Reflection 3 Week 4

 

Travel Photos Resized with MobaPhoto - for the visual component of this weeks assignment.

For this weeks activity I thought I'd step away from linking my ICT use to Biology and go with Geography. So with that in mind I have used MobaPhoto to resize some of my travel photos from the West Coast of Australia. I definitely wouldn't have had the ability to to this without using the resizing function in MobaPhoto as these are originally high resolution images. This beats what I was doing which was importing the picture into word, resizing, then cut-and-paste into paint to save, what a long-winded approach. This would also help when emailing large image files, in my previous place of work we had a shared network drive that acted as a 'dropbox' for larger files, which was a cumbersome way of doing this, as everyone had access and could view confidential files, accidentally delete or change the file or the location of the file etc. I can see this being useful in the classroom for students to insert images into assignments, be they word docs, or something a bit more tech-happy. It would be good for their storage space and mine, and would avoid any kind of size limit restrictions which could cost time to both teacher and student.

SAMR of Online Image Sharing

• Substitute: Students use online photo sharing as opposed to taking photos, printing and displaying.
• Augmentation: Students use the tools in photosharing platforms to edit images, add labels and concept mapping features.
• Modification: Students create a series of photo-based diagrams to explain geographic principles such as plate tectonics (i.e. find images of mountains, craters, volcanoes etc to show they know the results of moving tectonic plates)
• Redefinition: Students work in groups to add images to a photosharing platform that are relevant to a concept then create a Microsoft Research Auto Collage image and speak to it as a presentation.

As we are entering an increasingly digital age I am always cautious about exactly what I want on the internet about me. I enjoy the social aspects of the web but do not like the idea of people I do not know finding out or using my personal information, particularly photos.I use email to communicate with my friends and IMs, I do not have a facebook or any other kind of social media account. I regularly check my digital foot-print and sometimes am astounded at the amount of my private information is made public such as mobile phone numbers, home phone numbers, my home address and my property history! I contact them immediately of course to get it taken down and try to track down how they happened upon this information in the first place, I usually get the good ol' fob off :)

My Musings...I've always wondered.... if you asked people to provide personal information to various institutions and people such as places of employment, banks, churches, government bodies or even just the random person walking down the street (or hiding behind a keyboard), would they freely do it...

Welcome to social media...

Why not just give these folk (or anyone with a computer) a full-colour brochure of who you are as an individual complete with a timeline, friends names, your favourite activities, workplaces, contact details, your partners name and what they like, quotes, daily thoughts on various topics, lists of attended events, and photos of you in heaps of different situations, why would you freely do it...

This being said I thought I'd have a look the Creative Commons website for this weeks activity. The purpose of Creative Commons is to license material clearly so individuals and businesses alike can confidently upload images and content and have clear agreement as to how it can be used. Content licensed under Creative Commons is ALWAYS free to share, copy and redistribute provided you abide by their four licensing terms:

• Attribution: You must always provide credit to the original author.
• Share-Alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
  
• Non-Commercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  
• No-Derivatives: You may not distribute modified versions of the work.
  

This appeals to me and my way of viewing intellectual property. Its easy to understand, the author or originator of the work knows that what they upload WILL be shared BUT under restricted circumstances (so there are no surprises) and the individual using the content is clear about how to attribute credit. 

I have previously mentioned that I have worked as a sign developer for National Parks, in that role I had to stay at the fore-front of copyright legislation and attributions as the signs I was producing had material from so many sources. Images always had to have accreditation in a specific format (anything less was illegal). Interestingly enough even though individuals drafted the text solo, because it went through so many levels of consultation one clear author was no longer evident so the Department was the only entity able to be credited with the intellectual property.

Due to my disposition with internet security I made the conscious choice not to use a file/photo/video sharing website such as Flickr for this weeks task. I was thinking that you could generate an interesting discussion in the classroom relating to intellectual property, copyright, permissions, ownership and plagiarism. This could be applied the the geography classroom by generating discussion about how students would react if they found out one of their favourite photographs that they captured on holiday and painstakingly edited to perfection, was suddenly splashed all over the front of a travel magazine with no mention of them? You could back this up with a PMI relating to uploading images on-line, I'd imagine you would see positives such as 'socially appropriate, sharing with friends, showcasing events or photography skills'. Minus' such as 'can attract unwanted attention, people can modify the image for negative purposes, once its online its very hard to un-ring that bell'. I wonder if under the interesting heading you could ask the students to check the terms and conditions of their chosen social media platform and identify who actually owns the rights to the images they upload. A lot of the time they will find that the fine print gives the platform company a pretty wide scope of things they could do if they so desired, though this rarely seems to occur.

This article is two years old and a lot may have changed since but it outlines in plain-english who owns what on social media accounts, click here to have a look.

This could also form a conversation in the science classroom whereby intellectual property is held in very high esteem. The scientific community is very protective of individual ideas, hypothesis, contributions to theories, experiments, notions and pretty much any kind of texts, which is understandable considering the amount of dedication it can take to prepare these things.

 An emphasis could be made about plagiarism in higher education institutes for students intending to go to University.

Pug Voki with my voice - for the audio component of this weeks assignment.

Multi-modal discussion 

To cater for the vast array of diversity in students learning types, multi-modal teaching methods should always be used. Students learn in a variety of ways that are generally categorised into:

1.  Visual - Picture
2. Auditory - Listening
3. Kinesthetic - Movement

Multi-modal teaching implements activities and teaching strategies that incorporate all three. This is an umbrella approach to differentiated learning, which is important as students can furthermore be diverse in the learning styles from subject to subject, for example for biology you could be very much a visual learner, using diagrams and observing patterns but for English you may be a auditory learner, gaining more information from listening to the teacher, or through song etc. Multi-modal teaching supports the individual student learning style as well as re-enforcing the information by repeating the message across different modes. If a teacher is receptive to this, they may also encourage assignments to be presented in a variety of modes, for example, if you are a Kinesthetic learner in a science class and struggled writing up reports from experiments, perhaps you could perform another experiment on video displaying the skills you have learnt and explaining the scientific concepts verbally.

I found this list in Meris Standsbury's (2008) article to be rather helpful when justifying why ICT's are useful learning tools:

* Multimedia Principle: Retention is improved through words and pictures rather than through words alone.

* Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near each other, rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

* Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

* Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.

* Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

* Individual Differences Principle: Design effects are higher for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners. Also, design effects are higher for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners.

* Direct Manipulation Principle: As the complexity of the materials increases, the impact of direct manipulation (animation, pacing) of the learning materials on the transfer of knowledge also increases.

Therefore, students engaged in learning that incorporates multimodal designs, on average, outperform students who learn using traditional approaches with single modes, the report says.

I think you could probably add to that list: ICTs are relevant and embedded into students social and emotional lives, and students learn best when the learning is relevant to them, so use ICT's as a common reference point. I will reference the points in this list to justify the use of ICTs when I am on-ground in the classroom, as most teachers I have spoken to thus far seem to share the opinion that ICTs are nice for ICTs sake, but they don't specifically serve a purpose that cant be achieved with traditional means.

Movie of some of my travel photos using Windows Movie Maker - for the video component of this weeks assignment.

 

Now here's the kicker - to make this move I used images that I own so the photo credit is mine (c) but the song is not. Audio credit:

Coghill, J.,Collins, J., Fanning, B., Haug, I., Middleton, D. (2000). Waiting for the sun. [Recorded by Powderfinger] on Odyssey Number Five [CD]. Brisbane Qld. Grudge/Universal.





References

Henderson, R. (2012). Teaching Literacies: Pedagogies and Diversity in the Middle Years. South Melbourne, Vic: Oxford University Press
Meris, S. (2008). Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning. Retrieved from  http://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/03/26/analysis-how-multimedia-can-improve-learning/