Personal learning journal - Final

During this semester I have learnt how to use very interesting tools and webpages. I like technology and I enjoy using it; it has lots of possibilities and, knowing how to use it, it can ease daily tasks. However, it can be difficult or confusing at first, so training can be helpful in those cases. That’s why I think that this subject has been useful for us, or at least, it has been for me.

It is true that almost all the tools that we have seen are not directed to nursery education and that upsets me a bit, but from my point of view, every tool that we have seen is useful for a certain use, so I don’t feel upset about this subject. In fact, I feel positive about all that we have learnt and I think I will use some or all of the things.

Three tasks to carry out with a wiki

In the first task, we will provide the students different wikis and we will show them how they work; specially Wikispaces. Our aim is to show them different possibilities and give them the chance to choose the one they like most to use at home. However, in class we will use Wikispaces.

The second task will consist of asking the students to upload one project that was carried out in class previously. This task implies groupwork, because the mentioned project was done in groups.

The last task consists of writing and improvising. In groups one of the students will have to write down what s/he has done at weekend, but without writing the end. The rest of the group will have to guess what happened, adding different possible ends. 

Personal learning journal - Eighth week

This have been the last week before Christmas and we only have had one single class in which we have finished the excel spreadsheet and we have tried two new webpages: SurveyMonkey and Edmodo.

The first one is a tool that allows you to create surveys with 7 types of questions. It can be very useful to know what the students think about the teacher’s classes or about a certain topic. Those answers can help the teacher knowing the opinions and interests of the students.

The second one is similar to MiAulario, that is to say, it is a tool for uploading notes, articles documents... for the students; so that means that students and teachers are connected in that tool. Besides, the teacher can make announcements, post tasks, prepare online exams, organize the different groups and sub-groups as s/he wants…

Both of this tools might be very useful for primary and secondary education, but once more, there are nonsense for nursery education.

Personal learning journal - Sixth and seventh weeks

In the last two weeks we finished the Interactive Whiteboards presentations, we read about podcasts and e-books, and we learnt how to use some tools and webpages, such as, Wikis, Dropbox and PodOmatic.

I knew the name of podcasts before but I didn’t know very well what they were. These days I have learnt that they can be very useful for education and personal purposes. However, as with every other tool, we need to have the aim of its use very clear and don’t overuse it.

The same happened to me with wikis; I knew the name but no its use. I think that they can be useful in education, but not in nursery. I miss more tools and resources for nursery education in this class.

However, the reading about electronic books was very interesting and it could be very helpful for my future profession as teacher in nursery, the period when children start developing reading and writing skills.

Personal learning journal - Fifth week

During this first week after the internship, there have been some changes in the subject, due to the sick leave of our teacher. From now on, we will be with other teacher that will try to carry out the development of all the contents that the previous teacher had set. As a result, this week has been difficult for us and for the new teacher, and we have been talking a lot about the blog, the tasks and the assessment.

The topic of the week has been Interactive Whiteboards (IWB). We have had two presentations about them – one about reading 4 and the other one about the tasks that that group had prepared.

As I said in a previous entry, IWB have lots of possibilities, but from my point of view, we cannot base our classes and tasks just on that tool, because we need to provide students different ways of carrying out tasks. In addition, nowadays children are in constant contact with technology, thus IWB won’t catch their attention for a long period of time; they would get used to it and they would see it as boring as the traditional blackboard.

Tools can motivate children, but that motivation is brief; the only way to motivate children is to base the classes in a good methodology and provide challenging materials and resources.

Podcasting in class

The following link will redirect you to my podcast in PodOmatic. This podcast explains briefly the task I would carry out with PodOmatic in a class of 5th or 6th grade:

http://oihanesolano.podomatic.com/entry/2015-01-02T07_21_26-08_00

Excel spreadsheet

This is my spredshit to evaluate different aspects of the learning of the students:

	PROGRESS TESTS	HOMEWORK		PARTICIPATION	FINAL EXAM
	FINAL TESTS	FINAL HOMEWORK		FINAL PARTICIPATION	FINAL EXAM	FINAL GRADE
STUDENTS
Mario	5,0	5,7		4,7	8,7	7,1
Alicia	4,5	6,1		5,0	6,4	5,8
Rafa	7,3	7,3		6,7	8,3	7,8
Edurne	8,8	8,7		9,3	8,2	8,5