Melissa

Day 1

I can now access Wikis! I have never used wikis before so it was good to have a structured introduction to this. I feel it is very similar to Moodle, but you can't lock it down as much as Moodle, its not as private.

The introduction of new tools was good. Such as Visual ranking was great. You are able to put in what you like and then the students can rank them, then compare them to the rest of the class (however not sure if it is the ACTUAL average, as with the one we created ourselves showed a completely different set of results than what we had, and we were the only ones that had ranked them!!) The visual ranking tool was great, easy to use and I can see the possibilities. Only problem is finding the time to create the access data for the class to use these tools.

Day 2

Having more time to use the actual plan and get into the nitty gritty of planning was a good opportunity to see how this works, but again time is a factor.

Day 3 The instructions to do digital copyright was interesting to figure out! It's amazing how many times we use images and don't acknowledge the owner. The tool we learned today was 'Showing Evidence'. This tool will be great for those students who have no idea how to structure an essay, as they would be able to plan out the structure within the given guidelines and then write it out successfully. There would be many different situations where you could use this, starting from the basics in yr 8 through to supporting the students with needs. Again more time to write the plan is great. I have actually changed my plan from 'Money, Money, Money' to 'water', as I found it difficult to think of a tool to use and how that could utilise the things we have learned in this course. Trying to remember all the things we need to is a bit confusing, but sharing our sources and docs we have developed while here has been great as it has prompted me to write/use things I may have forgotten.

Set up a reasonable amount of my unit plan which was good, but I think that using the IT tools need a little more explanation, as the way I was thinking is different to the way that it should be used. (But I can, and will, make it work the way I want :))

I think if anything else enters my head my neck is going to snap off!!!

Day 4

These last four days have been very intense and completely what I was not thinking. I thought it was going to be a course that helped us learn how to use the computers better so we could transfer that knowledge to teaching others at our worksite. It is now actually a course that teaches us new tools to take with us to show to the other staff at our site.

visual ranking tool seeing reason tool showing evidence tool How to use wikis - upload to - edit - create digital copyright - copy/paste owner and licence learnt about many different webistes - prezi - eduorigami - creative commons - you tube - bit.ly - wallwisher - evernote - flickr engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate many 'shortcuts' and key demands for the Mac that I like using on the PC
 * __WHAT I HAVE LEARNED__**

The next step is to think how are we going to present this to the staff that are interested? How are we going to find the 10 that we need to train? How can we make this fun and enjoyable enough to keep staff engaged long enough to complete the course???