Rene’s thoughts…

Results of Portfolio Item 3

Evaluation: I found this web-quest to be very unique, informative & geared to kindergarten, year 1 level. I gave the web-quest 45 out of 50 because of its many great attributes. Overall visual appearance was exciting, fun and cute, it engaged with its audience. Navigation around the web-quest was simple and easy and did not waste time. The mechanical aspect was perfect, all the links to the resource and work sheets were established, and the grammar was correct. The introduction posed a question to the students, and related to their interests and prior knowledge of animals. The students had a self evaluation sheet on that they had to fill out, which got them to critique themselves, the level of the task was suited to the age of the students, it gave resources, and required them to use some higher order thinking skills, but the downfall is that there were only one resource for each animal, it could have maybe used some more. The clarity of process was explicit and allowed for the students to follow the steps. The task required the students to choose the animal they would rather be. The activities got the students to do this. The criteria was a great, in many aspects because it outlined what was expected, but then also made the students self evaluate.

Results of Portfolio Item 3

Evaluation: I found this web-quest to be completely useless in getting the children to use high order think & skill to find out information about sharks. I gave the web quest 11 points out of 50, because of many disappointing features in the task.

First the overall layout on first glance was boring, colour was non imaginative, there were no pictures except for 3 or 4 moving icons of sharks. Getting around the web-quest was not that easy either, the lesson set out for the students is confusing and does not allow for any evaluating or high order processes to be involved. Many of the resource web pages had broken links, 3 in total. Introduction is just a sentence, no question posed or problem to solve. It doesn’t alert the reader to what may lie ahead. The standards expected of a web-quest are not displayed and do not relate to knowledge the students already know. The task is too complicated and not well explained – it needs to be more explicit in what it expects the students to do and achieve. They must search for information themselves (which may or may not be relevant or reliable to the task), the process describes that they must do a commercial or adventure story for sea world using the inspiration program, ven diagrams and maps, it does not clearly explain step by step how to achieve a good outcome on the task. There are few steps and no assigned roles. The resources were very mundane and actually non-usable to the students as many of the links were broken. Most of the information could have been found else where example encyclopaedias and probably would have been more reliable. The criteria given did not explain to the students how they would obtain good marks, but focused more on collaboration effects.

Week 4’s study guide was all about word processing. It was nothing new to me, as i have been using all kinds of word processing programs for years, with school and work. The study guide was very useful though in reiterating all the different functions that exist in Microsoft word.  I do want to express my concerns with the portfolio item 2 task. I completed the task with all the requirements, all the columns, and explanation at the end and everything else. I used word 2004. When i loaded it onto the blog it opened fine on my lap top and home cpu. I decided to check this at work to make sure everything was correct and that it would open correctly but every computer i checked on it would change the format. I spoke to my boss who told me that this was most likely because all the computers at work bar one are windows 97′. The one computer that did open up correctly had windows 2002. So that was a concern of mine.Study guide 5 as well as the lesson in week 5 was all about web quests. I had no idea how complicated  web quests were. They incorporate so many different components so that the students are involved and use their skills to complete the web quest. A web-quest is essentially an inquiry based activity that uses skills for evaluating and controlling different situations. This is called problem based learning. There are different sections to web quests – introduction, task, process, evaluation, conclusion and teachers page.  A successful web-quest involves the students to not only seek out information but uses their skills to evaluate and plan structured answers and outcomes for the task at hand. A poor web-quest just gives information to the students and then gets them to answer basic questions and simple tasks that defeat the purpose of really getting the students to use high order thinking.

Portfolio Item 2 was a Comparative Search Engine task that involved evaluating search engines and their effectiveness in producing accurate and relevant results. Click on the link for a detailed explanation of my findings.

Well, its a bit confusing to say that our study guides and our tutorials aren’t in line with each other, so it may get a bit confusing, i got a head of myself last week and wrote about week 3’s study guide in last weeks posting. I spoke to my tutor and he advised me this is fine. Week 4 & week 5 study guides will get covered in next weeks postings, because we are kinda skipping week 4 study guide in tut because we all should know about word processing, so i will be writing about that in the next blog after i have done the portfolio task.Anyway, in addition to last weeks post about the study guides, some extra stuff i learnt in my tut this week was more in depth about web terminologies – such as URL’s and hyperlinks. It is interesting how simple we think the internet and the web is, but it really isn’t. Everything i wanted to say i wrote in last weeks blog. So Mr Lee, please take everything i wrote in last weeks blog into account for this weeks blog. 

So this week in tut, we learnt about the internet. You know i never knew how complicated it was. An “Information Superhighway” our tutor calls it. Well it really is. Its a series of globally interconnected computer networks, hence the word Internet. So some of the definitions that we use in everyday language for the are as follows:IP – Internet Protocol, TCP – Transmission Control Protocol, HTTP – Hypertext Transport Protocol ,WWW – World Wide Web & e-mail – Electronic mail.I already knew about the world wide web and email but it was interesting to find out IP, TCP & HTTP.Here is some of the interesting points i learnt about in my tut this week:

•   The internet works on a client/server basis - i.e. we both send and receive goods. A great example is the program Limewire (a downloading program) – when we download a song we are the client, but when we share our information and someone downloads a file that we have we are the server, hence it being a client/server basis.
• The Internet is the structure for everything that goes on in the interconnected world. It is the framework in which programs such as emails, search engines and much more run.
• Each computer is linked to a router whether it be in a local network or just a single home computer – with that comes a DNS  - Domain Name Server –  this is the IP address/Name. It is the identity of the router you are using etc.
• Email – is actually more complicated that just the web, meaning it takes more steps for an email to be sent and received than it does to look up a website or use a search engine. It is actually quite complicated.
• Malware – is internet threats.
• The end of the web address can tell you many things, if it ends in au it is an Australian site, uk it is an English site, ca it is a Canadian site. If a website ends in .com if often means it is a commercial website.
• You can type in the actual IP address (numbers) in the address bar and it will take you to the site you want to go.

These were the main ideas i pulled out of the tut. It was very informative and answered a lot of questions i didn’t know i wanted answered. Stay tuned for next weeks updates! 

Here are the results of my Personal Competency Test I found that in most answers I was either a level 2 or 3. I find that im not very good with creating hyperlinks, but yet i can remove them quite well. Im not competent at all with editing or doing anything with a video file on the computer except for opening and watching the video file. I not a 100% in using spreadsheets. I like to consider myself quite computer literate as i know how to use microsoft and apple mac computers. I would like to learn several different programs – smart boards are number 1 on my priority list. Adobe Photoshop, spreadsheets ie Excel. I know that my students will always be a step ahead of me in technology but i will be trying my best to keep up.