Week 3- Learning Activities

Creating a wiki- I found that creating a wiki very interesting… check out my wiki. The website site for instructions was scaffold very clearly. I loved the idea of printing the username and password page out- I have so many logins now, I am bound to forget one of them. I am fond of the wiki tool- it can used for some many purposes. For teachers it can be used as a communication tool, for year levels or whole school.

For students it could be used as lesson summaries for homework- you would get the excuse of leaving their book at home. It’s a good way to share everyone’s ideas and a collaboration of notes. Wikis are an enjoyable technology. Students will enjoy the editing process online much more than they would paper. Wikis are a great way to help students learn to collaborate, and they will allow teachers to monitor who's making changes, to what, when.

As a future Learning Manager it will be important to model and inform students of the legal, safe and ethical behaviours when working in wikis. Students must be taught  and modeled how to acknowledge someone’s ideas and images.

Creating a website- along with this week’s activities was creating a website-check mine out, I have two.

http://www.wix.com/danni2812/danni-webquest

http://www.wix.com/raydanielle/danniraytech
One was made for SOSE last year and the other one was made for Technology this year. You can see by looking at the 2nd one, that I gained experience from completing the first one! The best thing about this tool is that it was free- it kept asking for payment though. I have never thought of making a website before I had to for SOSE than I choose on my own will to do it for technology- which I actually did enjoy and thought were tools students could use so they could take control of their own learning. Research tasks were provided and specific sites, activities and open-ended questions were given for students to investigated and research on. This specific website tool, would be very engaging for the students. For one it’s using technology, which we all know students love. With a website you can post work, create an informational site, maintain a database of links for projects and display projects. Of course keeping in mind the safe, legal and ethical requirements which need to be monitored by the Learning Manager if students are using the internet. When dealing with anything that is online, you must make sure you are safe as a Learning Manager, you are modeling safe behavior to your students and encouraging safe behavior with your students and the school.

As a future Learning Manager I am aware what copyright, fair use and copyright infringement are and the expectations the school and students have on them. Smartcopying is a website that provides information fact sheets about all the issues that students, teachers and parents need to be aware of when students are working online.

When students are working with websites I have created for them or if they are creating websites, students need to be aware of copyright, creative common licences, cyber bulling and harsh material online.

As a future Learning Manager:

• I would make student access limited and password protected. 
• If I were to scan/copy materials, I could only use 10% of materials, this is protected by Statutory Text and Artistic Licence- and acknowledge where the information is from
• If I were to upload students original work on a blog, wiki or online, I would have asked their permission, had their parents sign a consent form stating I am able to. As always stating that the work is not my own, and using a creative commons license on their work.

Would I use weebly regularly in my classroom? Yes! The privacy setting it offers could come in use! If designing a unit with specific assessment for certain dates- you could hide this from students until it was time for students to view it. But how could you monitor this?

To sum up my thoughts on using websites as a tool in my classroom as a future Learning Manager I used a SWOT anaylsis scaffold.

	STRENGTHS	WEAKNESSESS	OPPORTUNITIES For certain strategies	THREATS
Websites	·    Very informative ·    Easily to navigate around ·    Can use hyperlinks to other websites ·    Variety of different sites to create a page (weebly.com, wix.com) ·    Private function for teachers ·    Students can have their own accounts ·    You can create free accounts- free access	·    Not very interactive ·    Once published you cannot keep maintaining it (can’t add to it)	·    Students can create their own ·    Can be used so students can monitor own learning ·    Students have instant access to a wide range of online available resources ·    Can be self-directed	·    Ethical issues online- harsh content online