C2C – The Be All and End All?

After rereading module two, I was again surprised that some students may be less than impress with doing a unit plan as assessment, due to it no longer being require due to C2C.

While I agree that C2C is used in a wide range of Queensland schools, it does make me wonder, if you are not practising your planning of units and lessons and relying heavily on prepared materials, how are you planning on applying your differentiation? And are you only going to work in a Education Queensland school for the rest of your career?

I feel like these students are limiting not only there horizons, but also that of the students in their classrooms. What if the activities are no longer relevant? What if that curriculum changes, therefore making the previous C2C invalid?

Don’t get me wrong, I have used prepared lesson plans before, however these were always used as a guide. I then had to make adjustments to lesson and activities based on students learning, abilities and what I wanted them to achieve.

Living in a world were technology is rapidly changing the way we teach and learn, wouldn’t now be the time to ensure we can make these documents to enable us to apply new elements in our lessons year after year?

I personally enjoy my making and creating my lesson and unit plans, and it genuinely makes me excited to teach my students this new skill or knowledge – even if my students are hypothetical at this stage.

I would love to know how everyone else feels about these planning documents?

Jaimi

PKM Through Feedly

After revising through Module 2, and reading this blog by Aaron, it was interesting to hear his thoughts about the use of Feedly.

While I have been using Feedly, I have more commonly been going through each individual PKM, which I have found time consuming, but allowed me to do a mental “tick” in my head.

After reading Aaron’s post, my aim for the rest of the course will be to use Feedly to its full advantage, which will hopefully when more successful than my current system.

Would love to hear any tips you have.

Jaimi

EDC3100 – Assignment One Web Artefact For Parents

So here we are the start of week five and it’s assignment time already. While I was concerned about getting this assignment completed in time, I actually really enjoyed the challenge.

I took David’s advice, and made my Prezi, Why use ICT in Mathematics?, as if I were already a teacher and I was preparing it for the parents of my class. I then went back and adding in the necessary details for submission of an assignment, as per the rubric.

I have view a number of other students web artefacts and been really impressed with what others have achieved!

Good luck to everyone with their assignments!

Jaimi

If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow – John Dewey

While working thought the learning path, I came across the title of this blog, a quote by John Dewey. I feel like this quote encompasses everything I feel about the use of ICT within the classroom and the future of teaching and learning.

When I was at school (insert yawn here) I found math extremely difficult because I could not remember all my times tables in my head, they just wouldn’t stay in there. My Mum brought me the posters and even a cassette that made them into little songs, to make them easier to learn, but nothing worked.

I now know thats because I was never taught the concept of times tables – I was just focusing on remembering them all.

I now know that children need to be taught that multiplication is grouping and that to work out the answers we just have to find out how many are they all together.

In my future classroom, I will be taking a number of different tools with me in my tool belt to ensure no child is left behind.

I’d love to hear from anyone who had similar experiences.

Jaimi

How to Turnaround a Skeptical Parent??

So while moving through the learning path I’m finding very difficult to decide on an artefact to present to parents as a justification of why ICT is vital in the classroom.

While working with students in lower primary, I have found more students have greater engagement in the learning when it is being taught in conjunction with ICT’s. I have found a greater number of students are able to engage in high order thinking, explain what they are doing and why, as well as explain to others what they are doing and learning. But how would I justify this to a skeptical parent, who may have had an education where ICT was either never used, or only used for non-educational games.

While I have a few ideas together, I would love to know what everyone is feeling too??

I found this YouTube Clip, which is based on the use of ICT in Norway schools, but it does bring use some good points that can be applied to schools all over the world.

Jaimi

PKM – This is How We (I) Do It

The whole idea of a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system is that it is your personal and individual way to to find and share different information or relevance.

While I have been finding this concept quite difficult, after reading Harold Jarche, What is your PKM routine?, I realised I have been doing this without realising for sometime. Every time I find something of interest, I have been tweeting about it on twitter, as I find it quite simple to find again at a later stage.

Jarche has states that this is one of the methods that he uses on a regular basis, as well as his use of blogging.

I had never considered what I was doing was in fact creating my personal PKM.

Beata’s blog also talks about how she is now able to apply her previous method of sticky notes and highlighters more easily through the help of Diigo.

So I conclude that my abilities, interest and motivation for my PKM is being quick and efficient, being able to use the technology to look up a hashtag or subject and find everything I had previously found useful and the ability to share what I am learning with like-minded people.

Jaimi

Is Knowledge Really a Curse??

After reading “Curse of Knowledge”, I found myself in a predicament of before agreeing and disagreeing with some of the claims Brain Harris made.

While I agree that there will always be different methods of teaching that need to be used for different students, and while this based on both their prior knowledge and their preferred learning styles, is the teachers knowledge really a hinder? Shouldn’t we be looking at this “problem” in a more positive light and commending the teacher for having a number of different tools in their teaching tool belt to over come the problem? While the teacher may find it more difficult to go back to the moment when they had less knowledge about a topic, would they not already be prepared with a number of different activities, explanations and models to be able to apply this to a number of different students within their class?

I love that Lauren has the same idea.

I finished this article feeling overwhelmed by the idea, so I would love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on the topic.

Jaimi

Spelling Lists and Writing Made Easy

While doing a little research on Twitter into #edc3100, I found a blog with some amazing ICT spelling and writing apps at by Pip Cleaves as Tweeted by Rachael Broom.

While am an yet to try this app, I just wanted to share it with you all as I think it will be a fantastic resource, at a primary level, to help with students spelling and writing.

In our tutorial this week, there was a lot of talk about engaging the students and how when students are engaged they actually want to learn and be able to achieve, rather than just going through the motions.

I would love to hear your thoughts about if you have used this app and if you loved it and what it would do or if you had any challenges?

I plan on testing it our on some family friends children to see how they enjoy it. I will keep you posted with the verdict.

Jaimi

The Wonderful World of Twitter

So today I discovered the wonder world of Twitter – I’m not talking about as a social tool to share selfies, but as a tool for teachers alike to share and discuss resources, teaching tools, ideas and experiences. What I learnt is there is A LOT of teachers using Twitter and having some very in depth conversations about all different things to do with all aspects of teaching.

While many of these are not based in Australia, most of the information or discussions can be applied across different countries, teaching areas and pedagogies. On The Learning Path, there is an article with a link to some very useful and interesting hashtags that are currently being used on Twitter by educators all over the world.

There are so many of these different hashtags that it is overwhelming, however I just selected the ones that seemed most relevant.

Which ones could you apply to your teaching area?

Which ones were helpful to you?

I would love to hear your thoughts on Twitter – @jaimibarrett

WELCOME

Good Evening and welcome to my blog.

I aim to discuss and engage in ICT at the same time, as I believe learning involves doing what you normally would not.

Feel free add anything you think would be valid and helpful to the topic of ICT within the Education sector, in particular Primary.

I look forward to chatting with you soon.

Jaimi