts, children could feel more engaged with their writing when they know others will read it. A lot of the time with children writing in schools it can stay in their books and only be seen by teachers. The use of the internet and the web results in children’s work being recognised on a much larger scale to a bigger audience.

100-word-challenge

To finish, we then investigated the use of educational badges and how they could be used in the classroom. Mozilla Badges launched in 2011 and originally was for the use of adults applying for jobs to support their CV. However, our group considered if they could be used in the classroom by teachers. As a method of getting to know the children better, children could display their achievements, hobbies and interests for teachers and others to see. I believe this is great knowledge to have in the back of our minds as teachers when planning lessons when considering how work could be presented and carried out by specific children in the classroom.

badges