Weekly Report & Reflection Post #9

Hey Everyone
I hope that you all had a fantastic week. Mine was extremely stressful once again, but its that time of year. I feel like I am struggling to stay in the game, but in exactly one month today I will be completely done and Christmas break begins!
 

Synergis Education. (CC) 2014

This week in session 9, we explored VoiceThread and Polldaddy. Personally, I really enjoyed what each tool brought to the table. To begin, VoiceThread allows you to up load a presentation, documents or images,  record your voice, add text comments and you can even invite people to be part of your VoiceThread. Voice thread allows for many educational opportunities inside and outside the classroom. At anytime, anywhere, students can invite other students to their VoiceThread and allow for others to comment on and add to the VoiceThread. It can be a place where new ideas are developed and where collective knowledge arises. Polldaddy was another tool that I explored. This tool has a lot of potential in the classroom and I personally enjoyed learning about this tool. With Polldaddy, you can create surveys, polls, quizzes/tests, and have your content rated. In an educational setting, you could create a class review that all students can access for a test that they have coming up, or you can create a poll for which day each student would like to present on. This tool is great because it can keep the teacher informed on how students are doing in the class(ie. how they did on the practice test). I think that this tool will be very beneficial for me in the future as a teacher and it is something that I will now add to my PLE under commuication. I think that even for group projects at school in  university this tool can come in handy. For example, last year I was in a stats class where I cad to form a case study on a particular topic, find data and analyze it. If I knew of Polldaddy I could have easily created a survey about a topic and had people fill it out. This would be very authentic data and very practical to collect.

Polldaddy. (CC) 2014

In regards to Digital rights and responsibilities, while using VoiceThread, it is very easy for individuals to make inappropriate 'commenting' on another individuals VoiceThread. There may be times when people disagree on what is being commented on, and this can cause brutal retaliation and possible tension between one another. I think that if VoiceThread was to be introduced into a classroom, teachers would have to go over not only basic rules on how to communicate on the internet, but how to appropriately make a VoiceThread with a video or audio recording. The more teachers make students aware of how to behave appropriately on the internet and what their rights and responsibilities are, the more this tool can be effective to learning. The article 'Tools for Teaching Cyber Ethics' does a great job at explaining the ten commandments of Computer ethics that I think would be great for a teacher to address when introducing tools like VoiceThread.  I think that as a developing digital citizen I am becoming more aware of what I posting on the internet and what responsibilities I have to protect myself and others on the internet. This class is really teaching me a lot about becoming a digital citizen.

In spirit of exams approaching, this weeks Feedly feed of interest is about how to de-stress from exams.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1HsY1X8ySjKBMVXPVCbP4qH/exam-stress

Thanks for reading!
Missemilyp