Thursday, October 29, 2015

Online Journal



Reflection of RS class
On 3/7/2015 the first day of our RS class began with brain storming activity of writing expectation from the module ICT in Education.
 Then the tutor briefed us on minor assignment, major assignment and project works.
After that tutor took us through the topic “How can the use of ICTs help improve quality of education”
a. Use of ICT in classroom teaching will make teaching and learning meaningful and lively.
b. Students will be motivated and curious to learn through the use of animation, simulation etc.
c. Saves time and resources of the teacher students will become independent learners by browsing information from different authentic sources.
d. ICT can substitute teacher shortage.
e. It helps students to explore more about the topic.
On 6th of July, tutor flashed out a video clip on teaching in 21st century. The video clips tells us that teachers are no more a source of information in 21st century because students are accessed to many sources like internet, online journal, books etc for any kind of information they need.
Therefore, we must teach our students skills and values. It is also very important to educate our students on reliable sources of information and inverse impact of harmful sources.
The skills our students require in 21st century are critical thinking, media literacy, communication, collaboration, information and creativity.
ICT in education is defined as a way or technology to provide information and a way to communicate with people living in different parts of the world. We can communicate through email, messenger, weechat, video chat, video call and endless sources. We should encourage our students to use these communicative tools to share information and solve their problem.
We get information from the internet in various forms as per our need and requirement. Teachers’ sites are useful for teachers to meet the need of teachers. There are different sites for different subjects. We can download ready made lesson from the internet to teach in our classroom in power point, word document, excel etc. We can also browse and down load audio, video, graphics, flash, text etc. for any purpose but we should know the correct procedure to browse. As teacher we can browse information to teach like basic of computer from the website baycon group.

On 7/7/2015 we looked at web research like basic search and advance search. Some of the new information I got from the lesson was different types of web browsers. I came to know that Google is the best web search tool for various purposes and provides range of useful features and products.  We can simply type the topic you want to explore in the search box and click on google search button and the result will be displayed in the screen within a second.
The lesson of 8th July was a new topic about google forms, google documents, google slides and google sheets.  I used it for the first time and I had tough time get into the page.
On 9th July we learnt more about google drive as online drive to save, share and synchronize. It was further discussed on how to use google forms, document, and drive in our classroom teaching. I came to know that google drive is used in storing lesson plan and T/L materials.  We can use it to save and share resources. We can use it anywhere where there is internet and to use the saved documents.
The google docs is of immense use for teachers for collaborative lesson planning, improve the writing process, reading response journals, track students homework and many more.
We tried using google forms to carry out a small survey as a part of assignment during RS class and it is very useful to distribute survey questionnaire and collect response and do the analysis of the result. It will save our time, energy and resources having not to print, circulate and collect back the forms which is time consuming and lengthy process. We can use googles forms to maintain formative and summative assessment of children in the school.
On 10th July 2015, the lesson was on blog and wiki which is yet another new thing I learnt after joining this module. Blog is the website to maintain and share information. In the blog we can give comment but cannot edit on the page. I even created blogger address of mine as http://gangzorps.blogspot.com. 
Use internet to share and edit materials to consolidate their ideas
Wiki is the website to maintain and share information to our friends whereby viewers can comment and edit on the web page.
We also carried out minor assignment and it was to search ten useful educational websites related to our area of studies and discuss how each one of these will help us to improve quality of teaching and learning.
Some of the website I have browsed and found are as follow:
1.       https://www.brainpop.com
6.       www.starfall.com
Thus the above are some of the websites which I found it useful and authentic. This experience indeed will enhance the knowledge of both teachers and learners to learn whatsoever as per the changing need of time and techno-world. Many are being misguided by unauthentic web sites. Therefore it is very important for teachers as well as the students to select the appropriate website to get factual or meaningful information. In due course of doing this assignment I have learnt how to go about with authentic websites.  


MS word activities:

The first activity was to create a teaching time table which I found comfortable because I have been preparing such table in my school for a week for different classes.

The second activity was to do with different fonts styles like Times New Roman, Arabic, Calibri, Arial  and increasing and decreasing font size and making it bold, Italic, changing colour, striking different lines. This activity was also not very difficult but one should read the instruction carefully before attempting to do it.
The third activity is about formatting the paragraphs, which was little new and to be honest I have been using left alignment, right alignment, center alignment and justify but after doing this assignment I have learnt many more regarding spacing, indent, paragraphing etc.

The fourth activity was to put triangle and an arrow over it and group them together which I found, which I found little tough. I had to seek from my friends over the phone to complete this question correctly. 
The fifth activity was similar to question four but the shape is circle. It is a new thing I have learnt from these activities.
I thought sixth activity will be tough but when I actually attempted, it was not very difficult and it was just to insert by selecting from the option given under equation.

I found the seventh activity very interesting except mail merge which I am still doubtful. I enjoyed designing certificate, header & footer, invitation card, news paper but mail merge was the toughest one. 
This activity on ms word really helped me and widened the horizon of my knowledge.
We have done two project works in group by communicating to our group members over the email and phone to complete it successfully.
The projects works are to use educational soft wares like Wonder Share Quiz Creator and Camtesia studio to design teaching and learning activities.
We did both the project works simultaneously because the due date was same that was 10th October. First of all I down loaded the soft ware wonder share quiz creator to design quiz questions and looking at the sample questions designed questions from our textbooks using different question types. It was not an easy job to set question as per the requirement. Of course to write a question from different question type is easy but inserting audio and clips was very difficult task. Any way we could complete it with much difficulty and submitted on time. In fact it was very interesting and worth learning which can be used in our school to design questions for quiz competition among the houses to make it more sparkling and interesting to the participants and audience.
The second project work was to make video tutorial which is yet another interesting and most difficult job to me. Firstly we discussed and planned a lesson from class IV maths and the topic was quadrilaterals. We agreed to teach different components by different members of the group and my share was to carry out students’ activity to find congruent sides and angles of quadrilaterals. To carry out this activity, I had to call and ask the students to show congruent sides and angles of a given quadrilateral drawn on the board. I had to teach the lesson more than three times to reduce the size of video clip because I could not share it to other group members who was suppose to put in Camtesia studio software to publish the complete video tutorial by collecting from all the group members and upload it for assessment. When I carried out for the first time it took me more than nine minutes which I could not send through email and I tried to share from google drive but unsuccessful. Then I tried for second time with mobile which took me more than six minutes but image was upside down and could not rotate.  When I tried for the third time it took me about five minutes which I could not upload again. Finally I tried my best to make the activity as short as possible and it took almost three minutes and the file size was 315 MB which I could share through google drive. To complete this project on video tutorial I had to run three times to Community Information Center which is about 5km drive because I am using data card and I could not upload and share at all.
Thus the above are some of the interesting activities I learnt from the module ICT in education. In due course of doing this assignment I have learnt many things like using google drive, google doc and google forms. Now I know how to store information and documents on google drive which can be stored forever without a risk of getting corrupted. Herein, I would like to thank the module tutor for giving such kind of opportunity in which I would not have learnt if this opportunity was not given. Once again, I would like to thank sir for the inspiration and support and looking forward for the same.
 

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