Digital Storytelling

Today we used Microsoft Movie Maker to try making digital stories or educational movies. There are many other pieces of software that allow you to do the same, some are more complicated than others.

Some possible educational uses of digital storytelling are:

• Producing a fictional story written by the students
• Producing a factual text, eg. All about cats
• Producing a timeline of the student's life
• Producing an instructional text, eg. how to make a paper aeroplane

What other uses can you think of? Post some examples if possible.

Make your own IWB

Go to this link to see how you can create your own Interactive Whiteboard. (Joe)

http://www.ted.com/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

Technology and Learning

While 'constructivism' and 'inquiry-based' learning are hot topics in education today, they are not new concepts. These approaches to learning have been present in classrooms for many years now however the available technology has not necessarily supported it. Now, with Web2.0 and the rise of social software, etc. there are more opportunities for technology to support this approach to education. (Joe)

Learning Objects--WISC-ONLINE

(Azalea)There are sufficient learning materials embraced in this website, referring to different fields like business, health, technical, general education and so on. This website is a good learning platform for sharing and acquiring resources, although most of these resources are presentation and information objects and simply designed with the performance which is mostly like Power Point. But, many of these learning objects have their own ways to stimulate users’ thinking, like giving multiple-choice questions or examples associated with the content. I think it is one way for motivating learners; however, it is still lack of interactive function established between users and knowledge providers. For evaluating its usefulness of teaching and learning, I think it suits those self-learning learners who have foundation knowledge in a certain area, and is a good source of reference resources for teachers. But, as these learning objects cannot be rebuilt or split for reuse, it is hardly to be a component of courseware.

Combining Visualization and Interactivity

Multiple representations, modalities and multimodalities

Dual coding

Gestalt Principles

Limitations of Short-term memory

(Azalea)

This Information Processing Model shows us a clear picture about the procedures of information transformation. See below:

Daniel Churchill's Paper

Here is the link to "Towards a useful classification of learning objects"

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9g4336282u640184/fulltext.pdf

Reminder: Group work for Lesson 3

Homework 1

Search for and explore:
•Limitations of Short-term memory
•Gestalt Principles
•Dual coding
•Multiple representations, modalities and multimodalities
•Combining Visualization and Interactivity

Homework 2

# Identify one useful learning object (LO) from the Internet
# Reference this LO in the RISAL
# Embed RISAL Link in your blog
# Write a blog post with short review of its usefulness for teaching and learning
# Embed your tag clouds from RISAL in your blog

http://interactivenarratives.org

Add some comments about what you think of this online resource...

http://interactivenarratives.org

8th Feb Presentation Slides for Learning theories

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg2vcf68_456dcpqpdfh&invite=570290545

About TED.com

http://www.ted.com
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 500 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

RISAL

Here we can discuss what we are doing with RISAL.

http://risal.cite.hku.hk/login.php

Sharon's RISAL tag cloud:

Details for mindmap

http://www.mindmeister.com/?first=true

Username: tametiger2010

password: tametiger

Cognitive Tools

Add your posts about some of the examples of cognitive tools from session 2 notes...


•Here are some examples developed mostly by students:Typhoon➔Drying Rate ➔ Multiplication of Fractions ➔ Learning Theories ➔ Perspectives ➔ Magnetic Fields ➔ Air Pollution ➔ Photosynthesis ➔ Waist Recycling ➔ Marketing Plan ➔ Animated Gifs ➔ Geography Decision Making Exercise ➔

•Review some of these examples and then select one for your review. Provide brief review in your Blogs (you might be asked to present).

Expert & Novice (Sharon)

chapter 2 How Experts Differ from Novices

I quoted this from page 19. It is talking about the differences between expert and novice:

We consider several key principles of experts' knowledge and their potential implications for learning and instruction:

1.	Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2.	Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3.	Experts' knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is ''conditionalized" on a set of circumstances.
4.	Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5.	Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6.	Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.