EDED20491 Week 3 Embedded Task 1 - Summary Blog Posting - Assessable This exercise was my first blogging attempt, but not my first experience with web-page design. As the curator of an army museum, I have written stories about other people - a LOT of stories! I tend to stay away from advertising too many personal details about myself or my family, because of cyber safety and the joys of the world-wide-web holding onto your data forever. If you google me, you will get a few hits, most of them work-related. You will also find links to information about my children such as school-related articles. One day, whilst googling myself (I know, sad, right?), I found my daughter's Instagram profile was completely accessible to everyone - EVERYONE! Ahhhh!!! I ran into her room (panic-stricken) and discovered that she had inadvertently changed a setting. I was concerned about privacy when assigned this task as a requirement for my Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching. I set up a Blogger account first, but wasn't thrilled with the layout features. Then I set up a page on Wikispaces, but didn't really like that either. Next step, Weebly - ah, now that's a little more fun! Ooh, YES, I can optimise this site for mobile devices too - students will like that!
I investigated Weebly to source its potential for use in the classroom. There is a wonderful option provided (for a fee) that allows a school or individual teacher to set up a page. Instructions for doing this can be found here. If I was using this for school, students and other teachers could become members and we could nominate editors. We could set the page access to private and keep it for members only. Alternatively, we could publish the site and share our work globally. If we were worried about offensive comments on posts, then we could block that feature or set the rule to review before posting. I found this Weebly thing a little tricky at first and I've played with web-page design before! I'm not sure how a novice would go, although Weebly does provide a beginner's guide. Navigation back and forth between design elements can be fiddly and it is not easy to align text with photos. When writing my first blog post, I embedded one photo in a text box but I didn't exactly know how I did it. I tried to embed the next photo and things went hay-wire... then suddenly it leapt into the column! I've almost got the hang of it now, but embedded pictures can still jump all over the page in editing mode, which can alter the structure. Students will need to keep a draft of their postings or they could lose everything. I noticed that you can get a zip file of your site sent to the administrator's email address. I would need to make sure that is done regularly as a backup. You could also save each page as a PDF using the print function in Google Chrome - that would help retain information. I took note in Blogger where it is possible to publish a blog post, then withdraw it from publication, edit the post and republish. That option is not available in Weebly, where you edit the post in published mode or delete it altogether. There is no taking it offline for a while - you MUST delete the post. Mistakes could easily be made by students here. It is very easy to embed links to websites within text; and uploading photos, providing links to them and giving captions is a breeze. I LOVE that I can choose from a gazillion fonts for the title bars, headings and text panels, but I can't alter them on every page (unless I upgrade to the paid version). I can add colour boxes, but can't alter the colour of the page, or provide a background picture to the page. YouTube clips and flash files are simple to add, which Generations Z just loves (see Reflections 1.1-1.3), and you can change the size of the videos. Embedding documents and other files can be tricky (see Reflection 3.1, Blogalicious) but after investigating various methods, such as saving word docs as a web page, it doesn't have to be scary. I enjoyed the use of colour-blocking to add coherency across the site and to make sections pop (see Reflection 2.1, Pedagogiwhat?). Weebly offers the option of adding apps to the editing tools. I have installed two free apps so far - the Back to Top arrow and Text Animation (I have added both to this page). There are more offered, some free but you must pay to use others. Many enhancement tools can be used in Weebly and I may explore these as I progress with my blogging. Even though Weebly is fun to play with, it is VERY time-consuming if you want everything to look pretty. Once you get the hang of it, the editing process gets easier. I think students would find this an exciting challenge! It would embrace their current knowledge of technology and allow them to further develop their skills. We could do all sorts of things - post assignments, write diary blogs, create videos and embed them, provide links to other sites, design projects, participate in other group projects, provide and receive feedback. The collaborative aspect of blogging is wonderful! Cohorts have provided some terrific feedback. One person in particular, directed me to her post which provides an excellent example of using blogging as an ICT tool for HASS, describing an activity that follows the SAMR guidelines. Other people have sent me private emails to discuss the weekly activities. Every time we work together, we develop our higher order thinking skills. Taking my cue from the post mentioned above, I realised that I need to expand my expectations of blogging. I created a small exercise to demonstrate the SAMR principles, using the Year 9 Queensland Curriculum for history and the topic of the Industrial Revolution. The first step would be to set some guidelines about access and appropriate use of the blog. These guidelines would also be placed on the blog. This exercise uses the blog at the Substitution level – for understanding and remembering. At the same Substitution level, I could embed a document onto my blog which outlines the topics of technology and transport. When looking at the SAMR level in conjunction with Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy, students would need to read, understand and remember this material. They would also need to remember to look at the blog! Next, I could post a small, Gen Z appropriate, YouTube video (see below) and ask them to answer a series of questions about the clip to engage them further at the Augmentation level. They would need to take note of key messages embedded in the clip and investigate them further. This would involve understanding, remembering and applying knowledge. They might be redirected to YouTube to look at similar videos and possibly learn and understand more about history. To work our way up the SAMR scale, to the Modification level, students could respond to comments about the embedded video and get ideas from each other. Adding to that, students could post photographs, quotes from articles, or video links relating to the Industrial Revolution. They would be asked to embed links in the photos and ensure all material was referenced. Students would be encouraged to comment on each other’s posts, providing constructive feedback and listing alternative sources of information. These activities involve higher order thinking processes, applying their knowledge, analysing sources and evaluating their significance. Looking at the Redefinition level, students would be asked to record their answers to the questions using an app like Vocaroo, or create their own group videos and upload them to the blog. The emphasis would be placed on the quality of information provided and the sharing of knowledge, not necessarily the quality of the video. The visibility of this task would encourage students to carefully consider their answers to ensure accuracy and validity, achieving the goals of evaluating, collaborating and creating. Given time and more experience, I am sure that I could think of many more ways to use blogs in a classroom. I have thought about how I could maintain blogs for all of my classes and came up with the idea that I could create ONE website, but have different blog pages for each year level. With both of my teaching areas closely related, I could have HASS pages for years 7 and 8 and History pages for years 9 -12. I wonder if that will work... hmm?? In fact, blogs themselves could become part of the historical record!
5 Comments
jo gardiner
22/3/2017 14:40:51
Awesome - love a bit of horrible histories.
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Amanda
23/3/2017 10:58:29
Thanks Jo! I have created anchor points within text and buttons on some of the pages. Great idea asking students to write code!
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Amanda
23/3/2017 20:32:38
Ah ha! "Section" just became available tonight as a page builder tool!!
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Carly Robbins
27/3/2017 20:48:42
They say you learn something new every day and I certainly did reading your summary of the functionalities of a Weebly blog! I love the 'back to the top' arrow app that you have installed on your page - I didn't know that it was possible to install these enhancement apps but I will certainly be having a play around with them on my blog now. I also found your points on backing up your blog posts really interesting - I hadn't considered this in Weebly but it would be such a shame to lose all the student's work and not have a backup. I investigated Wikis for this week's reflection and they have the ability to restore from a particular edit which would mean that data loss would be minimal. It would be helpful if Weebly had a function like that!
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Amanda
29/3/2017 18:46:04
I'm so pleased that I have "taught" someone something already! I found the 'back to the top' arrow by just playing around with the dashboard. I am sure there are many more cool features to be found if we had the time!
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AuthorAmanda is a museum curator and pre-service teacher, learning how to integrate technology with education to design creative learning tools for secondary school students. Archives
May 2017
Topic 6: Growing your pedagogy
Embedded Task 3 Embedded Task 2 Reflections 4.1-4.3 Embedded Task 1 Reflections 3.1-3.3 Reflections 2.1-2.2 Refelections 1.1-1.3 Categories |