I really enjoyed reading what Julia had to say about LAMS in her post The Wolf and the LAMS. It has a lot of potential for helping students to learn languages as it is interactive and allows for a lot of communication based activities and tasks. Christopher Alexander gives an easy to understand overview of what LAMS is and explains the benefits that it can have for teaching and learning, An Overview of LAMS, which I found very useful as I was not at all familiar with this program before. I can see very practical uses for it in the classroom, especially the opportunity to use it as a learning network between students here and in other countries (as mentioned in my previous blog modern day penfriends). Again it’s emphasis is on the autonomy of students and encouraging them to take control of their own learning and extend it as far as they can. Another important feature of LAMS is that it is not just for students’ learning, teachers can also access LAMS to find lesson plans, resources and innovative ideas for using LAMS in their classes. There are several sites (like the youtube video above) to help teachers get started with LAMS and to continue to expand their own learning along with the students.
There are a number of reasons why googledocs is a practical way to access all of your documents (see tutorial above). Personally I have found it helpful because I have been living between two destinations and two PCs which means I either e-mail myself the work I have been doing, creating many copies of the one document, as in the video or I save things on my USB key which, despite being the super-organised person that I am, I do not always remember to pack, which leaves me in a difficult situation. Googledocs is great because as long as you are connected to the internet you can access any of your documents and as mentioned in the tutorial, it is not just word documents, you can do spreadsheets and presentations. Miriam’s blog posting about google docs was really helpful as it explained how this program can be used to help students too. It is a great way for students to work collaboratively on projects, it is free and very easy to use and most importantly students will no longer be able to use the excuse “I forgot my homework”, everything can be seen in their googledocs account. I also appreciated Miriam’s points about the downside to googledocs. It is important that teachers be aware of both the positive and negative aspects of the technology they are using especially when working with young people. It is a good idea to seek professional opinions from peers or to do some research before using the software in class, just in case.
Chris Betcher’s blog posting, The Truth is Out There has really shed some light on the article that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald about PLC’s experiment into allowing students to use whatever resources they can to help them in their exams. The article merely introduces the idea to the public but Chris, being a teacher at the school and having discussed the idea with its creator, Deirdre Coleman, explains the ideas behind its invention and why it has come about. During practicum I realised the impact that technology is having on students, particularly in the realm of assessments. With an endless amount of resources to consult, cases of plagiarism are becoming much more prevalent and a lot harder to detect. This is a factor that cannot be avoided and with technological advancements will become even more commonplace. Accepting this and thinking about ways to make this a positive is essential and I think PLC are on the right track and everybody will eventually have to follow suit. Chris makes a really valid point about the futility of learning chunks of information just to pass an exam and then never using it again when what is really important is critical thinking . With the vast amounts of information available and the fact that anybody can publish this information on the internet the danger now is that much of it is not authentic. What is important is for students to be critically evaluating this information and not just accepting things at face value. Due to the Net Gen’s need for speed they can often be found to take the easy road, this is where they need a motivator and a guide, these are some of the new role of the teacher.
I found some very interesting points in Will Richardson’s blog posting, Reading Online is Not Reading on Paper. It is essential that teachers, old and new be aware of the pitfalls for including ICT in the classroom. While this kind of technology in the classroom is new the technology is not new to those people in the classroom. The digital natives have been exposed to this technology since the day they were born and use it on a daily basis to access all types of information and for many different reasons. Although the students may be more comfortable with this kind of technology, one thing they don’t have is a teaching degree. It is the teacher’s job to ensure that the technology is being integrated in an authentic and meaningful way. The American government is complaining that introducing ICT into the classroom has not improved students’ skills and knowledge but it is more complicated than simply making the technology available. Teachers must be trained in how to incorporate it into their pedagogy not the other way around. Richardson refers to Bauerline’s article, Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind in which another major problem facing the Net Gen is revealed, the deterioration of their reading skills now that the majority of their reading takes place on the computer. Jacob Neilson’s study showed that the majority of subjects, rather than “reading linearly, sentence by sentence tended to jump around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and colour and typeface variations.” Also he found that the attention span for reading has greatly diminished, this is a scary thought for literature and language in general. While learning different ways of reading different media is important a balance should always be maintained. A major focus in education at the moment is literacy, perhaps Nielson has discovered a contributing factor to the poor levels of literacy found in the Net Gen. Students need to be encouraged to engage in litterature in all forms but especially novels and material that will challenge them and enhance their literary skills.
I found some very interesting points in Will Richardson’s blog posting, 