I thought this presentation was excellent! The use of animation and Voki intrigued me. Voki is a cool animation program where you can synchronize your voice with a cartoon characters mouth. A primary school teacher in Geelong, Victoria, Australia named John Pearce’s talks of the obstacles we will encounter with technology, but also how to overcome them. His presentation is divided into 7 topics. I will touch on the topics I was most interested in.
Becoming an Agent of Change
Many teachers, especially of older generations dismiss the use of technology in their classrooms and prefer their traditional ways. Because of all the new genres of literacy, these stubborn teachers will soon be teaching literacy history. We have to look at accepting and understanding technology as part of our jobs. If we do not students will continue to learn about technology in a less structured format.
Safety Issues
Numerous teachers are afraid to implement online assignments because of the risk they are putting their students at. By now most threats have been recognized and ways of dealing with these matters have arrived. There are ways to make blogs and other online assignments only available to your “friends”. Proper screen names and careful monitoring can be set up by the teacher. John used a neat analogy between children using technology and children swimming. There are dangers involved with both activities. It is one thing to tell a student what the proper swimming strokes look like, but to actually put them into the water and have them discover it for themselves is the best way to learn. As long as we take the desired precautions students can remain safe.
Blogging
Mr. Pearce basically touched on what we as class have learned about blogging. Blogging has endless opportunities and can be very educational. The best part is that others can see the work you post, not just your teacher, peers and parents.
Copyrights
Many teachers worry about their students using copyrighted work. Some students just go onto Google and copy and paste copyrighted work into their own, which raises problems. Greats sites such as Flickr and Pod Safe Music make this issue easy to avoid.
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I like how John compared online assignments and swimming with children. For parents of students who oppose to online learning I think this would be a good example to explain the benefit of taking a risk. By allowing students to take a risk and responsibility of their own work, they most often learn more and have outcomes that are more successful.
[...] was reading Brianne Pister’s blog and I came across this site called Voki. It is a really neat site where you can create a [...]