Erin’s Educational Technology Journey

I found PowerISO, NeroVision4, Windows DVD Maker and InterVideo WinDVD for Vaio. Feeling overwhelmed, I went with NeroVision4, simply because it looked straightforward: simple icons, simple features, drop and drag and it promises to make a DVD out of my photos. Seems simple enough for me! As I mouse over icons, text pops up to inform me exactly what each icon does. This is very helpful. For example, I moused over a photo frame, and Nero informed me to “drag and drop pictures here from above or from Explorer”.

I selected an entire photo file from a recent trip to China. Nero had no problem uploading all of the images from Explorer to the DVD project. Over thirty photos were uploaded in a matter of seconds. I then played with the “effects” menu and accidently embossed all of the shots. Usually, I would get frustrated at myself, but I found the “back” arrow, which is nice, big and blue, and fixed everything in a short time.

Narration was a little bit difficult. I could not figure out how to narrate each photo, so instead I did one narration for the entire move. Thankfully, my “movie” is only five minutes long, so it wasn’t that bad! However, the narration loops, so I get to hear myself talk a little bit too much! I wanted to add a soundtrack, but I couldn’t figure out how to upload a music file from iTunes to Nero…I’m not sure if you can. I saved the movie then exported it as a file. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but I thought I should try both avenues to learn more about the process.

How intensive was this process? It was not too intensive to play with the effects or to upload the photos. I found the narration to be time intensive, simply because I could not upload music easily. In addition I could not add text to my images. I wanted to add comments and record the exact location of each photo. I also tried to edit my narration, but it was difficult to do so. It was easier to simply re-record myself. All in all, I spent about two hours creating a five minute production that is, honestly, an amateur effort. I will “play” with Nero more and try out my other DVD authoring tools to gain a better understanding of how to use the tools. I’m definitely happy I tried Nero. My past experiences with DVD authoring have not led to successful burned DVDs.

The 565 Toolkit referenced research by Kock (2001), Shirani, Tafti & Affisco (1999) who found synchronous communication tools actually improve the quantity of ideas. This was interesting to me as I’m a fan of associated learning and constructive learning. If there are more ideas out there, more associations can be made and thus more ideas can be constructed from those: A continuous cycle is what I’m imagining.

Also, Tu (2000a, 2000b, 2001) and Wegerif  (1998) were cited in the 565 Toolkit to support the claim that students’ knowledge is enhanced by on-line communication tools. I read Wegerif’s paper, now 11 years old but still relevant, and came away with the importance of creating a supportive learning community. You can link to Wegerif’s paper here: http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v2n1/pdf/v2n1_wegerif.pdf

The paper expresses that educational designers must consider the social dimension as important as the learning dimension when creating an online learning environment. I am now concerned about being able to design such a well-balanced environment! Although Wegerif’s research focused on professional adults and mine focuses on elementary children, I feel the paper relates to my professional background. At the very least, it certainly relates to my MET experiences. Nothing is as depressing and unmotivating as posting in a forum and not getting any responses!

Currently I use several synchronous communication tools for my MET program, not for classroom teaching. I hope next year I will be able to use some of these tools with my own class! As a MET student I have used:

Skype to collaborate with MET peers on a group project. We used the chat function and the video calling function. I found this to be very effective. You can conference call with up to 4 people (plus yourself) which is perfect for a group of five. Also, Skype has a synchronous chat function. I have used this and found it to be good, but I still prefer to use  Microsoft Instant Messenger. See my notes below.

Wimba’s Chat tool for WebCT/Vista: I have found this tool to be great in class, but if you want to check differenct areas within the course, you are often “chat kicked”, meaning as soon as you leave chat, you are often registered as “XX has left the room”. Actually, you have not left, but Wimba is fooled into thinking you have left. Several times in Wimba live chat, I’ve had to shut down my UBC tabs, re-enter my CWL , re-enter the course, and re-enter the chat again. I’ve found it easier to make sure I have a hard copy of essential information or open windows on my desktop during classroom chats.  

Instant Messaging: Yahoo, Google and Microsoft Instant Messenger. Usually I stick to MSIM simply because most of my contacts are already on it. I can send links, files and photos to contacts and easily receive the same from them. I can open several tabs and even be in discussion in Wimba and use MSIM to converse privately with members from the same class. I can chat with several people at once, or I can have private conversations running with many at the same time. I have never been accidentally removed from a MSIM conversation as in my Wimba experience.

I have had a digital camera for over 7 years, and my latest camera can take nice 30-second mini-movies with sound in addition to snapshots. However, I’m still not “on top” of the video editing software because I purchased my camera in Japan. All of the installation software is in Japanese, and shows up on my computer as a series of blips and code. Needless to say, I’ve been a fan of Windows Media Center and Windows Photo Gallery simply because I could understand it!

In this toolkit activity, I was asked to explore Picasa, so I downloaded Picasa 3 and instantly understood how to import pictures from Windows to Picasa! It was so simple. I was not excited about Picasa because I’ve been using Windows for so long, but I noticed one thing right awa: It’s easy!

I followed the link to the YouTube video explaining how to crop and resize photos. I decided to make a photo collection as an anniversary gift for my husband. Ambitious, but Picasa made it seem easy. I quickly spent a few hours organizing photos, retouching, cropping, playing with colour tones, adding text and generally having a great time in Picasa. I’ve now edited 12 photos for my anniversary gift, and I’ve decided to move on from “collection” to “publication”. I invested in a lovely photo book months ago, but never thought I’d be able to fill it so quickly. Although Picasa is a great web 2.0 tool for digital photos, it also prints off beautiful photos if you have a quality printer and proper photo paper. What I thought would be a huge “crafty” task ended up being a great way to practice my educational technology skills for school. I’m now fairly adept at editing, re-touching, organizing and sharing photos in ways that seem to be light speed ahead of Windows applications.

How intensive was this activity? At first I thought it would be time consuming, and I thought I’d get frustrated with file sizes, file transfers from Windows and generally learning a new system. However, it was very intuitive and in under one hour I was well on my way, engrossed in a project with a purpose. I’d recommend this toolkit activity to anyone who is frustrated with their current level of digital photo management. The learning curve is not that steep and the results are well worth it! In fact, I was planning on taking photos on my memory stick to my local Kodak kiosk and having the part-time workers print off a collection  for me. To export to my blog, I had to first export the photo to a file on my computer, then I could upload it to my blog. If you use “Blogger”, Picasa has a photo uploader which works directly from the program.

With Picasa, I can personalize photos and make them truly memorable without having to invest too much: A little extra ink, some quailty photo-paper and some time! I used Picasa to edit tourists out of the left of the shot, to blur the focus and to change the tint to yellow to get an “antique” look.

A trip to Macau in Dec 2008

Wikis are considered a web 2.0 writing application that is based in social interaction and collaboration (Alexander, 2006). Wikis support collaboration as users can enter the wiki, edit content, create links, create pages and build off of the thoughts of others. In our Module 4 Unit 1 activity, we were asked to have a discussion based in the class wiki concerning “sightings” of social media in our classroom experience and to identify the strengths and challenges of engaging students with social media in an educational environment.

It was interesting and fun to use a web 2.0 social media tool to examine issues in social media. I felt it was a nice merge of theory-into-practice. However, I notices that wiki content was developed individually for sightings and that people, including myself, posted their name beside their wiki entry. I thought the exercise would involve editing content without a sense of ownership, but sightings were personal and I felt “rude” editing someone’s entry with my own thoughts. Due to this format, the wiki discussion was very similar to the Web CT/Vista threaded discussions in the forums. In this exercise, there was little difference between a traditional forum and a wiki.

In the second activity, we co-edited content and collectively identified five strengths and five weaknesses of  engaging students with web 2.0 social media in an educational environment. This activity worked very well in the wiki environment. I made two suggestions, did not include my name, and did not feel upset when they were edited by other collaborators. The ideas improved over the course of the week, and I feel satisfied with the overall process.

Generally, I feel the difficulty in this task was in encouraging collaboration in the wiki environment. Although the threaded discussion brought out great insights, it would have been more collaborative if we initially structured our content contributions outside of the “discussion” box. Perhaps our initial wiki posts should have been generalized, with headings like “cellphones in class”, then we could co-edit a paragraph on sightings concerning the issue. Also, in our class we “signed” our edits. Signing our names  is a great way to identify who is participating or who to respond to, but at the same time it takes away from the collaborative and collective spirit.  If I were to use a wiki in class, I would give students a general instruction of sign/don’t sign and provide them with a starting example. I teach lower-elementary, and I think a little guidance would go a long way.

I think the Module 4 Unit 1 activity was a great success because it forced us to participate in the web 2.0 social media environment and really work through the issues. We can read about the theory of wikis and social media, but this activity showed us how to use a wiki for an educational activity. Feel free to visit my toolkit reflection on wikis which I completed before this activity.

First of all, this activity was fun. I enjoyed learning more about wikis than ever before. My first introduction to a wiki was through ETEC 510. I recall having a few moments in tears because I was confused with the process of editing and being afraid that I “broke” my wiki page. I also recall I uploaded a photo of a leaf completely by accident and quickly learned how to delete images in the ETEC 510 design wiki!

My second wiki activity was with PBwiki (now PBworks). I designed a wiki with an ETEC 510 group for a design project. By the end of ETEC 510, I was feeling wiki-confident! In ETEC 512 I created a wiki with a group titled “cognitive approaches”. Recently I checked it and was happy to see some edits had been made by  Dr. J.Richardson! I furthered my wiki understanding by writing a research paper on how wikis can be used to improve the writing performance of English as a Second Language learners. In my former school, I began a wiki project with grade 6 English as a Foreign Language students. Although my project was not academic or for research purposes, I realized that a wiki is motivating for students once they understand the basics. I have to admit this activity was labour intensive because I made it so! I was motivated to learn more about wikis because I want to use them to facilitate English language skills for my English Language Learners next year.

I knew a little about wiki-ing, but I had never explored the behind-the-scenes discussion before. Warning: It’s slightly addictive. The discussion forum in Wikipedia seemed to have more writing than the actual article! I was impressed by the constructivist learning and the support people posted. Questions were asked, and answered, in the wiki community. The biggest issue that seemed to repeat on several topics was the issue of copyright. People were concerned how to included images and how to reference text. Non-free content was a new area for me to explore concerning wikis, and it seems I am not alone. There is even a wiki page on Wikipedia’s non-free content policy!

I visited the latest version of the ETEC 510 design wiki and I was amazed by how much it has grown in 18 months. When I participated, there were about 30 topics or so, but now there are topics within topics within topics. Also, there are wiki pages on topics that we uncommon 18 months ago, like M-learning and 3G network capabilities related to educational technology. I felt strangely compelled to search for my old entries, but they are gone. However, the topic is there, but students have edited and changed the page as they built up the wiki to the point my former page is transformed. I felt a little sad, but I’m happy to see my page inspired others to make more connections and research the topic more thoroughly.

The UBC Wiki homepage was very welcoming. I would suggest that any UBC students who would like to try a wiki do it here. It is a supportive site, with all of the wiki WYSIWYG editing functions that a beginner needs. Also, there is an excellent orientation video embedded on the first page. A great design space for future wiki creators.

During this exercise, I decided to search beyond UBC and wikipedia to see what other wiki host sites are available through open source applications. Wikispace was suggested in the activity, and it has all of the basics for a great wiki: WYSIWYG editor, wiki statistics, widgits, page histories and simple collaboration tools with unlimited pages. You even get 2GB of free space for files and images. I then tried my old favourite, pbworks. It has grown in the last two years to include webinars, improved access controls and more multimedia plug ins for improved customization. Then, I found this overview article on “Four Free Wikis Worth Trying Out” from The International Data Group’s CIO page: http://www.cio.com/article/445813/Four_Free_Wikis_Worth_Trying_Out_. If you have never tried a wiki before, this is a good, general overview of the four most popular open-source formats. You can up-grade on most wikis by paying, and this is a good option to have: more space and higher privacy settings.

Tip: Visit PBworks (used to be PBwiki) at http://pbworks.com/

Invitation: Visit my MET 512 group’s Cognitive Approaches Wiki: http://cognitiveapproaches.pbworks.com/ 

My initial reaction to the ETEC 565 Toolkit information of there being over 400,000 educational blogs was “wow”. That’s a huge number of writers, writing for a purpose and for an audience. I assume this number is growing exponentially by the month and I wonder how many languages are represented in the number of 400,000.

My first experience with blogging was through MET. I designed a blog in ETEC 511, through KeepToolkit (http://www.cfkeep.org/static/index.html). However, I found it tricky to update and upload artifacts and files. In ETEC 565, I was introduced to WordPress. I found it much easier to use, and I decided to stay here!

Explore: I visited the following blogs

·         http://theopenclassroom.blogspot.com/ Jo McLeay is a M.Ed student who focuses on English teaching, literature and knowledge communities. She has posted a good podcast on learning communities coming together to make a difference through volunteering and a T.E.D. video featuring a P.E. teacher who uses blogging in his courses.

·         http://rachelboyd.blogspot.com/ Rachel Boyd has embedded videos that are educational and relevant to my teaching environment. In addition, she has simple explanations for many Web 2.0 tools: Twitter, Blogs in Plain English

·         http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/ A great blog created by Scott McLeod, an expert on technology integration in the K-12 environment.

·         http://educationwonk.blogspot.com/2009/05/carnival-of-education-week-224.html The “blog carnival” includes links and threads to issues and technology integration in K-12 education.

Contribute: In addition to my 565 blog, I created a “rough” MET educational portfolio using WordPress to replace my KeepToolkit version. It can be found at http://eringillespie.wordpress.com/, but it is a work in progress! The skills I learn in 565 are used within the same week on my blog. I have found blogging to be time consuming. There is a potential audience for my posts, and I take my time expressing myself. I want to maintain an atmosphere of a professional-MET student-lifelong learner, and this involves rephrasing, spell-checking, including references (when required) and avoiding slang.

As an example, I’ve actually completed several Toolkit activities, but I save them as a document in Word. The reason is simple: I want to double check that the reflection reads well and I want to add to it. I know I can edit posts, but perhaps a visitor won’t return to my blog and will instead see a less structured post.

Reflection: I would like to investigate why I don’t “love” blogging. I recognize it as a communications tool and an educational tool, but I don’t feel like it is an artistic release or an enjoyable activity. I feel guilty for stating that, but it is true. For some background information, I never really enjoyed writing classes in elementary school and chose art and drama over writing in high school. I guess that’s what the “private posts” function in blogs are for.