Rene’s thoughts…

Trek 2007… Here is my Photo story. It is title Trek 2007, it is the shortened name for my tour i ventured on last year whilst i was in America. I hope you enjoy it and get a glimpse of what i saw.

This is my powerpoint presentation, it represents my inspiration mind map that i completed for portfolio item 6. Powerpoint was quite easy to use, i have been using this program for a while now. I have used the program during high school and for one of my presentations in university. It is simple and fun to use. I enjoyed making this presentation.

I researched interactive whiteboards. It was an interesting topic to do, i thoroughly enjoyed doing the mind-map. Inspiration is an easy, user friendly program. This is mind-map, im quite proud of it. 

Over two weeks we had to construct an excel spread sheet. It was a grade book and it must incorporate simple and complex functions. Aimee White and myself worked on this grade book together. Here it is: Grade Book Spread Sheet

Here is my Autobiography check it out!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

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.

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.