Week number 2...
This week we were shown how to use the movie maker in the tutorial. Taking in to consideration what John said in his lecture about different styles of learning, I ask myself - what is my style of learning? What is my favourite style of 'expression'. These two styles are linked surely? Do they have a direct correlation? Also, does my style of learning gel with the way that I am using computers at the moment?
While interacting with movie maker, I started to realise that I may enjoy the process of learning more about using this medium because I often relate to visual communication/visual aids for learning and so, engaging with the visual video medium may help me to express something in a way that I haven't yet been able to express.
However I find the details of learning the program a little bit frustrating i.e. you learn how to do one thing but immediatly after that you start struggling with the next thing that just 'wont work'! For example I learnt how to drag a photo into movie maker but then struggled with finding a way of shortening the length of the clips.
Some points from John's 2nd lecture:
- The only thing worse would be to make technology "invisible," preventing children from even being aware of their ignorance." Monke, L. W. (2006) - i.e. not about integrating technology - that can make it invisible - piano/car example
- "If I don't 'integrate' a computer in things I do outside the classroom, but I do 'integrate' it inside one, then whatever I am doing with it there is probably not authentic".
- "...there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains."
- "The point about all this is that computers can often cater for all sorts of intellectual styles and approaches to thinking - at least, expressions of thought. (VELS: Visualising thinking??) That's the individual angle - computers usually offer everyone a starting point that suits their cognitive leanings."
- Riding, with collaborators who include Cheema and Raynor, considers that there are two independent 'dimensions' to the way people think and make sense of the world: Wholist-Analytic and Verbal-Imagery
- John says this is one of the scariest things a teacher can be faced with, because it is a graphical (and graphic!) reminder that all the kids in their class have minds that work in different ways and along different paths. And as a teacher you have to allow for that, and use it.
- "Work expressed in words is almost always valued over work expressed in pictures. All qualities of an Analytic-Verbaliser mind."
- "...in Lecture One I suggested that making a film required a very wide range indeed of abilities and interests. It also requires a wide mix of Cognitive Styles and Intelligences."
- "...And understanding your audience begins with an understanding of how they best learn."
- "ICT won't solve your educational problems, but it can help broaden the ways in which your students can learn and live and invent and create and cooperate and publish."
