Week One - An Introduction

Today we looked at Wallwisher and Delicious and their use within the elective.  I am already a user of delicious and have had some experience with wallwisher previously.  There is potential to use both of these tools within a classroom setting. 

With delicious it may be useful to set up a class account which could follow them through the school.  This could contain links to websites for research, homework and previous projects.  Collaborative blogs could be bookmarked here for ease of finding.  Pupils could recommend other sites that could be beneficial through the tag system.  Pupils would need to be aware that they cannot post inappropriate links on the class page and this would provide a basis of internet safety awareness.  It also gives pupils some control over their learning experience as if they are thinking about a site to link to and the tag they will assign to that site then they will be starting the evaluation process.  To begin with it is likely that they will not think about purpose in much depth but with integration into class inputs this will become clearer.

For wallwisher, I would immediately think of a KWL grid format for planning.  Although there are other uses.  Pupils would find the concept of the wall appealing due to the visual aspect of it.  It could also be useful in areas such as health and wellbeing.  I am looking forward to using other forms of collaborative technologies and seeing how well they work in practice.  I would like to explore Google Wave in this way especially as it is such a new concept. 

At the end of the module we are planning a trip to LTS to visit the Consolarium, including Derek Robertson, this will be a great opportunity to see the work that is being done using the field of games based learning.  If you know me well enough you will know that this is an area of particular interest of mine and one which I hope to make full use of in my professional practice both on placement and in the future.

While in Glasgow we will have a look at the Glasgow Science Centre as obviously the links between technologies and science are fundamental.

My interest in the module has not changed following todays input, it still holds a lot of attraction in terms of learning and I am looking forward to the challenges ahead.