Week 3

The main focus of the lecture this week was on privacy and responsibility and how to encourage these values around technology among our students. It's all about encouraging students to act responsibly and safely on the internet. As a teacher I know that I need to always be vigilant about privacy and ensure students take appropriate precautions when using the internet. This is something I try to do by finding appropriate sites for the students to visit prior to lessons, rather than just getting them to search using a search engine like Google. I would also like to help my students to learn safe ways to search for themselves as well.

This week we were investigating design briefs (investigate/design, produce, analyse/evaluate) and using a website to construct quizes and games.

We had to investigate how to solve the problem of making a frog jump. This was something that we did hands-on, rather than using computer technology. We trialed different ways of using a rubber band, cardboard, sticky tape and a picture of a frog to make the frog jump. Ours worked by cutting and folding the cardboard and attaching the frog using the rubber band. when you push on the back of the cardboard, it jumps! We used a design brief to record the different ways we thought it might work. Below you can see a video/pictures of our design.

After this activity we used the website www.quia.com/web to make a quiz. The quiz I made can be found here http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513872.html. My quiz is about farms and farm animals. After we had all made our own quiz, we had a turn at answering different ones. It was good to see all the different ideas people came up with and have people do ours and give us feedback.

We also played around with making different activities or games. My game can be found here http://www.quia.com/jw/387140.html. It is a game of word jumble, where all the words are different big cats found in the world.

This website was really easy to use and I can see the potential for teacher designed games and quizes, as well as the opportunity for students to use. There are so many games and you could adapt them to suit a variety of different topics.