Peer review week is over!

paigeff55.weeby.com

This week was interesting to say the least, at first I sincerely thought doing the peer reviews would be a complete chore but I loved it! It was so nice to be able to compare my own work with my peers, to see where my marks were sitting, what the standards were and to be able to do a little self regulating. I found myself going through multiple websites and reviewing them in my head, assessing what I would change and what I could learn from, to benefit my website and grades. I feel like I turned the one week that was supposed to be me helping my peers to my peers helping me. A typical Paige thing to do!

The peers that reviewed my website were such a help, their comments were genuine and constructive, I thought there was little I could change on my website, yet there is so much a fresh perspective can bring to the table. I really found the peer reviews so helpful, it was and is such a good learning strategy. There were multiple things that I did not understand or even consider that my peers did, I can not stress how helpful the peer review truly was. It is something I would definitely incorporate into my future classroom. The biggest thing that affected me this week would be the fact that my peers could not actually contribute to my social media site which is the whole point of the assignment! When I was testing my instructions and the  social page I never got my boyfriend to contribute I simply just asked him to follow the instructions and see if they were accurate. Thank god for peer reviews! The problem was I had created a page and a page has a manager, which is me. Therefore only I could post, people could comment but not post. Someone referred me to make a Google + community and it was the best criticism ever! I raced home and immediately created a community, yet it was not that easy. This meant I had to edit my website, create a community, learn how to use it, make a new set of instructions and re-upload them. I was ropable to say the least!

The peer reviews not only helped with the assignment and blog part of task two, yet I found my group for task three and I discussing the quality of reviews we had gotten. The reviews were also five percent of task two which is not a lot yet could be the difference between a pass and a fail. A peer had reviewed my friends site but left no comments or criticism's, nothing at all! How is she meant to benefit from no feedback? Fortunately we verbally reviewed her website with her and she was able to incorporate our ideas and constructive feedback which in turn also benefited us by learning things we could take on board as mentioned earlier.

This week my group for task three and I met up in the library instead of our tutorial as this week was an online week. We devised our structure for task three, partly finished our contract, made a wiki and chose our teaching strand, lesson idea and the technology we will be using. I feel confident in my groups ability to do well and I am excited to move through this last assignment! Unfortunately one of our group members did not show up to our meeting which was not a great a start, yet it made us come to terms with what our repercussions might be if this were to be an on going thing which meant we were able to complete the consequence part of our contract. There is always a silver lining.

I am relieved/excited/nervous/stressed and thankful that I am now up to my final assignment for not only this unit but my other three too. We are officially in the fourth quarter, the end is near!

Blog you soon.

Week seven, topic six. The end of task two is getting closer and closer!

This weeks topic was 'collaboration and cooperation'. In the lecture Stuart Duvall took us through a guideline type structured lecture that explained what makes group work successful and what makes group work unsuccessful. This lecture made me feel quite positive and excited about getting task three started as the members in my group are all  intrinsically motivated and strive for high marks. None of this P's get the degrees stuff, we want HD's!

Topic six was really based around task three, how to get started and what not to do. I loved this little bit of input Stuart added in to lecture.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B47FoXFf0TRzcDZIbktCbGdqbDQ/edit

I believe this idea of acting like your mother is watching you is not only linked to task three but is great advice to follow with in task one and two as well. As I suggested in my last blog that this unit has made me realise that Facebook is not a joke, it is a site that is a depiction of my personality, work ethic and reputation. future employees will look at my Facebook and this potentially could make or break my job opportunities. I believe that not only in a group situation should you act like your mother is watching you, but, that should be your strategy for the online world too.  There is stigma about being able to edit yourself, allowing you to only show the highlight reel of who you really are, so why not take that opportunity to make yourself look better rather then, well, like a drunk party animal for most people!

In the work shop this week we were working in our groups for task three and one of our members was away sick, the rest of us were stressing about making the group contract and worrying about how we were going to get started without her information. Then we remembered we live in the 21st century. I had all of Sarah's details on the contract before the other two girls had even finished typing, sometimes you just have to love technology! the rest of the workshop we discussed how excited and nervous we were to get our grades for task two back, yet we decided to make a silver lining out of a possibly bad situation and make a meeting for next week, to go through our peer reviews and grades, see if we were on the same page and hopefully using the guidance to improve topic two and make a start on topic three. From then on we have decided to meet up once a week as well as in out tutorials to work on task three and also so we all something excellent to write in our blogs under 'networks and communication'!

Safe to say I drove (sped)  home to check my results, without giving to much away, I was very happy little Vegemite.  I thought the feedback was fair, relative and informative so I could do better with task two. It was largely my blog that I could achieve higher marks in. Hopefully you can tell I have been following the guidelines you handed out conveniently after task one!

Speaking of grades and marks, this weeks lecture left me slightly frustrated towards the end when it was revealed that the sample social media site that is on LMS did not receive excellent marks for all the categories, I noticed that it even had a few sufficient marks. I just asked myself why they would upload an average site when they know everyone will be using that as a guideline? kind of seems like a nasty trick to me! Luckily I took the low marking as a guideline and immediately added increased descriptions and information on my site.

On the same day task two is due for our peer reviews I have an essay due for another unit about how I used a specific form of technology to increase my learning. Boy did this unit come in handy! The amount of information I crossed over and linked to in my essay was enormous, it is so nice when all my units correlate, makes me feel like a real future teacher! As I wrote that essay and study this unit I become more and more invested in the idea that technology belongs in schools. That every year, every stand and everyone should be using technology in some way or form. A great point I cam across this week was that using applets and programmes for things that can also be done physically is a great way to allow the students to individualise there learning, make them feel responsible for their learning and allow them the choice and freedom which in turn I believe will induce higher grades and participation.  In a way using technology to work on that self regulation.

My head is about to explode!

That is all from me, will blog after my peer review for the final time before I submit task two in. Holy moly where is this semester gone!

Blog you soon!

Continuing on the idea of topic five I really enjoyed the part of the lecture when we discussed sharing lesson plans and idea's via the Internet because I thought it correlated nicely with task two as www.teachertube.com is a platform where teachers can upload, download and view other teachers lesson plans and strategic ideas much like what we are trying to create in task two. This also came really handy for my 'teaching tool box' which I have been told to create in another unit so when I graduate I will have a whole bunch of ideas and lesson plans, I will be organised and ready to go! I also found there was a lot of emphasis in this weeks lecture about how we need to make children smarter, how every body needs to be a genius. It was clear in the lecture that over the past ten years the worlds education system has been bombarded with hundreds of ideas of how we can make everyone smarter. For example: children not wearing shoes in class, only having three walls in your classroom, giving your children a 'memory pill' which is capable of "turning ordinary students into honours graduates" and my personal favourite, heated underwear will make our students smarter and more hard working...seriously? What ever happened to the idea that everyone learns differently and we must cater to that learner specifically? "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" Albert Einstein.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B47FoXFf0TRzdGhGcktJOFRGcUE/edit

Moving through task two, it is finally making more sense to me. The lecture clashes with another tutorial of mine so I miss out on the second half and do not get to watch the first half until after the tutorial so you can imagine my struggle. when my seating group and I first started discussing task two the girls I sit with were bouncing ideas off each other, starting to look for there social media sites and there I was confused as a bat during the day time! Luckily my group and I use our tutorial time to brainstorm, collaborate and compare because it was truly all from them that I learnt most of the criteria for task two. I have currently found my topic which is fitness, made my social media page as talked about in my last blog and I have just created a power point on my 'how to' instructions. I seriously thought that the 'how to' part would be a breeze. I found it so time consuming!  Remembering that I would have an actual peer following my instructions made me so nervous, I did not want to miss one thing out or go in the wrong direction so my poor boyfriend became my human guinea pig! I had him on the phone as I relayed my instructions to see if they were correct and found that they were not because I had done the screen shots from when I was already signed in, which meant I had to create a whole new account purely to take my screen shots. Never the less, my guinea pig of a boyfriend finally made it to my page on Google + and my instructions were correct...finally!

At the beginning of this week my 'teaching tool box' had one lesson plan in it that I used while I was on practicum last year, now because of task two and this weeks lecture on Teacher Tube I have linked so many ideas up with ACARA codes which made for great lesson plans and ideas. Although my graduation date is so far away I have found this unit in particular has contributed a lot to my 'teaching tool box' and will set me up not only for when I become a teacher but also on my  pre-service practicums. As bizarre and stupid this may sound, I truly did not think to scale the Internet for lesson ideas, yet there have been so many that I can alter and personalize to cater for different years and different strands. For once, I love the Internet!

Blog you soon!

Week six, topic five. I can not believe how fast this semester is going, we are almost half way through!

This week was all about teaching in the 21st century and how "we need to tear down an education system designed for the 19th century and replace it with one that's suited for the 21st" Rupert Murdoch. I found this quote really relevant to not only my degree obviously as a future teacher, yet also really relevant to task two. I say this because not only does our education system need changing but I believe our social order and abilities do as well.

With this in mind, I found creating a social media platform for people all over the world who share one thing in common really fun if you may. For people all over the world to be able to come together and share there knowledge and love for fitness (my topic) has so many positives, yet something inside me as a human being finds it sort of sad in a way. The idea that people no longer need to physically and actively participate in social interactions and can simply do it all from behind a computer screen upsets me. I am a kinesthetic learner and an extrovert and to think of a classroom full of people creating and learning from behind a screen frightens me, as a teacher and a human! For example, during the lecture we were shown a video by B.F Skinner endorsing the 'teaching machines'...talk about a depressive and dark learning environment! not one child was interacting, asking questions, or receiving verbal feedback/ reassurance, which to me are all key points of learning . There was absolutely  no social element to that class room. In this unit there is a major emphasis on technology being apart of the 21st century and our education systems which I am all for as long as that does not mean eliminating the social element to learning.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Skinner_teaching_machine_01.jpg

Moving on, I have created my social network site for task two using Google + (Plus) as I needed something exactly like Facebook but it could not be Facebook! Google + is much like Facebook in the way it manipulates all sharing functions from links, videos, photos and posts where as other sites generally only have a photo option or posting options, rarely all options in the one site and trust me, I trialed  about every social media site the Internet had... you name a site and I will have an annoying 'welcome' email from them, I guarantee!  Not to mention it was not until this week I realised I did not have to create an actual event and rather just a platform for people to share information with. If it was not for a girl in my tutorial and I exchanging constant text messages and ideas off one another I would probably be on the completely wrong track. They were not lying at the beginning of the semester when they said they want us to learn and not to be taught! I find having a different outlook from my peers helps me see the tasks in a different perspective, all though we are all doing task two on a different interest we have been bouncing ideas and brainstorming during our tutorial time and as I said being a kinesthetic learner this has just been so beneficial for me!

When referring to linking the technologies discussed in this unit with my everyday life and my other units, these past five topics have been so relevant. I find myself saying things in my head such as "well she is breaching netiquette isn't she!" as I read peoples Facebook status' in concern. I find myself editing my behavior online a lot more then I previously did, sort of realising that Facebook is actually not just a big joke and I should remove my year 12 leavers photos...!

If there is one major thing I have learnt this week it is that: technology still scares me!

Blog you soon.