Reflection

							I read the Novice/Elementary: Kindergarten Classroom Collaboration” piece and watched the
video as well. For those of you who didn’t look at this, it is a blog that a Kindergarten teacher
created to enable her to share the work of her students with their families and with a classroom
that they communicate with in Australia. Within the blog the teacher used a lot of free tech tools
to share video, images, artwork, projects, and audio with others. Some of the tech tools she uses
are: vimeo (video sharing), viocethread (shares images, documents, and videos with the
possibility of voice narration), rockyou (shares images through slideshow), voki (creating a
speaking avatar), SchoolTube (like YouTube, but focuses on student video and media sharing),
and animoto (turns photos, videos, and music into a video piece like a movie trailer). Most of
what I saw in the blog would fit into the Expression/Visualization approach to learning. Some
examples of this included the “We love moms” Mother’s Day video that included interviews and
accompanying artwork of each student. Each student had an opportunity to interview another
student and to be interviewed for the video. To celebrate Earth Day they created posters and
decorated paper grocery bags (these were returned and to be used at a local store on Earth Day)
expressing how or why the Earth should be cared for. These also would fit in the
eCommunications Video/Audio/Data Online Environments because there were opportunities for
interaction and comments from others through the blog medium in each task. Their interactions
with the other Kindergarten classroom in Australia also demonstrate this communication-
learning dynamic. The class in Australia asked what snow was like and the teacher had students
explain in their own words and they also posted a video showing what they do in the snow and
how to make a snowball grow from baseball size to boulder size. In all of these examples you
would see them in the mid-to-high range in the complexity because they were real-world,
authentic tasks. The videos they created were made to share with their mothers as a gift on
Mother’s Day and the Earth Day activities were used to demonstrate learning or share
information with others in their school or the community at large. These examples also
demonstrated mid-to-high range in the instructional approach to learning because they were real
experiences versus just reading about something in a book. They were actually having a dialog
with the Australian class, asking questions and answering questions, about each of their daily
lives.
Most of what I saw in this blog was totally new to me. It is going to take some time and more
exposure for me to be able to suggest improvements to these lessons in regard to the technology
use. Right now I am compiling all these new tech tools to a list that I would like to explore later.
This week’s readings and videos demonstrate that great teaching should include authentic, real-
world learning tasks that enable the teacher to take on a supportive role with students being
actively involved in some type of learning experience. When used in the most productive
manner, technology can enhance the lesson to this type of level as well as motivate students to
complete the learning task. These types of higher-level, authentic learning tasks are more
complicated to come up with at first, but the result is well worth the effort. Each of the units of
study and learning experiences that we read about were inspiring and exciting moving well
beyond the basic skill level and demanding that students use higher order thinking skills to
complete while also sounding like relevant tasks that were also a lot of fun to complete. These
are the types of learning experiences that I want to create for my students. Like one person
stated in one of their posts, it requires us to “think outside the box.”