Week 6, Reflection 5

Group 4 Tools


Animations and Simulations

For this task there were lots of tools presented to us which we were to choose from and explore. I had a look at most of them and had some fun playing around with them.

ZOOBURST
First let's look at ZooBurst. As stated on the website, Zooburst "is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone create his or her own 3D pop-up books". After signing up for free and navigating around the site and getting started, I found it relatively easy. With the thought of teaching secondary students, Zooburst struck me as being a bit simplistic, juvenile, and not so engaging for the most part fo the ages we will most likely be teaching.

However, as one of my specialisations is LOTE, I can definitely see the benefits and classroom use of this little site. When learning a foreign language, beginning students feel as if they are kids again (not always a great feeling!) when it comes to the language they are able to produce and understand. Even building basic sentences can be a challenge. Zooburst could help students produce language in the form of a story, whether it's one of their own creations or a maybe even an attempted translation of another existing story. It could even be a short biography! Pictures can be uploaded to personalise characters and settings, and with the paid version, sounds and voice are able to be added into the mix.

Coincidentally, a couple of days before I first went to the Zooburst site, my 7 year old daughter wrote a little story she was awfully proud of, so I thought that together we could illustrate that story, called Where Is Kiko?, using Zooburst! She had a lot of fun doing it and I had a blast helping her out. Here is her final product.



Where Is Kiko?

To sum up on this one, as stated, it could be a fun and useful tool for beginners in foreign language classes, and I might definitely try to use it in my future classes for this purpose. But for high school aged students in other subjects, I don't really see it as being that interesting enough or engaging enough for learners. But you never know until you try it!


ONLINE CONCEPT MAPPING

Image retrieved from: www.easierway.ca

Next I had a play with the online concept mapping tool bubbl.us.  Mapping of this nature is a wonderful way to get students to engage those higher order thinking skills and expand on their knowledge of a subject, brainstorming all the components of a topic and their corresponding relationships. Technology nowadays helps us to create these maps in a visually stunning and simple way. Here is my engagement activity for this one, mapping the topic of some of the Group 3 and Group 4 tools and concepts.



And what better way of analyzing this tool than to create a mind map about it.



To close, these tools (even ones I haven't mentioned, such as Google Earth and Google Maps) definitely have a place in aiding learning and getting students to incorporate different methods to present and illustrate their study topics. I would first have to look at the class and examine their preferred learning styles and learning goals to decided which, if any, could be used to enhance the classroom. Variety is good; it caters to many different teaching/learning methods and should be used to maximize student involvement and learning outcomes. Good luck!