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Reflection - Overall Module Evaluation

Overall, this module has taught me a lot about 21st Century, technology and I have learned how to use a lot of different programs that I found out could be really useful so now that i know how to use them I will be able to download them at home and thanks to the teacher i can use variety of programs instead of sticking to programs like PowerPoint and overall Microsoft Office programs. I really enjoyed 21st Century Module because I never found any session boring or useless as we always did something relevant that we now had to put in our blog. I now know how to make a website, how to use variety of different programs that I seen before but i never was able to use them because they looked too complicated, I am able to create a blog and I found out different blog websites, I found out a lot about how to make an actual poster and also about different technology back in the day and how different technology is in the 21st Century. I realised how lucky we are to have all this easy to use technology and how lucky we are to be able to access it because back in the day not many people had a simple computer, nevermind a phone, so I am grateful for doing and completing this module because it taught me a lot about important things in life and 21st Century that I didn't know about.

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Reflection - Tomorrow’s World

Tomorrow’s World is a television series and we watched it in class and we then had a discussion about it, what we have seen happening and what we think it is about. From what I have watched and understood, Tomorrow’s World is about predicting the future of science and technology, it was quite interesting to watch this tv show because it was showing us how people thought of the future and how technology will change.

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Reflection - Kahoot!

This task was really fun as we had to create our own Kahoot quiz. First we played few so that the people that never used it got a bit of knowledge about what it’s about and then we had time in lesson to create our own quiz about anything we wanted. I decided to do mine about General Knowledge, I created 24 questions and I tried to make some of them easy and some harder, then we tried my quiz in class to see how everyone does and I think the class enjoyed it as much as me so that made me happy. I decided to do mine on General Knowledge because I couldn't think about loads of question for one specific topic and General Knowledge can be about loads of random things therefore i managed to end up with 24 questions because it was enjoyable for me to create it. It was also very easy to create the quiz, nothing about Kahoot is confusing or terrible to understand. Overall i really enjoyed that task.

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Reflection - Poster

The task was to make a Poster about anything we wanted, it had to be inspirational. The program that we used to create this task was Adobe InDesign, I decided to make my poster motivational and it was about being optimistic not pessimistic. I found it quite hard to use this program because everything is in black and text is in white and the text is so close to each other and the writing was really small so it was hard for me to find the right tools i needed to use at that time. It was quite time consuming because I spent most of my time in lesson figuring out where I can find my saved picture and how to paste the picture onto the program. Overall, I did enjoy making the poster because it was something I could do individually and create something on my own, however I don’t think I would use Adobe InDesign again because there’s so many other programs where I could create a poster and that I understand more.

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Reflection - Pet Website

For this tasks I have used Adobe Dreamweaver and it was a challenging tasks as I’ve never used that programme before. The task was to create a pet website and it was quite fun as we were able to pick the name for our pet, pick background colours and fonts. I enjoyed it as it turned out really good and i found out how to use a new programme in the future if it’s ever needed.

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Reflection - Keyring

In today’s lesson we have used a program called Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 which we used to create a key ring. It was a good experience because I learned how to use the program and I will be able to use it in the future. Furthermore, i contributed by showing other students how to transfer their work on the USB so that they can complete their work. I got a lot out of this lesson as I managed to learn something new about this program.

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Commentary 3 - LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a website for specialists all over the world, there's about 500 milion people using this website in 200 different countries. The aim of LinkedIn is to help professionals from all over the world make connections with other people to help them become successful and effective and to help them find the perfect job for them. By joining LinkedIn you're signing up for a lot of job opportunities and making new connections, you can easily upgrade with your career. LinkedIn is used for different areas of teachning and learning and anyone can joing LinkedIn. It can be used by anyone with any qualifications, there's something for everyone on this website. LinkedIn is used by others in many, many ways. For example people use it to make new friends that have similar interests or are looking for a similar job to them so then they can search for a job together, or even if it's just to socialise you can message people and communicate with them. People also use LinkedIn to find a job or a way to progress with their career. To do that, you need to make an account, you can put a profile picture so professionals and others can know how you look but it's not something you need to do, then you need to put your name and what you study or where you currently work, any work experience or even voluntary work. You also need to put your skills and interests as by doing that and completing all the steps on your profile first it gives you more chances to find what you're looking for because professionals always look at your profile and on your work experience and skills so it is important to fill all the information needed. I have a LinkedIn account myself and i created it to connect with other learners in my class. I use LinkedIn for formal and informal learning. I use it for formal because it is mainly a professional website so you can't put anything innapriopriate on your profile, however i do use it for informal learning as well because i do use it to connect with other learners and find out each others skills and interest. The relevant teaching and learning theory I would link LinkedIn to is Behaviourism and Humanism. I would link Behaviourism, because it is a website where everyone needs to follow the same instructions like I mentioned before, for example filling in the information on your profile, putting work experience and skills and everyone just needs to follow the same steps therefore i believe it links to Behaviourism because Behaviourism is about shaping and controlling behaviour, and by people completing the same steps on the website that basically means their behaviour is conditioned because most people go on that webiste for the same reason, to find a job, therefore without filling in the needed information people have less chances to hear from any professionals. I can kind of link it to rewarding because if you complete all the steps perfectly you're more likely to hear from someone, therefore people might follow the steps because they might get rewarded. When it comes to Humanism, Humanism is completely different to Behaviourism but it can also link to LinkedIn, because by signing in to LinkedIn you are able to express yourself by putting your individual skills, picture, work experience and where you currently work, therefore that is showing off your individuality and Humanism is all about the whole person and individuality, that's why I strongly believe you can link Behaviourism and Humanism to LinkedIn. LinkedIn also has some benefits and limitations. One of the benefits is that it is quite successful and there's a lot of users and professionals that give people job opportunities so it is a really useful website and the fact that it is for people from all around the world makes it better because it's not limited for anyone, anyone can use it. Furthermore, LinkedIn is a good website because it tells you what you need to do on your profile to be more successful and hear from someone which is good for people who like instructions and like being guided. It is also good because you can talk to people from all around the world or even your friends, make new connections and find out about other people. It's also free to use and another benefit worth mentoning is that LinkedIn comes as an app as well so if you don't have an access to a computer or a laptop and you have a phone, you can easily download LinkedIn on your phone and it is also free on your phone and you can use it whenever to check if you've heard from any professionals. When it comes to the limitations, it might be time consuming because you will never know for sure when or if you will ever hear from a professional about job opportunity.so people might be better off using websites such as indeed or hand out their CV's because this website doesn't guarinee success.

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Commentary 2 - PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a slideshow presentation program and it's a part of Microsoft Office. In my opinion PowerPoint is one of the best programs as there's so much you can do on it, there's variety of things it's useful for. You can make animations, and even PowerPoint animations, you can also use PowerPoint as a blank template for building video content and you can make your videos look professional if used well. Personally I mostly use PowerPoint to make presentation for my university work, i find PowerPoint one of the most useful programs to create amazing presentations as you can do so much fun things such as change background colours, make animated gifs, create a slideshow and other fun stuff. PowerPoint's intended aim is to make it easy for people to create some amazing, professional looking presentations and animations. PowerPoint can be used for absolutely any are of teaching and learning because it's a program which anyone can use for anything, so if you study Law you can make any presentation you want. If you study Health and Social Care, you can do the same. It's amazing because it's easy to use, its free, it's really useful and the most important thing is that it's for everyone. You can access PowerPoint by downloading it and you can use it on your computer or your laptop. When it comes to formal and informal learning, you can use PowerPoint for both of them. For example, I use PowerPoint for formal learning by creating presentations for a task from university. It's formal because it's an assessment at university therefore i am going to get marked on it. However, I also use PowerPoint for informal learning quite often actually as whenever I want to make an animated gif or create a presentation for myself for example to help me organise university work better or even anything that isn't related to education that i do on PowerPoint is informal, because i am doing it outside university and in my own time and it has nothing to do with education. Furthermore, the relevant teaching and learning theory that can be applied to PowerPoint in my opinion is Humanism. I think it's relevant because Humanism studies the whole personal and the uniqueness of every individual, therefore it links to PowerPoint because by making your own presentation you're showing how unique you are by chosing your own design, font and just in general the way you're creating your presentation can tell a lot about a person so if everyone in a classroom makes their own presentation they all will be unique and the teacher will look at it individually.Also, for Rogers the focus of psychology isn't behaviour but how individuals interpret events, therefore if a teacher gives a student a task to do a presentation about a certain topic, that individual will interpet it in their own way and make the presentation the way they want and understand it. Humanism is about the individuality and PowerPoint is perfect at letting people express their individuality. When it comes to a PowerPoint there's some benefits but also challenges. I talked about a lot of benefits already like i mentioned before one of the benefits is that there's variety of stuff you can do on a PowerPoint and I believe everyone would find something for themselves, it is useful for all type of things and it's quite easy to use as everything has headlines therefore it's quite straight forward where you have to click and what you are looking for. Also, PowerPoint is great for collaboration. It's good for people that work in the office or for group work because by going to a 'Review' tab at the top of the program and clicking the 'New Comment' button people can leave comments and reposition stuff on the screen for other team members to look at, review and reflect on it. Another benefit of PowerPoint is that you can share your presentations with others, so if your presentation is educational or you think it can help others or entertain others you can share it with them. You can upload your presentations to websites such as Youtube. There's too many benefits I could talk about when it comes to a PowerPoint and not that many disadvantages because PowerPoint is one of my favourite programmes. One disadvantage I can think of is that maybe it's not as easy to use as I think, some people might find it easy to use but some might be opening it for the first time and having no idea what to do. Another limitation i can think of is that it has so many hidden features and things you can add to your presentation that people don't even know about because it's impossible to use it all at once, if you want to know everything about PowerPoint it would be time consuming because you would have to open it, sit there and open every single tab and figure out what everything is for and how to use it in a presentation.

References:

Bell, K. What Are Benefits of PowerPoint? [online] Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/benefits-powerpoint-55958.html

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Commentary 1 - Moodle

Moodle is a learning platform that was designed for colleges and universities to provide educators and learners with a secure and useful system. It’s a website but if it makes it any more useful for anyone you can download Moodle as it’s also an app so if you like working on your phone Moodle is perfect for that. The main aim of moodle is to help students with their work. For example, teachers go through a PowerPoint they made in class and Moodle is very useful as after the lesson teachers put the PowerPoint and any other extra information that students need to know on Moodle for students to be able to access it in their own time or if someone wasn’t in class it’ll be useful for them as they can go on it at home on their computer or phone and look through it and catch up with others. Another aim of Moodle is to put important messages and information for students from certain university of college, educators can put things like upcoming events, competitions, information about the library and there’s even email where you can log in and it’s a formal email so that the teachers or other students can email you with any information. Another really useful thing about Moodle is that it helps everyone be organised. It’s a place where educators can put our grades up for us to see and there’s place for feedback. It’s really useful and organised as students can access their grades at any time and be able to check how they improved throughout the year or what grade to expect to get at the end of the year. It is used to support any area of teaching an learning, so whatever you study at college or university most teachers use Moodle to put grades up and put the lesson on Moodle, that's why it's a great software. Moodle is used by others in many, many ways. There's variety of stuff to access on moodle and learners use Moodle by login in which is also a great thing, the fact that you have to have a valid login on moodle which is your student ID because it's safer that way as no one else can access your grades or change your details and teachers work can't be accessed by anyone else but them as teachers have a bit more control on Moodle because they're educators therefore they can access stuff we student's can't. When it comes to formal and informal learning, I have used Moodle mainly for formal learning because I use it all the time to access and check my grades, to look at my email and if i received any emails from tutors or other people within university, i also used it to communicate with other students which is informal but I don't do it often. I have also used it in a formal way by accessing class PowerPoints and Word Documents. The teaching and learning theory I would link Moodle to is Jerome Bruner's theory of Development: Discovery Learning & Representation, and the reason why I would link it is because Bruner believed in learning by discovery and he came up with 3 stages of cognitive representation, the first one is called Enactive and it means representation of knowledge through actions, it links to Moodle as learners can prove their knowledge by making actions such as going on Moodle and using the work educators put on Moodle to understand the topic more and gain more knowledge and by doing that they can then do well in their assignment and represent their knowledge because they did something to gain that knowledge which in this case is, going on Moodle.If the learners went on Moodle and looked at all the information such as PowerPoints and Word Documents that the educators provided them with, they're more likely to get a good grade in their assignment and if they will they're more likely to follow that routine and go on Moodle to gain more knowledge. Another theory I would link Moodle to is Social Contructivism. It's a cognitive learning theory which Piaget set the foundations on and other theorists further developed it. Social Contructivism assumes that people learn from others, therefore it links to Moodle because Moodle allows learners and educators to see the work other people did, for example teachers can also learn from us because when we sumbit our essay teachers have to mark it and they can learn something from us, then we can learn from them as they will give us a grade and feedback that we can look at and reflect on later on, therefore it links to Social Contructivism as we are learning from others. There's also some challenges of Moodle. One of the challenges is that there is a lot of information and for me it was hard at the beginning to find where something was, for example the log in button is in the top right corner instead of in the middle of the page.

Reference:

Hurst, M. Jerome Bruner's Theory of Development: Discovery Learning & Representation [online] Available at: https://study.com/academy/lesson/jerome-bruners-theory-of-development-discovery-learning-representation.html#lesson

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In today’s class we had to create a Prezi which is a website where you can create presentations. We had to do it in groups and there was 4 people in my group. It was a collaboration therefore everyone had to do something to help create this presentation. We decided to do ours on YouTube and we wrote about what YouTube is, safety and security whilst using YouTube, what you can do on it and the purpose of it. When it comes to what I did to contribute, I logged in on my login and picked a design for out presentation and did some researching going on YouTube and checking what it’s about and I typed everything other members of the group found out by doing the research. It was a good experience as we got to do different bits and we worked as a team to put it all together.

Within our group we shared different tasks and whilst I was picking the font, design and different colours others were putting together all the information’s. I researched the security of YouTube as it’s a website where you can watch videos and anyone at any age can go on it, therefore YouTube can be a dangerous place when it comes to what videos are there on it and what impact they have on people watching it. I believe my contribution was as good as the rest of the group as we all equally shared the tasks and did our own bits.