I’ve created an interactive lesson using H5P flashcards about the 360-degree Camera Ricoh Theta, it was fun and easy and quick to do.
As for Microsoft office mix in 2016, we had to go to Microsoft office and download office mix then a new tab for office mix appears inside Microsoft power point, but in 2018 the office mix tab will be embedded within the Microsoft power point. To me using office mix was complicated a little bit and that wasn’t my feedback alone, a lot of my classmates talked about how they suffered using it.
I also created an e-book with my classmates Dora, Sara and Ismail, we choose the Interactive White Board as our subject and we talked about its properties and characteristics. I think creating such e-book might be very important for teachers of early levels like grade one and two, where kids can be really attracted to visual stories and pictures.
It is scary how technology develops at a very fast pace, if one wants to compare IWB 8 years ago and now, you will find magnificent differences starting from calibrating the pen every time you switch on the board and now students don’t know that this was the case previously till the quality of pictures; how it was and how it is now. Smart Document Camera is a helpful hardware that can be added to IWB, it projects any object in front of its lenses directly on the IWB, it helps in demonstrations, investigations and text projections.
Screen mirroring is quite a useful solution for reflecting phones and laptops’ screens onto the TV screen or even the IWB screen. It was easy to link to Apple TV since I have iPhone but the fact that you can’t mirror more than one iPhone or Ipad makes it limited in its functionality. If you want to compare apple TV with Kramer Via Pro you will find a huge difference in price and in functionality, the first is cheap and can mirror only one screen and only from Apple gadgets while the second one is much more expensive but yet it can mirror multiple screens up to six screens at the same time and it can mirror any brand of gadgets and not restricted to one. So as a class equipped with all these interesting technological tools KVP is a must to have.
Apple Ipads and Chromebooks are different gadgets with different potentials, each with different properties. And it depends on the buyer and his reason behind buying of them. If he wants a cheap durable gadget chrome book would be the one. But if he is looking for fast, trustable advanced applications then he should look for Ipads.
The final part of information literacy presented very useful information to me. I wasted a lot of time searching for articles and books without finding them because I wasn’t searching for the correct keywords. The tips on how to use search engines are crucial to me, and I will apply them from now on.
ICT literacy
This category has six subcategories; curation of the information, personal learning environment PLE, O365 and G suite, create learning material, classroom hardware and software and finally, information literacy.
Again a new term was introduced to me which is curation and I really needed because I always suffer from gathering and organizing information, I used pearl trees as my creator.
My PLE which is again a new term stands for Personal Learning Environment, that I had no idea about it. But the challenge I faced in creating it is that I wanted to be in pictures so it took me quite a long time for gathering pictures and logos for it, I use popplet as a mind mapping tool but I faced problem in embedding it in word press so I changed my blog from word press to Wix. you will find it embedded in the products section.
In O365 all what I knew was Microsoft word document, power point and excel the offline mode. Now I discovered that there is an online mode and that we share with friends and work together, also there is Sway which is an interesting new way to represent your project, Teams, OneDrive that you can share files on it and work simultaneously with your friends on it and OneNote which I liked the most. The idea of writing and taking notes directly on any file I upload helped me in taking notes directly on the slides that my teachers where explaining. I’ve joined Microsoft Community and I’m planning to earn some badges in the Christmas vacation, there are two training sessions that I am interested in “getting started with OneNote and Getting started with OneNote class Notebook: A Teacher’s all-in-one”. While in google suits for education I found rich and helpful resources for teachers nowadays. I wished that I knew them early when I was teaching for six years with no resources but the book and some websites. I found that there is no Google Educator Group in Lebanon till now, but unfortunately I’m not in Lebanon. May be if I returned and there was still no group I would take the lead and launch it. Also I’ve joined Google Translate Community because honestly the translation from Arabic to English and vice versa needs a lot of improvement so I’ve decided to be part of this improvement. In summer I’m planning to be Microsoft certified educator and google certified educator too.
