Working Together!

 

When it comes to group tasks I become quite scared and worried as I always get the feeling that working as a group will be hard. I have discovered that group assignments stress me out because I can't control what happens, I have learnt to collaborate, compromise and trust other people to do their part. This week our group received an email from Val our tutor saying that another person has been added to our group, Jeremy was added to our group so now we have 5. Our group decided that we would meet up in the study week to get the ball rolling, we all met in the library and we decided that we would start researching about Ancient Egypt and then bring all our ideas together the next group meeting we had. We all decided that we should initially create a Wiki so then we could have a look at how it all works so we can get it started when we were ready. I created the Wiki for our group and sent an invitation to all our group members to accept so they can then have access to our Wiki.  

I decided to suggest that we each take a page or part of the task and work on it and add it to the group wiki. This way we could concentrate on one area each and collaborate through the construction of the wiki but also still share ideas, gain feedback and advice throughout the process. The group members agreed with my reasoning so that's how we proceeded with the task. I volunteered to do the Teacher Resources Page. I am now going to take a look at the sample wiki sites from last years students to help me get some direction with creating the Teacher Resources page. 

The Beginning of Task 3!!

Now the time has come for us to start working on Task 3 which is a group assignment!!!! In our tutorials we split up in groups of four. In my group was Elise Smith, Sarah Kee and Ashlee Kujawski. Val introduced Task three to our class and immediately we started talking about what we were going to do for this assignment. We only have a few short weeks left of the semester so we needed to get it started as soon as possible as it being a group assignment they normally take a lot longer to complete compared to other assignments. Val talked to us about the Google docs brainstorming document so our group decided to use that and write all our ideas and notes on this document so our whole group can see!! I thought this idea was great!
We talked more in class about what area in the curriculum we were going to base our wiki on and we decided we wanted to cover History with our topic being Ancient Egypt we looked on the Australian Curriculum website and found that Ancient Egypt works in with the Year 7 age group. Now that we know what we want our authentic learning experience to be based on we have to as a group, design our learning experience, make our wiki, make a presentation to show the processes we go through as a group and add resources to our wiki that will be useful for both teachers and students.

 At the moment I am really worried about how we are going to organise all this so that it works effectively, I hope we can communicate and collaborate well or this task may be a disaster.

Recording My Video!!!

Now it was time to record my screencasting video!!!

I found myself very nervous during the recordings and made quite a lot of mistakes to begin with. Once I felt confident and began to understand what I was talking about and where I was going wrong I stopped making all the mistakes. I eventually made a full video all the way through without making any mistakes and then I played it back to myself and it actually sounded pretty good. I was really happy that I had finally recorded my screencast and felt confident enough to link it on to my website!


I now had to upload my video to my website! I had out from a fellow peer that Yola and Jing were having a problem with embedded the screencast onto the website so I just decided that I would add a link onto my website. I already knew how to link things onto my website so I knew it would be easy. Little did I know that the file had a large amount of megabytes and when I had signed up with Yola I didn't know that you couldn't upload anything bigger than 500mb without subscribing to a higher level within Yola. So as I had already made my website and completed Task 1 I knew i couldn't change website creators now so I had to make the upgrade. I paid an amount of $12.95 just so I could upload my video... It had to be done though so I didn't mind :)
Now I have finally uploaded my video to my website.. So happy it is finally complete!!!

What is Screencasting??!!

I had no idea what screencasting was when it came up in the assignment.. So I decided I would find out what this was!!!
Screencasting is defined as "a digital recording of a computer screen output...accompanied by audio narration" (Wikipedia, 2013) As I was reading about Task 2 in my learning guide I came across that I needed to download software to be able make my screencast, the two options I seemed to have was Screen-o-matic and Jing, i asked my peers in my next tutorial what they were using and it seemed that majority of my class was using Jing. I did my research on this software and it seemed like the best one to use!!

And the winner is JING... I decided to go with Jing because I liked that it’s a program that is always on your computer and you don’t need to be connected to the internet to capture videos or images. For our assignment the video is limited to 5 minutes duration so it wasn’t an issue that Jing only allows users to record for only 5 minute periods.



Check back to see how I go creating my screencasting video tutorial of how to add a reference using EndNote!

Choosing my Referencing Technology!!!

 I had a good look at the referencing page on the Technology Toolbox and read up about each of the referencing technologies, i.e. EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley. As i was navigating through the Murdoch University website I discovered that the University has purchased a license for EndNote X6 that enables students to download the software to their computer and use it throughout their studies. I also noticed in the learning guide for this unit that it has a section dedicated to EndNote and how to download it. EndNote is also free for Murdoch students so i decided i would go with it!!!!!






I read the instructions carefully on how to download EndNote to your own computer and i thought yes I can do this! Little did I know I was going to struggle to read the instructions properly and not be able to download it.. I thought that possibly having a Macbook was my problem as to why it wouldn't download on my laptop so i decided that I would go into the Murdoch IT Department in the library and see if they could help me out! As so as I went in there they helped me download it straight away and it worked first go when they helped me out. So off i went.. I was so happy I finally had EndNote downloaded.

I started looking around the EndNote program so I would start having some idea of how to input the correct details into my chosen resource type.. It seemed really simple so far so I decided I would do a trial and error to see if I could properly use this referencing technology. I used the webpage that I was going to be using for my Word Document. YAY I got it the first time I input the details into EndNote!!!
Now I think I'm ready to start my screen casting video..

Wish me luck!!!!!

Finding My Resource..

The next question my group had to decide was 'What teaching area topic were we going to choose'? We didn't want to choose a common area that everyone was going to be working on so we decided that we would go with the teaching area of MUSIC!!! I was happy that we choose this area as what child doesn't like using or seeing some sort of musical thing happening in their classroom!!!!

After choosing our topic we all needed to choose a resource type, as I had five people in my group one of us would have to double up on a resource type. I decided that I would use a website as my resource type as overall i thought it would be relatively easy to reference. All i needed to do was to find a webpage that was about music and technology so i thought i would use Google to search for a particular webpage based on these topics.

After finding the webpage that i decided that i was going to use, i then had to write a brief summary in Microsoft Word explaining how teachers could use this particular technology and what the webpage was about.  After writing this brief summary i thought i had better start researching what referencing technology I was going to use. So I am going to check out the ALWAYS useful Technology Toolbox for Educators wiki to see what technologies are available and get some more information about them...

Check back to see how I go!!!