How does learning through technology affect a child’s learning outcome? This is the question I’ve been thinking about during these two weeks.
Technology provides our world with easy information in an instant. This helps everyone stay more in touch with what goes on in countries half way across the world as well as helping students with research for homework and projects. However, it can also be a distraction from our work and inhibit our children’s learning. The major question educators are asking is “how do we keep technology from ending the genius of our world and instead help the genius grow?” Schools need to consider how to connect with the new generation of students and their families, how to make us think about the future, and learning from sources other than only technology when deciding wether to implement technology into their curriculum. The way our generation uses the technology they have in their hands today will determine the future of all generations after them. Technology will no doubt be used by educators in the near future for all students. It is up to our teachers and parents to educate us on how to use this technology given to us. They will determine if we keep using technology the way we do now, or use it for the betterment of our future.
I like Powtoon best in all these tools. With PowToon, anyone – even if you don’t know a pixel from a proxy server – can create engaging, animated videos with a professional look and feel. Not only is PowToon already great “as is” but it’s also getting better and better every day! It’s being consonantly developed and upgraded without any price increase, so it’s really as good as it gets! One of the best software, definitely! My second favourite tool is Padlet. It’s simple and powerful, and its operations are simple and arbitrary, without borders, which can be dragged into any format of the file and easily entered into the text. When I am a true teacher in the future, I will make those students who dare not ask questions anonymously or those who haven’t thought of their own problems to see other students’ questions on the wall, so as to promote everyone’s thinking. In addition, ClassDojo is my third favourite one. As far as I’m concerned, ClassDojo‘s services are expected to accurately record students’ performance in the classroom, and to score, to evaluate, to encourage students to progress, and to make the messy class orderly, which really helps teachers.
I may not use Final Cut any more because when it exports files, it takes too much space in the computer and it wastes a long time to transcode. I don’t like Testmoz, either. Since Testmoz requires the creator must set the correct answer for the questions, but you know not every question has an accurate answer for it. And I may not use Rubric anymore because its web page is too gaudy to use in the daily life.
As it’s saying Two Heads Are Better Then One, what if there were more than two, I prefer working with my friends, or others in a group to achieve our goals easier. As I mentioned being in a group required to do a Group Plan and set our common goal. At the first day of this class, we set up our group and decide to be number one group in this class. The content we used for our project was responsible information from a reliable source and I believe that our group did our best to present in a responsible way. While presenting, we made sure to orally cite our sources and kept the information we presented short and to the point. Someone in the audience listening to our presentation would probably pay attention the information simply because sounding credible was a point of emphasis for us.
We faced two main problems, this class requires quite a lot creativity and different ideas, and some of the members in our group are too quiet and they don’t like to share their ideas with other members in the group. To solve and avoid this particular problem happened in our group, our group leader, become a coordinator, join members ideas and suggestion together and coordinate the activities. Other problem that we faced was, because two of our group members are too clse to each other, the other members find it difficult to deal with them or even to get knowing them more, because they were always together and prefer to speak to each other. So the group faced a problem with cohesiveness, as it argued is a good dynamic to develop a group. Cohesiveness is generally used to refer to the degree to which members desire to stay in the group and express agreement with the group goals. But there was also some disadvantages of cohesiveness that related to the problems that we faced. I think too much similarity of the behaviour of group members leading to increased cohesiveness, can actually be detrimental to performance. Group member will attempt to discover which behaviour are acceptable and unacceptable. This is a period of getting to know each other, deciding on goals to pursue, and getting organised.
Well, sometimes it is hard to recognize my own strong points and to acknowledge my own weak points. Most of the time it is easy to realize other people’s shortcomings.
I think my strong points are self-reliance, firmness of purpose, and being result-oriented. If I see the goal I can approach my aim step by step. Therefore, I can also motivate myself and other people. And as for weak points, I think that sometimes I’m quite impulsive and don’t want to endure some people. For example, if one of my group members shouts at me, I am angry and then quit this work. It sounds normal to quit a work where your friend is shouting at you, but there is a problem to make friend with her again. Most of time, I focus more on turning ideas and plans into practical actions. Therefore I always lack of flexibility and creativity, and sometimes I act more like followers in the group. Due to my pitfalls, I put forward the following three personal learning goals: 1. Be more pro-active during working process; 2. Be more open to the new ideas; 3. Be more flexible to changing plans; 4. Stop worrying too much.
Learning to work as a team is another goal I have set up for myself. I have been a team of one for so many years that this will be hard for me. Teamwork is important; learning to value the opinions of others and not to get upset over criticisms that others may have is another goal at which to look at and achieve. People work differently than I do; I have to learn patience in that respect. I have to learn to understand that where I am a doer and not laid back at all, someone else may not be that way. I have to learn to accept that. Again, patience falls back into that original goal category. Another goal I have set for myself is completing my assignments in a timely manner. I do not see any problem with completing the assignments in a timely manner in the interim, but the thought of failure petrifies me. I have been in classes where I have fallen behind, and believe me, it is not a pleasant feeling. One of the biggest and most important goal I want to achieve is graduating and getting the much-desired baccalaureate degree.
Frankly, I really learnt a lot in these two weeks. Thank you for Dr. Wang! Looking forward to seeing you again!
I use Final Cut to edit my audio and create my video for our piano lesson. 
Padlet is an online collaboration tool that allows you to quickly make a story wall of your own simply by drag and drop”. The tool contains rich templates, supports multiplayer collaboration. It supports multiple forms of presentation, and it is ideal for interactive gadgets for teaching. Padlet gives us a white wall, and we can put anything at the wall. It’s simple and powerful.
WynneChi's Learning Blogfolio 