Week 3 - Engagement Activity 5: weebly reflection

Engagement Activity 5: Creating a website - blog reflection

Reflect on the functionality of a website. What did it allow you to do?

Weebly is a more complex ICT, it allows pretty much everything that blog and wiki combine, but the owner has more control, and the product has a better finish look. Create pages, upload all kinds of gages, slide show photos, videos, even audio file.

How can it be used in your context, for you, and your learners? Use a thinking tool, such as a SWOT analysis or PMI to brainstorm its functionality. Think also about how you could use a static website to support student learning, but also how your students can use one to express their creativity.

After looking at three different tools, and the experience I had from the last couple of weeks. I think weebly is a better finish product to host learning information, so I have posted a “How to” page on weebly, once student have an idea what they need to learn, they can then click on the button to post their learning experience on “how to wiki”. There is a placeholder for all the information, and there is a place for them to freely share what they have learned or ask teacher any questions. I think a combination of ICT can be quite useful.

I would treat Wiki as a playground where has all the “draft” or free ideas, then tidy them up, post them to weebly so students can have a clear summary of what they have learned. With photo slide, I can post students good work on weebly, this can be a encouragement for them to get competitive, I will probably set up the rule to post three great work from what I found on their learning wiki site and post it to weebly. Whoever got their work posted 5 times can get a chance to create a post and show us a “how to” on weebly.

Weebly- PMI

Plus

         Much better finish look

         Easy to added and edit

         Different pages on top

         Owner controlled

Minus

         Time consuming

         No input from others

Interesting

         This can be a tided up place for wiki

To me, weebly is the finish product I would use to present materials, rather than use it during the process.

Week 3 - Engagement Activity 4: create weebly

My weebly

not really done yet, but it is almost 12am Saturday night, so this is it for today :)

Week 3 - Engagement Activity 3: Wiki reflection

Engagement Activity 3: Creating a wiki -  reflection

My wiki

1. In your blog, create a new posting reflecting on the learning potential of a wiki in your context.  You are considering the technical affordances of the wiki (the things it can do), and how these can be used by you and your students to support, facilitate and transform learning.  Again, be sure to write analytically rather than being just descriptive. A SWOT analysis or PMI is a suitable scaffold for your analysis.

Wiki has huge potential to be used for sharing work or knowledge, the problem for me is that wiki is a bit hard to maintain once everyone can have their say. On the plus side, I can create a project for a single topic I am doing, and assign students to a team to respond to it. Maybe even do a competition between groups, students can be encouraged to post up videos they can find related to that topic, and explain why they choose that particular video.

SWOT for wiki

• Strength

Able to create project

Able to sign groups to a project

Easy for users to participate

Able to check wiki history

• Weakness

Multiple users cannot save their input at the same time

Hard to manage user to follow the instruction

Hard to control input

Time consuming to maintain wiki content

• Opportunity

Make a global classroom

Collect knowledge from more people

Learn about students from their inputs

• Threat

Cyber bullying

Easy for users to mess up the format

Easy for users to delete content by mistake

Once struggle with wiki users will not return

Exposed to inappropriate materials

2. As should now be embedded in your practice, be sure to consider the legal, safe and ethical requirements in working in a wiki. How will you support the development of these habits in your students?

There will need to be a basic house rule about the wiki site; this should be covered by school rule. I might show couple of examples to students if they do not follow the rules, their permissions maybe removed or limited compare with students who does. Show students examples of good wiki, and encourage students to build the wiki towards those sample wiki pages.

The other safety issue could come from the links or videos embedded to wiki, which students have no control of. This takes the teacher to spend time to check and maintain the wiki site to make sure it is safe; to me this could be one of the worse weaknesses for wiki, time consuming and hard to control the content.

3. Be sure also to link to your experiences in the Moodle wiki in Weeks 1 and 2. You should already have a blog posting responding to the reflection questions for these activities.

From week1&2 wiki, I am start to release the strength of wiki compare with blog. Wiki can be a good place to find ALL information from more users, but blog is a more personal or a group of people place. Blog can be well organized, compare with wiki I found blog is much tidier.

4. Be sure also to consider in your reflection that it is not just you, but more importantly your students, who will own and be working in the wiki space.

Wiki can be less attractive, because a lot of people are involved and the less attention you would likely to get from teachers if students were seeking for one on one advise.

Once students have a bad or unpleasant on wiki, it is going to be very hard to get them back to the system again. So the process of setting up instruction is important, and make sure it is easy for students to follow, and make sure the wiki site is well maintained with useful information.

Week 3 - Engagement Activity 1: Blog reflection

Engagement Activity 1: Creating a Blog - Reflection

Blog to me is very flexible; we can make it very personal like a personal online dairy or make it online learning space. For my subjects, I would make it more personal for Math subject, because this might help students find Math a bit more interesting and related to their life outside of school, and I would make it more academic for my business classes, it can be a great place holder for all kind of information about the world of business, and students share their findings and comment on each topic.

Blog

         Plus

·           Flexible

·           24/7

·           Socially Interactive

·           Visual

·           Auditory

·           Connect people outside of class

·           Easy to organize

·           Easy to use

Blog can be managed to cover variance types of leaners, the visual or auditory there will be pictures and videos; for sequential and global the posts can be well organized they will be able to follow step by step or see the big picture by looking at the post history on the side; for active or reflective learners they can choose to comment on the post, or just read and take the key points they think is helpful from a blog.

         Minus

·           Time consuming

·           not accessible if no computer

·           No real time feedback

·           No protection on the blog content

·           cyber bullying

·           not face to face

To be blog is focusing on the declarative knowledge, and not able to demonstrate that users have learned procedural knowledge. There will be no way to show students have understand how to carry out a chemistry lab tasks unless it is performed in real life. So I guess blog can be quite limited, I will need to be very careful when to use it, and what to use it for. The purpose of using blog in my class needs to be carefully thought through first.

         Interesting

·           can show personality

I struggled with the difference between “plus” and “interesting” so did not come up with enough ideas here.

After looking at a lot of blogs online, I realsie people can make their blog extremely “boring” but really academic or just focusing on the topics, as it will be useful for people just seeking for information or knowledge instead of entertainment. Most of blogs are showing some level of personality of the owner, through the colour or template they choose or the layout may have been changed. How much pictures they used, and I even come across someone used the same youtube clip as me, so that was exciting. I find it was helpful using blog to host all my engagement activities, and named they week by week, it made it easy for me to look back and search for information.  The whole experience was pleasant enough, and not a waste of time. Blog is limited online sharing tool compare to some of other online interactive sharing website, such as facebook or my space, but it is good in some level so the purpose of using blog can be managed well because of its limit. I would definitely give it a go once start teaching.