Peer Reviews

My Kitchen Rules (Wiki) homepage

It's coming to the end of the semester an our final submission for our last assignment is due Friday which will be a relief.

Today, I completed three peer reviews on other wiki sites. All of which were very different from ours. This was a big eye open, and it enabled us to have the opportunity to reflect on our own groups work. It gave an indication on areas our group may need to address before the submission deadline.  

Screenshot of Peer Review system

All our reviews were fairly good,in fact mostly HD's. However, those that gave credit it some areas, I wish that they could provide us with some constructive feedback for our group to  improve on as we were all just left questioning why or what can we do to improve?

Myself, Darlene, Jody and Jenny all sent through our copies of the peer reviews that we had been given to each other. This was a great way for us  all to reflect on the feedback given and make minor adjustments to our wiki.

Jody and I where also very concerned about our references page as this was still incomplete. We hadn't heard anything from Mel since she went away on holidays and we were unsure where she retrieved the images from. Jody said that she would try and search for her pictures on the internet and add them in ourselves. This was a bit inconvenient, and unnecessary. This is maybe something we should have considered as a group at the start of the task.

Final Days....

I have spent the majority of this weekend, compiling our reference list together, chasing up my group members for information. I just want to get our project finished. I feel like I am getting little input from some members of my group unfortunately some are also on holidays which cannot be helped. They  have kindly tried their best to stay in contact while away but this is difficult. Putting our reference list together has proven to be very time consuming. In doing so I also decided that I would check to insure all Hyperlinks were working correctly, which I am glad I did. I found that some were not working, the icon that links from our homepage to student page was going to the old page that had now been deleted. This needed to be rectified.

Darlene had now sent me through a draft of the powerpoint presentation for myself to edit. She had worked very hard and I was pleased with the content however I wasn't too sure on the layout (alinement of text) and choice in colour. Personally, I thought Charcoal was a little dark and did not really link to our wiki design which is blue. I made a suggestion that if she would not mind I could have play around with the layout. Darlene had expressed that she hadn't had much experience with Powerpoint and therefore was happy for me to do so. I didn't want to override her presentation that she had put so much work into so I opened a new powerpoint document, created a template and begun to copy and paste the content across before re-sending back for her confirmation and so that voice over could be added. We were both happy with the outcome.

Screenshot: Presentation Draft

Screenshot: Presentation (editing)

Additional Resources

I wanted to get an idea of what sort of information a teacher may have at hand already in their school libraries if they were wanting to do this project with their students. I decided I would search my own school library as if I was the teacher going to undertake our lesson plan and needed some extra resources such as books on Healthy eating. I discovered that there were plenty of books on health foods and nutrition under the science section. I also stumbled across a classroom video Smart Food, Healthy Body . 


Title:Smart Food, Healthy Food
Subject:Nutrition

Details: 14mins
Year: 2009
Study Level: Junior

Description:Smart Food, Healthy Food is an Australian made primary curriculum fit program that explores how nutrition plays a crucial role in maintaining a healthy body and mind, it's aim to guide students into making healthy and balanced food choices.


More details on this video can be found on the website http://www.vea.com.au/Product.aspx?id=5324 along with teacher support notes that are very useful and can be downloaded as a PDF.

Contributing to our teacher resource page

This morning I worked on adding to the teacher resources. Darlene and Jenny had compiled some resources into a word document and both sent through for myself to edit and upload to our wiki. I wanted to go through and sort these into categories eg. websites, YouTube videos, documents.... I found this very time consuming and I didn't really want to have go through and re-organise. This could have maybe been made easier by being presented in this format initially. Slowly I edited, copied and pasted the links across into the Wiki, adding the hyperlinks to pages, organising the information under their appropriate headings and adding logos/pictures to make it visually appealing.

I went back to our group Facebook page where I had shared any resources I had come across that we may have found useful and also added these to our wiki site. I also felt that it was important to include some background information for our prospective teachers on Authentic learning, and what it is about.

I am feeling tired after today dedicating about 6 hours contributing to our wiki. I have now finished our home and introduction pages, uploaded the teacher resources edited and added to these and am now reviewing the updated lesson plan Mel had recently uploaded and adding the PDF documents required for the lessons. I only hope others appreciate the amount of time and effort that I have been putting into our group project and I can only hope they are all doing the same.

'My Story' - Bookmaker for Kids (IPad)

'My Story' Apple App for IPads

I had mentioned to my group that as part of the lesson plan we could use or recommend an App to teachers for creating the class cookbook. 'My Story' was an application that my classroom teacher had used last year with a year 3/4 class to create an Ebook. I remembered that this had been a great success with the students and 
had been used for assessment of the students. I didn't know much about Apps and Ipads myself, so wanted to get a better insight into how it all works.

I was fortunate enough that this weekend that I was able to loan an Ipad from my school. I spent some time looking at the application 'My story' and went about creating an example-open with IBooks of how students can use the program, to be included in our lesson plan.

A little information about My story:  My story is a simple story maker and book creator for children available from the Apple App store. Children can draw, use photos, record voice, type and send their books to friends and family. 

I thought this app allowed some good features that would be simple for the students to create their recipes and produce a cookbook. I was excited to be able to share this with my group members who when I had previously mentioned the idea, were confused. It was difficult to explain what I had meant and how we were going to use it. By sending them the link to 'My Story'  they were be able to watch the fantastic overview video that demonstrates clearer how we could use 'My Story' on an Ipad and what its features it has.  http://mystoryapp.org/.

I was really enjoying our group task and found I was getting immersed with the authenticity of the project. I put myself in the students perspective by creating a recipe with instructions, ingredients, demonstrating the app, drawing and recording features. This later would be used as a sample resources for teachers on our wiki. However, this was where the problems started.... I had made this great sample, and I was eager share it with my group. I stupidly had assumed that I have a Mac so would simply be able to save it from the IPad onto my computer as a document and share it with the rest of my group members. I was wrong!

I tried multiple different ways....

-saving it as a PDF
-syncing the IPad to my computer 
-uploading to Dropbox
- emailing it to myself 

each experiencing further issues....

When trying to upload to dropbox I had realised that it had been sent to my ex-classroom teachers personal dropbox which I could not access. I decided that I would give her a ring to seek some advice, she had used this program before. Unfortunately, she could not remember how she had got the students work off the Ipads and could access it through dropbox her suggestion was a Google Search to figure it out, this is what she would have usually done. Far too hard... there must be a simpler solution, I kept on searching.

Next I tried emailing it as a PDF document to myself. But how do I create an email account? I had managed to connect up to my WiFi at home, but the assigned email account was my ex-teachers. I needed to somehow change this. I went into the mail and account settings, here I found the option to change this but for some reason hotmail or my outlook account were not working. A third and finally attempt with a gmail account... it worked! 

Next problem... when I opened the attachment in the email, it was opening on my computer in a program called Adobe Editions, the layout appeared distorted. How do I get Ibooks for Mac. I noticed their were a few people on Skype at the time including our Tutor Jenni, I posted a question to see if any of my peers had any suggestions.

Nicole very kindly said that she would have a look, she owns an Ipad. It opened fine on hers in IBooks. Like myself she was under the impression that you should be able to get Ibooks for Macs but I discovered after doing some further research on the web it turns out that Apple have only made Ibooks available for Ipads and Ipods at this stage.Very disappointing! I looked into other options such as Kindle readers for Mac but these only allowed you to view purchased books not read an ebook that you had created yourself.

If we are to use this as a sample for the teacher resource page we will have to include a note to say that it would require opening in Ibooks to view.

Group Meeting Thursday 2nd May

I was a little was disappointed  to begin with today that not all our group members were able to make todays meeting.  Now that we are well on our way with the task, regular communication is the key to moving forward and their thought and input are valuable. In saying that, arranging times that suit everybody is near on impossible. I really appreciate however that they had the politeness to send their apologies to the group for their absence, and was also able to send through the teacher resources that they had begun gathering. They would easily be able to reflect on what had been discussed by viewing the Facebook discussion at a time convient to them, so this really wasn't a problem.

In todays meeting we discussed at length the issues some of us were experiencing with the wiki and different browsers we were using.
I had become very frustrated when I uploaded content to the home and introductory page. The layout would initially appear fine on my screen then when it came to saving it the layout changed. Text kept moving about all over the place! I thought it might be because I was copying and pasting content that I had drafted in a word template but still after re-typing it all out it still moved about.

Screenshots: Jody and I trying to resolve viewing in different browsers.

We were not really able to resolve this technical problem completely Jodie had suggested that now she was more confident with how to create a wiki and that she was easily able to re-create the wiki to see if this would fix the formatting issues. It was worth trying...

I didn't realise that trying to upload the wiki content successfully.. that is without pictures moving and font resizing, would be so difficult!  I had just assumed that it would be the same as creating a website in which I was very comfortable with now.This was so frustrating...

I decided that I needed to learn more about Wiki's. Up until now, I had been questioning Jody when I couldn't find or work out how to tackle something on the Wiki as she was a little more familiar with its layout. Now it's time I step out on my own two feet... I needed to learn more about this! I decided to experiment by creating my own Wiki so that I could play around with it, without the fear of messing up my groups work.

I didn't have a clue where to start. I didn't even know what technology Jodie had used to create our site. I went and explored the Technology Toolbox for some guidance. 

The first thing that was of interest to me, a simple clear definition of a wiki.

"A wiki is a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often created collaboratively by multiple users." (Wikipedia, 2012).

From here I spent time browsing through some of the useful links supplied under teaching ideas and resources. There are heaps of great resources that can be found here. I just wish I had more time to explore them all. The technology Toolbox provides an overwhelming amount of resources and links to other sites for this unit and I would recommend that you initially begin your research here. You will often find most of your questions or information that you are looking and it is easy and less time consuming to navigate around then endlessly browsing the Internet, which can become a bad habit.

TeachersFirst: Wiki Walk-Through was one of the links I took a look at. It provides a step by step walk through of all the basic information you would want to know when first starting out with a wiki. I found this information very useful as it gives clear and simple explanations in which you can follow.  The site also mentions Wikispaces and PBworks as both being free wiki tools.

Google Sites was another that the Technology Toolbox offers links to. It provides all the information required, a brief overview of Google Sites, template examples, direct link to getting started which is convenient and some useful YouTube videos that I always find the most helpful to watch.

Above, YouTube video: Google. (2008, Feb 27). Google Sites Tour Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X_KnC2EIS5w

It appears Google Sites was the chosen technology Jody had been using to create our group wiki. Now I know the technology it might help with assisting me trying to work out a few of the difficulties I had been experiencing by watching a few tutorials and reading up on the sites tools and features.

While I was on the Technology Toolbox I also took this opportunity to look at the two alterative free technologies suggested. I was curious as to why Jody chose Google sites to use.  

I went straight to Wikispaces and quickly set up a account, I did not want to be doing lots of research on this as our Wiki had already been created using Google Sites and way well on it's way. This was just for my own benefit to see what other tools there were available and whether they were any easy to use? NO is the answer! I managed to create an account and set up a new project on Wikispaces, but this is all I could work out. I found the whole site very confusing! I think this is a tool I would have to do some reading up about and learn how to use it before jumping straight in a the deep end. It wasn't going to be something I could just figure out by exploring. Maybe if I took some time to watch the YouTube tutorials and examples it would become more clear.

Now I was probably just wasting time, avoiding doing what it was I was actually meant to be doing at this moment in time.  At the end of the day this was just another free web-based technology. The video overview appeared pointless as it did not appear any different from the others tools. I therefore did not bother to look any further into this site after watching the video overview. I think there is more important things I could be directing my time to with the project. I also found that I could not read the pages tabs at the top of the sites homepage to explore the site further, the text was too small making it impossible to see.

I could now understand why Jody had chosen Google Sites. This seemed the most straight forward and sensible option as it appears the easiest to learn . We do not require something that is going to be too complex to use. Everyone was going to be required to contribute to this and we did not know what each others technological knowledge and capabilities were like.

At the end of todays collboration a few of my group member's expressed that they felt they needed or wanted to contribute more to the task. We had decided as a group that our presentation should be something that is left to last after our wikis content was well on it's way. This had been Darlene's assigned part of the project. I could understand why she would be feeling like at present she was not contributing enough to the task. This was ok as there was certainly lots that could be done. I made a few suggestion on other task alternatives  and these were discussed amongst the group. I think everyone went away feeling a lot happier that they had enough to do up until our next arranged meeting together.

"Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal."

I accessed The Technology Toolbox for Educators today and was having a look at some of the technologies it suggests for collaborating. I had heard of a few of these, the most obvious being Google Docs to share files along with Google Hangout and Wiki's. We have been using Google Docs throughout Tasks 2 and 3 as external students to sign up to tasks. 

After attempting to use Powerpoint as a means of trying to express my ideas, I was intrigued by Conceptboard, a team workspace. "Work more efficiently with visual content." This could be a useful technology for Task 3, I thought. I only wish I had read some of this information earlier, so that I had time to explore further. As a visual learner I felt this might be a great way of me expressing my ideas visually. I watched the demonstration video from the link on the Technology Toolbox and was impressed. Unfortunately, this is not a free program and requires a monthly subscription, not really viable for one task but may be a consideration for future teaching.

FlockDraw on the other hand appears to be a free online whiteboard based drawing and painting tool. It does not quite function in the same way. This is only useful only for presenting picture or illustrations and to be honest you would just use an interactive whiteboard. I was a bit disappointed that the site also does not give significant detail of its available features and found that there was no good basic overview videos when searching YouTube for the technology tool. Conceptboard would be my preferred choice as has many features, such as being able to edit screenshots, highlight content, add comments. It allows for cross collaboration,video chat and live view of the board with others. 

After reading this quote by Downes. It has made me realise how it is important to remember that when working in a group, learning to interact with others and sharing is all part of learning to be inclusive as a team."It only works if they are prepared to make talking about what they are doing a part of doing what they are doing” . (Downes, 2006). 

                                        Success = working as a team

The Meaning of Team. Together everyone achieves more!

 (ViVaNSE, 2011) Retrieved from Technology Toolbox (April,2013)

Giving constructive feedback...

Obviously throughout this task we would all have different opinions and different expectations that we would expect of ourselves.  Some of my group member's sent through drafts of their content for our Wiki today. I was made to think hard and relate back to the peer review system and remember how to go about giving constructive feedback rather than negative. After all, this was a group task and we were there to support each other. It's just a case of diplomatically putting our views out there. I didn't want to go and criticise or hurt any of my groups efforts.  It is important when working in a group to consider how to voice your opinions carefully, and avoid offending or insulting anyone.

Lesson Plan (Draft): I was very happy with the progress made on the lesson plan so far. Mel had quite obviously put a lot of time and thought into the content. I had a few suggestions that I wanted to contribute. I was just hoping she wouldn't mind the feedback. I had great difficulties in trying to explain in words the things I was trying to say without sounding negative. The content I thought was great but I had a different image in my head regarding the structure of the plan. I was picturing more of an easy table layout. At present I work at a Primary School in Millner and have had many relief teachers during my time here with my year 3/4 class. I could relate back to when they would walk into my class and pick up the teachers lesson plan and could not even be bother to read the half of it. Too much description too long paragraphs. They wanted the task to be explained quickly, simply and to be able to access the lesson content fast. I wanted to try and explain this all when giving feedback to my team member but didn't know how to make it all make sense. So instead I asked her if she would mind me editing the word document so that I was able to show her what I had in mind. 

I took the word document and converted it into a table format allowing for a day,week, lesson description and resources needed as headings. There were also a few extra details that I felt needed adding which was agreed upon. We had a discussion of what sort of time frame would be expected from a year 4/5 class.  I suggested a note to say what a standard lesson is typically based on eg. 45min period and also suggesting allowing more time for some tasks like using Ipads in groups they may need more than one lesson as I realise how long things can take sometimes in the classroom and doesn't always conform to the teachers initial lesson plan.

So far in this task I believe we have been collaborating very well as a team. We have all formed good relationships with one another and have each given opinions and our own contributions to the task. Although now, considering this is a group task, I should do some background reading on what does make a good team.

My input so far... We have a name and logo!

So far I have begun drafting up the content for our home page and introductory page. This will include background and task information, suggested target year level, group members, learning outcomes, links to the WA curriculum, a description of the Authentic learning and a link to our presentation once it has been created. I believe I had now made good progress with this and have put it up onto the site for my group to comment and give thoughts and feedback on what can be done from here. 

I was starting to feel irritated that we had not yet decided on a title for our wiki resource. I was  feeling in a creative frame of mind today so decided I would think on, and create a Logo for our Wiki site. I had an idea in my head and decided to run with it...

Beginning research

I have found throughout this unit that the best way to get a clear understanding of the tasks requirements was by initially viewing the three sample sites that the tutors had put on the LMS for us. Being primarily a visual learner, having a visual representation has really helped me get a clear understanding of tasks we have been set and a good idea of the expected standard. A written description of the task may be read differently by people and can sometimes be mis-interpreted. I would also find it difficult not knowing when I had done enough to achieve the marks that I wanted without having something as a comparison.

Screenshots of sample sites 

I really like sample 3's site I thought that this would be of a good standard to set ourselves. It appeared to have addressed all the marking criteria to a high standard. Simple, clear, with easy navigation is what we wanted. I noticed that all the sites had addressed somewhere on their site about authentic learning, some more than others. This is something we will have to make sure we include in our wiki resource. I was disappointed to see that a group from last year (sample 1) had already done something close to what our group had planned to do (Healthy Eating). I was worried about this as I didn't want ours to be too similar. My concerns were later put at ease by our tutor who reassured us that our idea was fine.

I tend to feel when first starting out with a new task, it is that feeling of the unknown and I sometimes lack in confidence which makes you want to seek reassurance that you are on the right track before continuing and risk the fear of getting it wrong.

I noticed that two of the sample sites had a separate references page. However the other just listed the references at the bottom of the page. Did this matter? I asked a couple of members in my group in an email who were also unsure. Darlene checked this with Jenni on Skype chat who informed for us that either way was fine. It was up to us as a group. I think if we end up putting it as a separate page we may want to consider subheadings such as teacher resource page, introduction, lesson plan etc. That way, you would know what page you were referring to. These are all aspects that we will have to discuss as a group and work through together. When talking with my group member's I think we are all feeling very much the same. We all have many questions going around inside our heads that we want to seek answers for.

Query about Health and Physical Education (Australian Curriculum or WA) Screenshot of Skype Chat Jenni Parker

As expected many of us are very unfamiliar with the curriculum's. With changes currently happening whereby everyone is rolling over to the Australian curriculum it makes it slightly more confusing. For the past year I have been referring to the NT curriculum within my job role here in Darwin until recent changes over to the Australian curriculum which I am now trying to learn and understand. The WA curriculum framework is also new to me. I have found that these changes have made it a little confusing on which one we should be addressing for this task, especially when I then discover that Health and Physical Education was also only available in draft form for review. Why did we pick health I thought! Why not a subject area that was already completed? Are we making this too complicated for ourselves? After speaking with Jenni who happened to be on Skype at the time, it actually was not such a big deal as I had thought. We could use either. I gladly reported back this important information to my group in which we then extended our conversations further in our group looking at what one we would address, why, and how.

We discussed the different options and decided that we would address the year 4/5 scope and sequence lifestyle choices content from the WA Curriculum Framework.  This was also something that I wanted to clarify with our tutors. Are we required to address all the outcomes for knowledge and understandings or refer to only one. For example, did we need to cover Hygiene content in our task or can we just focus on one aspect of it's content such as varied/sound nutrition?

We have a Wiki...

Jodie had set up a 3 examples of wikis for our groups consideration.

https://sites.google.com/site/whatsforlunch113/home
http://edn113whats4lunch.wikispaces.com/
https://sites.google.com/site/edn113grouptaskdanigroup3/

Jodie sent a link to Google drive to enable us access so that we could edit the group Wiki. 

This is the first time I had attempted creating and editing a Wiki. I thought it would be similar to creating a website, but it in fact I was finding it far more complex. I was hoping that I could just be able to open up the document and start copying and pasting from the word document I had created as a draft. How wrong I was. When adding content from word I found that the formatting changed and varied across pages. It took me a few moments just to realise intially that to be able to edit our wiki site you needed to click on the pencil icon at the top right hand side of the screen. This was clearly a complex tool to master and would take time to get used to, time in which we did not have. I needed to learn fast, but this was very frustrating.

Group Meeting

(Sunday 28th April) This morning I thought I would get better prepared this time around for our second  formal group meeting.The brainstorming doc hadn't really worked for our group to get our ideas across to each other clearly. I also found that there was still some confusion when working with Google docs. Was it the current version of the document? One member ended up having two of the same document, but different versions. I am used to writing all my ideas down on paper in note form, but clearly this was not going to work for a group task. I decided I would use powerpoint to start brainstorming some ideas on the tasks content. I could then share this easily with the rest of my group members via email or post onto our group site. 

Screenshots:Powerpoint ideas.

The slides were to give an overview of what basic elements we needed to include for task 3. I found that by also reviewing the sample sites this gave me some ideas as to the content which we were required to include. I went through the UlRG guide and broke down the task into stages, simplified tasks. See Slide 2: What we need to have. I felt by doing this it gave us all something to start working with and was a conversation starter. By including the scope and sequence I also wanted to confirm we were all looking at the same content in the curriculum. 

For todays meeting I also set up some Agenda items in attempt for us to try and stay on topic as it is very easy for time to pass just chatting and not getting anything constructive done and any decisions being made at the end of it all.

April 28 at 12:58pm

SUNDAY 28th GROUP MEETING AGENDA: (please add if there is anything you would like to discuss) ps. hope you dont think im being bossy just thought this might help us maintain focus?

PLEASE ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS...

Think we need to focus on the idea and content first. 

TASK DESCRIPTION-More detailed description of what we want our task to be and include I think is the first step (also see Dani's comment on how we make it available to wider audience) What it is we are going to plan for? Overall goal of the students/teacher? 

-Once this is all agreed upon I am happy to make a start this week (Mon-Thurs) on drafting up some paragraphs of writing that can be used for our home page... and put forward to everyone on Thursday....? eg. Intro, group members, task description etc etc obviously with the exception of including the powerpoint prezi at this stage think this should be let to very last!

LESSON PLAN:

For Thursday : if everyone could get some ideas together to consider for lesson plan Ideas so that we can start on this. next...

In my opinion I believe that this meeting went well. We had managed to cover all the agenda items suggested and had decided on the content we each needed to gather.  

However, earlier on when first beginning the task some of my group had decided to allocate specific jobs to people. When it came to todays meeting I must admit I became a little confused in the conversation as I hadn't realised this and saught clarification on what it was I was meant to be doing to contribute towards the task as I hadn't yet been allocated.

It was decided that I would begin doing the home page and Introduction content. Jodie and myself would work together in setting up the Wiki and work on adjusting the layout of content.

I expressed my concerns to the group that if too many of us were all trying to upload content at different times, we might run the risk or overriding others contributions or messing up the formatting. Therefore it was in agreement by the group that myself and Jodie would be responsible for uploading and    

                                                      editing others content onto the wiki. 

Our allocated Tasks:

Jodie Dunning was responsible for creation of the group wiki and uploading content.
Melissa Baugh was to create the lesson plan and contribute to students resources.
Jenny Matthews would compile resources for teacher and student pages.
Darlene Catalano contribute to resources, create and manage our group presentation.
I would be responsible for the home page and introduction page content, contribute and upload resources. 

Outcomes of Sundays meeting: successful
                                                        made good progress so far
                                                        clearer on our ideas,all the same
                                                        allocated job roles
                                                        agreed to meet together again Thursday to share progress.

Jodie today also asked group members what each of our expectations were for the  assignment . From the groups responses it has made me very happy to see that we all have set very high standards for ourselves and want to achieve high marks. It was reassuring to know that other members of the group were also enjoying this unit as much as myself. They also had as much determination to get the most out of this unit as did I and a pass just would not cut it.

Authentic Learning

For the remainder of today (Saturday 27th April) I thought it would be of interest to do some research into understanding more about 'authentic learning.' The lecturers refer to this regularly and it's something I know very little about. I was aware that there was some useful links on the Technology Toolbox that I had briefly glanced over before now, but not in depth.

Week 8 Lecture on Authentic learning (Jenni, April 2013): gave some good examples of non meaningful tasks and word problems. "Why would your students want to care about these problems?" (Jenni, April 2013) It did make me think about how we should approach this task and looking at it from the students perspective on whether they would be interested in it or not.

We needed to ensure we were not "giving our students questions with no meaning"( Jenni, April 2013). What is the end product? These were all important questions we need to be asking oursleves throughout this task.

The lecture refers to Jan Herrington's 9 elements and that we could use these as a check list for task 3 The more of these elements our task addresses, the more authentic the task will be.

I knew that it had been mentioned that there were links and information to Jan Harringtons elements of Authentic learning on the Technology Toolbox for Educators. This would be my first point of call. I followed the link and watched a couple of the You Tube videos on authentic tasks. The first describing the characteristics of an authentic context and the second on authentic tasks.

 

 Above,YouTube video: Jan Harrington (2013) Authentic learning 2: Authentic Task, retrieved from Technology Toolbox for Educators,Murdoch University.

The video gave 3 clear examples of authentic tasks and gave you a clear idea of what was not. Jan also states that an authentic task 'should be broad enough for students to still be able to make their own decisions'. I thought this was a very important point made. We needed to be careful that our task does not end up a series of instructions on what to do and how to do it. Students need to be able to problem solve and think on their own. The task matters the most and should be completed over a longer period of time, not in only one lesson.

Ideas coming together... decisions being made!

So far I think we are going OK. we have made our first important decisions as a group.

1. Facebook group would be our first means of communication.
2. Group meetings will be held Thursdays 07:30pm (WST) and Sundays 12pm (WST).
3. Our subject will be Health and Physical Education. Our Topic will be Health and Nutrition.Year level 4/5.
4. The Task: Students will research healthy food choices, create ingredients list and posters of their recipes. Presentation to the class, they vote for the best recipe which will later go on the front cover of the cookbook. Recipes will be combined into an Ebook for the school library. Printed copies will be made available to parents for purchase.
5. We will be addressing the WA Curriculum content.

I am feeling a little better about the group task now. Everyone is contributing equally to ideas and we seem to be collaborating well and are managing to organise ourselves as a group. Now to sort out who was going to do what.....

EDN113 Task 3 Facebook Group

The brainstorming document has not proven to be a successful communication tool for a group task. It had been used to get each others contact information, but the group agreed that a better solution was needed. We discussed various options, and weighed up the pro's and con's of each. In the end, it was between Skype and Facebook as the most suitable methods of communication. It was decided that Facebook would be the most effective, as all group members were already signed up, and conversations could be reviewed by members who may have been unavailable at the time.

Facebook did have it downfalls though, which we all soon came to realise. It was not as easy as Skype for maintaining conversations. Each time someone commented or wrote a thread you were required to refresh the page. This became quite annoying and confusing! Fortunately we found a solution to this problem. By setting up a group message, we could converse easily in real time with one another without the need to refresh the page and sort through posts which would not maintain a chronological order.

Friday 26th April: Our first organised group meeting 

I have again been reminded how important regular communication is within the group. It is the key to effective collaboration. I can see now how easy it can become to miss out on decisions, become confused with  what each others contributions are to the task or not understand what it is you are suppose to be doing.

To ensure we maintain regular communication, I put forward to my group that we schedule bi-weekly meetings to discuss ideas and monitor the tasks progress. I thought that members may not agreed to this suggestion or would find excuses for it not to happen but I was wrong... Everyone agreed!  It was decided that we would ALL meet on our Facebook Group on Thursday evenings at 7:30pm (WST)  and on Sunday's at 12:00pm (WST).  Since implementing this schedule, I have been very please at how we have been performing as a group. We have still been able to maintain day to day communication via Facebook messaging and email where required, and the regular group sessions have proven to be very productive.

Brainstorming

A group brainstorming template had been set up that required us to download, save a copy to our Google Drive account, then share with the other members of our group. Firstly, I had to set myself up with a Gmail account as up until now I have always used a combination of Hotmail for personal use and Outlook Exchange for work. This setup was easy. Simply follow the step by step instructions on the Gmail web page. For information on how to set up a gmail account watch this You Tube video below on How to set up a Gmail Account.

Sharing the group brainstorming document with my team members was the first point of communication I had with them. I found it daunting collaborating with people I did not know, as I am generally quite shy until getting to know people. However, I felt a lot better that a I was able to recognise a few of my group members names from chatting with them on the Skype group or on the externals Facebook group.  

At this stage I am unfamiliar with how Google Docs works. Although I have been able to use and access documents previously, I am unsure if i am doing it correctly. I would soon find out I suppose. I sent an email to all my group members sharing the google doc requesting that they add their name, contact number, email and preferred communication method.

After this I took a few days off this task to complete another assignment. I was shocked to return to my Gmail inbox a few days later to discover a mass of emails I was not aware of. I was not used to checking this one regularly and had not expected such a quick initiation to this task by my group. This highlighted to me the importance of prompt communication for a group to work together effectively. 

It seems over these couple of days somehow there had been some confusion over the brainstorming document. One of my team members hadn't been able to receive this or able to edit it. We then discovered that this was probably because they had given a hotmail email as their contact, as opposed to a gmail email which was shortly rectified.  Members of my group all seem very enthusiastic to commence this task and are keen to make a good start. I did not want to let them down and admittedly I had gotten off to a slow start with this task. It was time to get the ball rolling...

Chapter 6: Community building and Collaborating with Technologies

Howland, J. L., Jonassen, D., & Marra, R. M . (2012). Meaningful Learning with Technology (4 ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.

It has been a while since I have re-read our unit textbook. Chapter 6 on Community Building and Collaborating with technologies I felt would be of great knowledge for this particular unit, being a group task. This chapter talks about 'Wiki's' being an 'effective collaborative tool for constructing knowledge'(p.137). 

This chapter introduces technology tools that supports collaborative projects, and describes how wiki's can be of benefit to learning communities in K-12 education. It also points out the disadvantage to the use of Wiki's.

Figure 6.3 and 6.4 are good examples of how wiki's can and have been used within the classroom to engage in a collaborative environment. It has made me realise that for Task 3 as students we are using our teacher wiki resource as a 'learning tool for collaborating, designing, co-constructing and representing our knowledge'(p.140).

Some collaborative projects that I intend to view and refer to when considering our project are:

-Telegarden- example of internet-based collaborative task that stupports learning outcomes in science. Students are required to tend to a living garden.
-Save the Turtles- example of a collaborative writing example for students (chapter 7 p.183)
-Cyber Fair project is a project example on Global Schoolhouse.
-ThinkQuest is an example of a online learning environment for primary and secondary students.