Tool 4: Digital Images
In a teaching context, the most valuable photographs are the student’s photographs. When using images for learning it is important that I don’t use them gratuitously although used properly they are useful for engaging students with the material. Images can be used on the school network, on the interactive whiteboard, using mobile phones and cameras, also iPods. “Teachers can present learning materials to the student with the purpose of engaging thinking, knowledge, understanding, analysis, evaluation, influencing feelings, or supporting skills development.” (ICT’s Week 4 Resources) The activities this week involved us getting an understanding of how images need to be resized and also how we can edit images to make them more appealing. To resize the images we were given a website called Softpedia. The main point was that images need to be resized in order to be used efficiently.
Activity with Flickr
The activity with flickr involved creating a free account, uploading and image and also displaying an image on this blog following the correct copyright guidelines. Using images is critical to developing a student’s visual literacy.
“Like traditional literacy, visual literacy encompasses more than one level of skill. The first level in reading is simply decoding words and sentences, but reading comprehension is equally (if not more) important. The first level of visual literacy, too, is simple knowledge: basic identification of the subject or elements in a photograph, work of art, or graphic. While accurate observation is important, understanding what we see and comprehending visual relationships are at least as important. These higher-level visual literacy skills require critical thinking, and they are essential to a student’s success in any content area in which information is conveyed through visual formats such as charts and maps.”
An activity I feel I could use before very class, is display a suitable image to the subject content and get students to use a See, Think, Wonder tool to evaluate and critically analyse the image, hopefully preparing them for the lesson ahead.
creative commons -Practice Yoga, Be Healthy! {EXPLORED} by VinothChandler
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/4459777970/
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Image Manipulation Picnik
I found picnik to be the most enjoyable activity we’ve had to do yet! I could spend hours on picnik editing and manipulating images, and I think my students would too. I feel a great assessment piece I could use in HPE that would develop student’s visual literacy skills is to have them create a poster encouraging physical activity in obese individuals, without using text. This would require the students to choose and manipulate their images critically. I would then have the students submit a 500 word summary of why they chose and presented their images in the manner they did. Below is an image of myself playing football last year for Brothers against Boyne Island. I think it looks pretty engaging! :D
Tool 5: Podcasts
A podcast is a video or usually sound file created by someone shared online usually through subscription. They are usually part of a series. However this is not always the case. As a teacher, they can be accessed online as files created for your students. But more importantly, they are also files that your students create and share by uploading online.
As previously mentioned, aural and visual literacy is becoming very important in the 21st Century literacy set. As a teacher, I need to consider the implications of this era of mass communication, and develop new literacies for my students. This then, presents podcasting as not just recorded information. But a tool for developing an aural literacy set of skills needed to communicate effectively in the 21st century world.
Podcasts have become a very useful eLearning tools, so much so, that iTunes has created an application called iTunes U, the U standing for University. So while it would be great to create my own podcast for my students, ready-made podcasts for learning have already been created. However as a teacher it will be more beneficial for my students to have them create their own podcasts rather then just listening to ones I present, this will develop their aural literacy set to a higher level. I attempted to create my own podcast using Podomatic but everytime I tried to "allow" the use of my microphone, the program wouldn't respond when I clicked allow! However here's a podcast on education I found interesting on phonics, vocabulary and spelling instruction. http://theteacherslife.podomatic.com/player/web/2008-09-04T18_04_36-07_00
Tool 6: Digital Video
Digital video can be used in a range of ways for educational purposes in schools. Communication, observation and analysis, and reflection are beneficial outcomes of using digital video in education. As a communication tool, digital video can facilitate student’s communication of ideas and assessment. Digital video is also used as an observation and analysis tool, enhancing students' observations of phenomena, experiments or performances. Finally, it is used as a reflection tool to support student reflections on their own learning.
From the provided readings this week, it was discovered that outcomes of student video production include affective, Meta cognitive, higher order thinking, communication and presentation, literacy, organisational and teamwork and moviemaking skill development. This presents moviemaking as a great tool to enhance multimedia literacy. The activity for this week was to create our own video, I used iMovie as I have the most experience using it. I created a video using still images of a trip my girlfriend Natalie and I went on to Emerald. I then uploaded it to YouTube and set the privacy settings to private so it can only be viewed here ;)
Michael
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