TECH PLAY 3: Tools for Creativity

My reflection this week covers creativity tools and discovering the benefits they will have on my students.  In previous reflections I have covered the use and effectiveness of blogs and ePortfolio tools. Today I will be diving into how Voki’s and Prezi’s can help students’ creativity.

http://www.voki.com/
My Voki

Voki’s are creative “Speaking” Avatars. They can be used as interactive lessons, introducing new technology, enhancing language skills, for homework, and projects galore. Students can create their own Avatars, using their own voices and these Voki’s can be posted to any website, blog, or profile.

Voki’s are engaging to the students and allows them to create an avatar for presenting information to the world in a safe manner.

Voki’s are very easy to use and control. Students need little instruction to use the tools in building their avatars.  As an educator, I will be able to easily add lessons and review what the students create before posting.

Another tool that Voki has is called Voki classroom. It easily adds technology to every unit of study and it is quite affordable.

www.prezi.com/

   Prezi is an online storytelling tool for presenting creative ideas on a virtual canvas. It can be used for group projects or interactive classroom sessions. There is an importing tool for power point presentations. Prezi can be accessed from anywhere. It is the perfect tool to inspire creativity in students.

   Designing tools that bring out students creativity can be a challenge. That’s why I am thankful for tools like Prezi and Voki. They fit into the TPCK model especially easy. The affordances of this technology bring access to easy to use tools to infer better collaboration with students at home and around the globe. English, History, Art, Drama, Music teachers to name a few may utilize this technology for essays, lectures, plays, musicals, and etc. It would be nice to see how the pedagogical aspect is fortuitous. As a PE Teacher I could use these tools to have my students research famous coaches in the NFL and have them design Prezi’s with their favorite sayings, who they coached for, and  have them show why they were so successful in the teams they led to such success. Then using these tools brings about a NEW creativity aspect. I have learned that creativity is novel, effective, and whole when inserted properly.

   Other ways these tools may be utilized would be in setting up introductions at the beginning of a new school year. Each student would set up their own Voki that would consist of introducing themselves to the class. I would have them describe their name, grade, and to name one thing that no one knows about them that they will share. This could all be done in a sixty second delivery.

   Finally, creative tools turn dependent students into independent ones. Having them discover that they can take charge of their own growth in education, develop critical thinking logic that they never realized they could accomplish, and seeing how Bloom’s taxonomy is real in their lives through their creativity, evaluation techniques, and that they can analyze, apply, understand, and remember. This is ultimately when I will feel successful as a designer of instruction. 

TECH PLAY # 2 ePortfolio Tools

   This week I have been exploring and play-testing with different eportfolio tools. I have looked at such sites as Wet Paint, Wix, WebNode, Simply Box, Portfoliobox.net, Posterous, ScapBlog, PBWiki, Carbonmade, Folio For Me. There were several of these sites that had been removed or were not available. But the biggest drawback or obstacle for me was their difficulty in using. If I were to present these tools to some Elementary kids they would have trouble understanding how to use these even with good instruction. The site I found with the most user-friendly tools was Weebly. It consists of click, drag & drop site creator, and it automatically saves all your work.
 
AFFORDANCES

   When I teach my students, it will be wonderful to have affordances such as click and drag, easy to find tutorial helps for every imaginable issue, image transfer tool, embedding code made simple, to teach how to create a web site for building eportfolios.  

CONTEXT CONSIDERED

   When considering blogs and eportfolios I have considered kids from kindergarten to high school seniors. I feel sure that by teaching early childhood how to navigate through Blogger, they wouldn't have any trouble knowing how to design their blogs. Now when I considered high schoolers, building an portfolio on Weebly would make them very happy to have the easy set-up of click & drag, image transfer, video, prezi, embedding tools, and a very user-friendly site. I would  teach them how to collect good artifacts to use, select the most impressionable to post, how to reflect on why they are using them and what they gained by doing this project then how to connect all the above together to make an ongoing eportfolio.

     

TECH PLAY 1: TPACK Mashup in Blogging

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   This will be achieved by having the class being split up into groups of 5. Each group will be considered a team and they must choose a leader or captain. They will be given a week to come up 3 routines and post them to Safari Montage. Then on Friday they will demonstrate their routines on the smart board in front of their peers. To conclude this lesson there will be a performance of leadership by having “Game Day”. It will be time to put these routines in action. A tournament of 5 on 5 games will commence until a winner is decided. 

  The overall goal of this lesson is to teach that “Leadership” is learned and not something you’re born into. The objective of this lesson is to reinforce that “Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination”- Unknown.  The students (6th-8th grade preathletic boys) will be using Safari Montage to create three routines for wide receivers.  Safari Montage is like having a digital recorder, video player, record player, overhead projector and a laptop computer all in one place. The final will accomplish the boys learning new technology and teamwork. Each group in turn will teach the other teams their routines.

   When the boys finish their computer lab time, the last ten minutes will consist of a daily blog in blogger.com. Weeks prior to this Tech Play has been spent teaching my boys how to use blogger. They have learned how to create blogs, how to add text, images, embed technology like Prezis, , videos such as Youtube, images and videos they have created from their iphones, and how to use tutorials to help them when they become confused. How to use design templates and fonts to spice up their pages. But the  best part of these blogs will be to see how the boys develop and grow. 

TPACK Model Applied:

TECHNOLOGY

The technology used is Safari Montage and the boys will have time to play with it and learn from each other as they set up routines on a chalk board and develop the best routes for wide receivers. This can be short distance, deep pass routes, reverse routes, statue of liberty schemes, or even screen passes.

PEDIGOGY

My pedagogical design would be more along the lines of a constructivism model. It is a hands-on type of task where the affordances would be to remain on task to lead your team to have the most effective routines and ultimately win the championship game. The team will have time in the computer lab to construct their routines during the week as they use Safari Montage.

CONTENT

My content will address these Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards:

(5)  Physical activity and health. The student understands and applies safety practices associated with physical activities. The student is expected to:

(A)  use equipment safely and properly;

(B)  select and use proper attire that promotes participation and prevents injury;

(C)  include warm-up and cool-down procedures regularly during exercise; monitor potentially dangerous environmental conditions such as wind, cold, heat, and insects; and recommend prevention and treatment;

(6)  Social development. The student understands basic components such as strategies and rules of structured physical activities including, but not limited to, games, sports, dance, and gymnastics. The student is expected to:

(A)  know basic rules for sports played such as setting up to start, restarting, violating rules; and

(B)  keep accurate score during a contest.

From the New Bloom’s Taxonomy my boys will use:

-          Creating

-          Evaluating

-          Applying

OBSTACLES

My drive is to go around the biggest obstacle in most schools and that is the availability of computers in the home. Now my dilemma would be in having access to the computer lab during school hours.

The next four blogging posts consist of my research into emerging technologies and their affordances. I had the opportunity to learn about the CAD system for US First Robotics program, Legos Universe, CreatingMusic.com, Apple Apps, Safari Montage, Discovery Education Streaming, Technology Based Rubrics by Kathy Schrock, Clicker assessment Tools, and Inspiration/Kidspiration Software.