Task 2: The Social Learner

Image Taken by Brayden Cook

This week I started looking at task 2 for my unit Living and Learning with Technology.
For this task I am required to find a Social Networking Site, provide a multimedia resource for a peer to follow so they are able to connect and contribute to it, as well a complete a peer review on one of my peers' social learners. The first part of the task will require me to think of a social event where I can use a Social Networking Site to create and organise the particular event. Secondly I will need to find the appropriate Social Networking Site to use and create my event on that site. Finally I need to create a form of multimedia that provides clear instructions so that my peers can access and contribute to my event with ease.

I feel as if the Social Learner task will be a relatively easy task to complete. I think the peer review part of the task will be interesting as it is my first experience marking another person's work. This part of the task is my first little 'taste' of what it will be like to be a teacher. I am rather excited to get a start on the task where I will be exploring many different social media sites as well as hopefully creating an interesting event.

Brayden.

Digital Citizenship

Poster Created by Brayden Cook

This week I started the 'digital citizenship' part of Task 1. This part of the task required us to research one aspect of safe, ethical and responsible use of ICT in an online environment. At first I was unsure what all those terms meant, so I had to do some research. An example of unsafe use of ICT is cyber bullying, for ethical use it may include acknowledging the works of others in an appropriate manner and an example for responsible use is thinking about what you put online and how you present yourself. The thought process of what aspect I wanted to use was rather simple, cyber bullying is something I have always felt passionate about, so researching and creating a poster about it seemed like the right thing to do. After some research on CyberBully I found some statistics about it on the Queensland Government website.
Figuring out how I was going to create my poster proved difficult. I have previously made posters using Microsoft programs such a Publisher and Word, alongside Adobe Photoshop. As I have previously used these programs I wanted to explore other options, and decided to use an infographic website. As there are many different websites to be used, I tried a few different ones such as Piktochart, Infogr.am and Easel.Ly. I signed up for Piktochart, however the website was running incredibly slow, so I thought I would move on to the next website. Yet again, I had the problem with websites not loading so Infogr.am was out of the question also. As these two websites, that others recommended to me, were not working, I ended up researching some free infographic tools for myself and came across Easel.ly. Easel.ly is an easy to use website, which I highly enjoyed using and would recommend to others. I have finally uploaded my poster to my website as a PDF, as well as providing a link to the online copy.

Brayden.

Making My Website

Today I started Task One for Living and Learning with Technology. This task requires us students to create both a website and a blog documenting our work throughout this unit. With creating a website many problems may appear due to multiple different reasons, one problem I faced was being unsure of what website I should use to build and create one for myself. In order to solve the problem I asked a few of peers what sites they were using to create their own and whether or not they thought the site was easy to use. From the answers I was given I decided to try out both Weebly as well as Yola, unfortunately Yola has a 3 page limit with its free version so that website was not suitable for the task I am completing. With Yola being out of the question I have decided to use Weebly to create my personal website. From what I have seen and heard in both the lectures and tutorials, as well as what I have read in the Unit Guide, I feel as if this unit as a whole is going to be interesting and I hope that it will broaden my mind with ideas of how to integrate technology into the classroom. As it is only the second week into University I am yet to find another area where a website may be a suitable way to present information, however I think throughout the next four years and throughout my future teaching career both a website and a blog will be used as a unique way to present a task.
Below is an image of the home screen of my website.

Brayden.

Image Taken by Brayden Cook

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog. I am currently a student at Murdoch University where I am studying Early Childhood and Primary Education full-time. I am currently doing 3 different units, two core units and one elective unit. As part of a task for one of the core units, Living and Learning with Technology (EDN113), we have been asked to create a website and a blog documenting our studies throughout the unit.

This blog will be dedicated to documenting on different tasks throughout the unit. Each post I create will be marked on a criteria based around: Unit content, Learning and/or problem solving strategies, thoughts and/or feelings about our learning, networks and communication, connections and extensions, use of technical knowledge, visuals, hyperlinks and finally writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation. I am aiming to cover all areas of the criteria in each post in order to receive the highest grade that my effort is able to get me.

I hope you all enjoy joining me in my learning journey. Please feel free to leave me comments and feedback.

Brayden.