Let’s do the Time Warp during Photography class

I just had a random thought and decided to share it with you all.

This blog has so far been about New Media and its usage in a classroom setting. Emphasis on the new part. But I’ve noticed a current trend in teenage bloggers’ affinity towards vintage photography. It’s not just the bloggers either. Many of my friends go out of their way to purchase vintage cameras and buy the appropriate film. Apparently there are even stores that have started to make polaroid film specifically because there is a demand once again.

28 Camera Drawing by Christine Berrie

My point is, how cool would it be if Visual Arts teachers (more specifically those who teach Photography in the senior years) incorporate vintage cameras into their curriculum? It sounds like a sweet deal to me. It would be interesting to find out how many kids in Year 7 this year have actually ever loaded film into a camera. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had never used anything but digital cameras. I think I will conduct a small investigation… Oh sister of mine! *Logs onto Facebook and sends thirteen-year-old sister a message asking about her use of film in cameras.*

While I’m waiting for my sisters reply, I thought I would wind this post up by bringing us full circle and talk about the adaptation of the “vintage” style into digital cameras. There are aps on iPhones, such as Instagram, that use filters to create “vintage” photographs. I don’t own an iPhone but I know that my friends are obsessed with posting hip vintage-looking photographs of their family, coffees (interestingly my friends really like sepia poloroids of cafe-style coffee), sunsets, vitamin bottles (one of my friends is currently homebound with the flu), plus lots and lots of tea light candles in jam jars!

iPads in classrooms… or maybe not.

I’ve been hearing a lot about using iPads in classrooms, but as I explored the websites on this weeks scaffold for Virtual Worlds, I stumbled upon the blog Carol’s thoughts on life, ICT and whatever comes. Carol is an educator in the UK and was asked on Twitter if she thought iPads were useful in classrooms. I expected a glowing review of iPads in the classroom, and Carol did glow when she spoke about her own personal use of the iPad. However, she pointed out some problems with using an iPad over a laptop as a teacher in the classroom.

Did you know that iPads don’t link up to the IWB?

I don’t own an iPad, but I thought her blog post was quite interesting:

http://carol-carolrb.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-useful-ipad.html

Of avatars, wings, dance6, and the educational value of Second Life

Disclaimer: Before beginning this blog post, I just want to clear up the fact that when I refer to avatars, I am not talking about giant, blue aliens with mad tree-climbing skills.

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I did it! I ventured into Second Life in order to explore with my uni tutorial classmates. Interestingly, in Second Life my tutor has wings and directions were given along the vein of: “Follow the horse!” or “Follow the flying monkey, cat-dog thing!”

Needless to say, there was a lot of laughter in the computer labs today as my tutorial group embarked into a grand adventure – after we all played  around with our avatars’ outfits for a good half hour (hence the creation of the monkey cat-dog). My two friends and I had good fun choreographing dance routines – our favourite gestures were probably “dance1″, “dance6″ and “kmb” (that last one in synchronisation even had our lecturer in fits of laughter).

On a more professional level, we also explored a learning environment that a student-teacher had set up within Second Life. I enjoyed experimenting with all the items and thought the activities within her learning space were very well-tailored to the developmental stage of her students (who would be in primary school). Unfortunately, a few of the islands we visited had lots of teaching and learning areas, but they were set up to be used while an instructor accompanied you in SL. Without the instructor, it was difficult to actually figure out what you were supposed to do within that environment.

I can see that the applications of Second Life are vast and ever growing, but I wish I had been given a clearer and more engaging example of how Second Life might be used specifically in the KLA I will be teaching (English). I thought that students might create and roleplay stories or scenarios that they script and storyboard in class, and I heard rumour that there is possibly a group that reenacts Shakespeare’s plays in “The Globe”. That could be interesting if done well.

My other problem with Second Life is security as I feel that taking students onto Second Life could potentially introduce them to strangers who might cause problems. However, in the lecture today it was mentioned that the State is trying to create closed Simulation networks to be used by school students only. As a teacher or parent, I would feel more comfortable with the students being in a closed environment. Though it can be argued that students are just as likely to run into weirdos in the CBD as they are on Second Life.

Tags: gestures, Second Life, university

Dipping a toe into Second Life

Hi everyone!

Hope your weekends were as awesome as mine was. I won’t go into details here, but I will say it was packed to the overflow and consisted of a lot of travel time. But roadtrips are fun – I enjoy the time spent with people in between the destinations.

On that note, this blog post is an in-transit post, of sorts. I am about to sign up for Second Life (SL), as per the request of my university lecturer. Yes, you heard right – my uni lecturer requires that we sign up to SL because we are going to have a uni tutorial through the medium of SL. This is both exciting and daunting for me. I’ve never used SL before and it seems like such a CRAZY way to teach a class, but I’m also looking forward to seeing how it all works. My lecturer’s enthusastic recount of her experiences with SL and the amazing minds you can access through this online virtual world.

I had never considered how SL could be used in a secondary school classroom until beginning the CAN unit. It seems WAY out there on the weirdness scale, but it seems that big names in the education world are already using SL. I don’t want to miss the boat or fall behind, so I look forward to seeing how teaching and learning are accomodated through Second Life.

Tags: Second Life

Tools for the 21st Century Teacher

While most people who will read this particular blog will probably have access to a link to Michael Zimmer’s amazing Tools For the 21st Century Teacher, I thought I’d post a link just in case someone outside my uni learning group stumbles upon this post.

Also THANK YOU, MICHAEL ZIMMER!!! for putting together a diving board for teachers to find really useful Web 2.0 tools for classroom use. I felt quite proud that I was aware of a fair few of the tools listed by Zimmer, but there was also so many that I had never even heard of. I love the non-linear Prezi and I had heard of Glogster being used to make posters in a Year 9 science class. I really need to get on top of things and sign up for a few more of these resources, such as Diigo – apparently there are a few people within my English Curriculum Spec class that have been collecting some really great resources and I feel like I’m falling behind. The treasure chest is right there, all I have to do is sign up!

A friend and I had a play around on TitanPad. We were in the library but there were probably some disgruntled researchers, because the two of us were giggling and ooohing and aaaahing like little kids with a new toy on Christmas Day! The concept behind TitanPad is “back chat”, similar to using Twitter in the classroom, as was mentioned in the first CAN tutorial. I also thought that students could use TitanPad for group assessments – they can chat without using Facebook, and the teacher will be able to play back the Back Chat and see how ideas and concepts developed.

Here’s a link to the two Prezis that I made: http://prezi.com/drbmrgvy-zui/narrative/, http://prezi.com/rai081rh_b0z/whole-language-vs-phonics/ The first is a teaching resource for Narrative structure, and the second was used as a visual aid during a Teaching and Learning debate last year at uni. By no means are they amazing, but they show how easy it is to create a fresh, engaging and non-linear presentation. I’d like to practice and play some more with Prezi and have been mulling over an idea for a sequence of lessons using Prezi. I think it would be cool to get students to use Prezi to create experimental visual poetry. What do you think? 

 

Step beyond the narrow stip

“…most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

Now, I know that Rilke was originally writing about the creative process of writing in his letters to Franz Kappus, but reading over this quote again, it got me to thinking of teachers in their classrooms. From my experience as a student and from my first prac, I know that teachers can become complacent and set in their ways.

Marie Antoinette (dir Sophia Coppola, 2006

They say if something ain’t broken don’t try to fix it, but on the other hand, you could have a perfectly good typewriter but you’ll never be able to link into the possibilities of the Internet that way. As teachers we need to keep up with the constant technological changes, not simply to be hip, but because these changes provide incredible, fresh resources and more efficient methods of teaching and learning.

I think teachers in Australia need to be taking the initiative and getting further professional development. In a tutorial at uni this week, we talked about the fact that in Finland, teachers must have their masters, whereas in Australia you can just get a Diploma of Education and never have to do any further study. And with the laptop roll-out I fear that there is a gap forming because teachers have not been effectively trained to use the technology provided. How can the students use their laptops in the classroom if their teachers are not given the professional development to use and create lesson plans based on the new technology?

“A school would be seen as more than a building”

While thinking about my ideal classroom, I remembered a quote that I had read in a paper by Neville Jennings (n.d.): “[In order to achieve a Real Education Revolution] a school would be seen as more than a building”.  Jennings suggested many other elements that would lead to an Education Revolution, but his idea of community over infrastructure caught my attention in regards to the topic of learning spaces. I agree that a school, the learning environment, is a stronger and more valuable place, to both students and teachers, if there is a sense of community spirit and unity of purpose.  School is becoming less and less about the building with the introduction of new media and technology. Students don’t need to be “at school” to do school work and communicate with teachers, so how do we make the face-to-face time count?

I thought a lot about what my ideal classroom would look like, but felt like I haven’t had enough experience out there in actual classroom settings to make a judgement call. When I think about the conditions of the classrooms that I taught in while on a missionary trip to a small village in Vanuatu, I know that most Australian school-aged children are blessed to be able to attend schools with roofs over their heads and proper flooring under their feet. We have windows and doors, many classrooms have airconditioning and some form of heating. The addition of access to Interactive White Boards and the laptop roll-out is above and beyond what the kids in Vanuatu or many other countries could dream of. Those students were mesmerised by my digital camera; my students during my first practicum got annoyed with me if I told them to hand write their draft biographies before giving them the chance to use their laptops.

One of my best friends went to a professional development seminar about student well-being in her final year of uni, and the ideal that she passed on to me from that seminar was that teachers should strive to make their classrooms inviting places. She told me that teachers should think of themselves not only as educators, but as hosts/hostesses. There is an element of hospitality in creating a classroom.

Teenagers have to go to school by law. They have to come 5 days a week. School is LIFE for these kids for more than a decade. Sometimes students have more face-to-face time with their teachers than they have with their parents. They spend more time at school sometimes than they spend at home. Therefore school classrooms need to be places where our students feel safe. Places that they WANT to be. So as a teacher I would love to be able to create a place that my students are able to mark as their own.

Where would you rather be?

I guess what I am saying is that I view the classroom, and the school in general, as more than just a physical place. You can’t always have a say over the physical environment, some schools just don’t have the finances to make leaps into the world of Alt-classrooms. Use the space you have to its greatest potential. Latch on to the new technology available; take the students’ minds elsewhere if the physical environment isn’t adequate. But most importantly, create a space that feels safe and promotes creativity and productivity. Give students a place that they want to come in to.

Tags: building, classroom, school, school community, student well-being