Category: Professional Learning

OZeLive Edtech Down Under Conference

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I had all good intentions of spending lots of time on my blog over the summer and getting together some useful posts but alas it didn’t eventuate… What is more exciting is that I am part of the Australia E-Series group that is working with Steve Hargadon from The Learning Revolution Crew to organise an Australia time zone based edtech conference. This is a fantastic opportunity for Australia to showcase some of our talented educators from all educational sectors… from early childhood to university and adult education.

  • The conference has broken up the topics into strands which include:
  • Educator 3.0* eLearning/ Blended learning/ LMS* Networking
  • Collaborative learning / learning theory / pedagogy
  • Use of technology in the classroom/learning environment
  • PLEs / PLNs/PLCs

So far we have a number of presenters signed up be we are looking for more presenters and participants. Share the flyer below with your networks.

https://www.smore.com/336c-ozelive-2014

Visual Literacy and the Australian Curriculum

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I often participate and sometimes present in a regular free online webinar with educators from around Australia and sometimes SE Asia. Every Thursday night you can usually find us in the Australia E-Series Blackboard Collaborate Room. This room is kindly shared with us by Steve Hargadon from Web2.0 Labs.

On Thursday 4th July I presented a session on Visual Literacy Tools and the Australian Curriculum.

The Australian Curriculum has a definite focus on visual literacy through the incorporation of the General Capabilities. Visual literacy is important in all areas of the curriculum. In the past I have certainly used visual aids like video, photographs, tables, graphs and diagrams but I have not explicitly taught my students that interpreting these visual tools is essential to develop deep understanding and that these skills can be applied in all areas of the curriculum. Visual knowledge is one of the four organising elements of the Literacy general capability. The key feature for students and and teachers in the visual knowledge section is that students need to understand how visual images create meaning. As teachers we must explicitly teach interpretation and creation skills.
In the webinar presented 4th July 2013 I shared with the group some useful tools for finding and creating visual literacy objects for the classroom. Below I’ve listed the links.

MindMup mind mapping tool

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I’ve started experimenting with this mind mapping tool which is now available through Google as an app. This is a very simple tool which can be easily used and manipulated to gather your ideas with students. Once you get the language of the tools you can follow keyboard shortcuts to add new nodes to your maps.

You can also use MindMup from the URL http://www.minmup.com I’ve connected mine to my google account so that I can then save directly to my Google Drive, otherwise it’s saved to the cloud and you need to keep track of your URL location.

Once you have finished creating your mind map you can then export to various formats (including as an image or table).

What I like most about this tool is the simplicity. I will be teaching my students how to use this tool and incorporating it into some pre assessment and post assessment work.

 

 

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