Module 6

Hiya All,

How in the heck are youse all? Well it is holidays so naturally I am happy as a pig in mud, haha! Yet here I am blogging in school holidays. What am I doing to myself. I must admit, here comes the nerd again, to being quite excited but some of the things I have been learning. I am trying to create a blog for my class. Some of the Web 2.0 tools I have been discovering have fit quite nicely into this blog. I see the future of children's learning and it is new and exciting.

Ok, I am getting carried away. On the down side setting up things and access issues are at the moment still a barrier but there are some interesting ways to change how the children are learning I think. This gets me to the first new tool we looked at in this module, bubbl.us. I have already used this in the classroom and think it is a new and interesting way of brainstorming with the children and also organising information into categories and subcategories which can be challenging for the children. Wouldn't it be great if on a SMARTBoard you could write into each bubble with your SMARTBoard pen.

Anyway on to glogster. This is quite an exciting new tool also. I have not really used it too much in my class but I think from next term I will use it more. I know the Year 6 teachers are using it widely and effectively to present students information in a new way. In some ways this tool allows the teachers to step back. A glogster poster pre-prepared can be the input tool for the student allowing them to spend more time assisting groups of children. It is the future I see, haha!!

I am hoping that I will be able to use these tools and become familiar with them and place them in my blog. As I said with ICT accessing and reliability issues, I can see a lot of the tools I will now be using will be particularly good in helping to push those Gifted and Talented and genuinely interesting children as they will be able to take extra strides in their learning at home. Those children who are motivated and interested will be able to use these tools to sate their curiosity. I hope. Of course it depends to a large degree on my own creativity which is slightly unfortunate, haha!!