TED – Sugata Mitra: Kids can teach themselves

I was looking through TED. I found this old (2007) video my Sugata Mitra titled Kids can teach themselves. Sugata set up an experiment over some 5-6 years around India. He was curious as to whether children had the ability to teach themselves. He started the experiment in his own building. His business was right next door to a slum. He knocked a hole in the wall and inserted a computer monitor (behind protective glass) and imbedded a mouse into the wall beside the monitor. The computer was able to access the internet. Within hours he observed (cctv) that some children from the slum began to investigate. Within a matter of hours they had started to browse the internet. Self taught. Sugata went on to further the experiment in remote areas with very interesting results. Have a look at the video. Its about 20 mins long. I found it very interesting.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves

Mathletics app

My daughter struggles with maths. When she was in primary school she would use a programs called Mathletics. She could log onto the site at school or at home and do skill appropriate maths activities that her teacher could then log in and check on her progress. I have just come across this program for android smartphones. Mathletics Student and Mathletics Teacher are very useful apps that I have downloaded.

Re-blogging

Well the hot topic at the moment is re-blogging. The question of whether is is cheating seems to the main theme. I don’t think it is cheating. If I have re-blogged someone’s blog or put a link of their blog into my post it is because I have found some thing useful or of interest. I would have no issue if someone wanted to re-blog my posts. I generally, as a rule of thumb. Mention in a comment on whomsoever blog that it happens to be that I have found their information useful and am going to re-blog. I found that Hey! Miss R is of the same opinion as myself.

Learning path complete, Now its time to Reflect…

Reflection is very important as mentioned by Mrs Brown

ICT's in the classroom with Mrs Brown

It’s now time to reflect on our professional experience and what a big three weeks it has been. During the learning path I came across points about “the Reflective Teacher” which I found to be very useful to start preparing for Assignment 3.

What is Reflection and Why do we need to do it? Check out Why we need to Reflect?

Bloom Reflection raises these questions for us to consider when reflecting on our work and lesson plans.

Q 1. What did I do?

Q 2. Did I meet my goals?

Q 3. When did I do this before? Where can I do it again?

Q 4. Did I see any patterns or relationships?

Q 5. How well did I do ? What worked or needs improvement?

Q 6. What should I do next?

Check out Ashleigh’s post about her experience. I too will miss my students, it’s hard when…

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I have never used Pinterest and found this link, which was posted on Alison’s blog to be helpful.

http://alisonjackson93.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/an-awesome-ict-board-to-follow-on-pinterest-check-it-out/

Justine

Free Technology for Teachers

A great link. Thanks.

fionabudd2014

One of the important messages I’ve received during my EDC3100 course is “The value of personal networks”. Apart form Diigo, Twitter and wordpress, I am an active member of many Facebook interest groups, study groups and Special Ed groups. This morning I stumbled upon Free Technology for Teachers. This Education website provides a variety of tried and tested technology site’s, strategies and techniques covering many content areas and year levels. You may be looking for something in particular but I’m sure you’ll also discover many programs you didn’t know existed. This style of personal networking also allows you to tag and share ideas with friends and colleagues .

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IWB

The classroom that I am currently in has 5 classroom computers. There is no computer lab at the school. There is a white board that is used daily. The board is used, prominently as a projector. The spelling activities PowerPoint is played on the IWB. Video that are within the C2C lesson plan are played on the IWB. If the children are required to write down their responses from a brain storming session a word document is displayed with the responses typed and projected onto the IWB. There is no interactive use in this Interactive White Board, due mainly to a fault in the equipment. The IWB “pen” is non functioning and there was a technical problem with the white board at the start of the year that has rendered it ineffective. There is no technical support at the school. Any requests for repair need to be directed to the principle, who will organize repairs. Having no computer lab has meant that any use of the computers in the room is limited to a 1/2hr window in the “reading group” rotations. The students are then directed individually, for example, completing a picture of Rainbow Fish for english assessment. This has been time consuming and very repetitive for the teacher.

I have just completed the cybersmart module 4. Wow. Doing the simulations was very intense. I became very involved in the process and found that I was actually beginning to have a physical reaction to the process. I started to feel very nervous and that feeling increased as the simulation continued. I became worried for the boy who was being bullied and wanted defend him but also didn’t want to be picked on myself. How bizarre that I became so involved. It was difficult for me as an adult to respond appropriately. I can imagine that it would be difficult to do so as a child without all the reasoning capabilities of an adult.

If a child was in this situation they would not have the ability to rationalize as an adult does and could inflame the situation. Children like Billy can be bullied for the smallest things and other children may have a sink or swim attitude. Jump on the band wagon mentality. Internally grateful that it is not them being bullied.

I think students are using the internet frequently. The devices that the children have now (ipod, ipad, mobile phone) are all very small and able to be hidden from prying parental eyes. These devices are the child’s doorway to cyberbullying. It is very hard for parents to monitor these small devices. Even if the child does not have WiFi access on these devices, they can use any credit that they may have to jump online.

I think the connect.ed modules are up to date and relevant. It will need to be updated as the technology changes but they do address a lot of information of possible areas of risk.

Cybersmart Certificate