Ghazala Bilquise

This is the link to our group presentation - Collaborative Learning Please share your comments and feedback on our work

I used this teaching strategy with two sections. With one section it went very smoothly. I paired the students in groups, so they could watch the YouTube video and help each other out. When I explained the class activity for the day and told them they had to watch a video and apply the steps themselves to create an interactive flash website, they were initially overwhelmed. I encouraged them by telling them that they had done well in the previous activity and that this one will be simple as well. Without much arguments, they immediately got to work. Their main motivation was that they could leave if they finished early since they would usually have to wait longer if I had taught this myself. They faced few challenges during the task and since I was facilitating the activity, I could guide and assist those in need. The students who finished their task then started helping others out since they would have face the similar challenges (especially in the coding part). The lesson went smo...

I am an IT faculty and because of the ever changing nature of this field, the most important skills our students need are two fold - they need to comprehend the technical side of things but most importantly they need to be able to learn on their own. Their success in their workplace is dependent on their ability to adpat and learn new skills as they progress. Students need to be self-learners as well as life-long learners. They need logical skills. For example, instead of learning a programming language they should learn logic to adapt to any language. Students need to understand that what they learn in class is just the beginning and no way near to the end of their learning journey. The non-cognitive skills in my opinion are more important than their cognitive skills and these are skills which will determine their success in the future. Unfortunately, most of the time more weight is given to the cognitive skills because the non-cognitive skills are often difficult to measur...

The video suggests  that we should use constructive alignment to align students learning to our teaching goals - which involves understanding the learning outcomes and communicating it to the students and then setting the teaching and learning activities to build those competencies during the course. So taking this into consideration, I'm listing the learning outcomes of one course I'm teaching this semester - CIS 1203 Web Technologies , along with the blooms taxonomy the outcomes fall under. Remember,  Understand LO 1 . Describe the evolution of the World Wide Web from inception to the present and explore the technology behind current and emerging web applications. - Understand LO 2. Identify and describe the various elements that make up the World Wide Web and the supporting infrastructure and technologies. Apply LO 3 . Explore the structure of HTML pages with emphasis on emerging technologies, such as HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, and apply HTML/CSS rules to create basic ...

Assessments should be part of the learning process integrated within the learning and not thought of as simply a means to reward or punish the students for their understanding of their course material. When we are conducting assessments, we are not only assessing the students but also our teaching and learning methods. This implies we need to clearly define the goals of our T&L and integrate appropriate assessments while doing so. Teaching and Learning as well as assessments should be designed in such a way that allows us to develop not only competency in the subject matter but also focuses on other skills such as team work, leadership, self-learning, curiosity etc. Assessments need to be varied to accommodate various learning styles of the students and also enhance the learning experience. Some students may be good at hands on activity and presenting their work and not too good at exams. I believe that assessments should be motivating to the students and allow u...

I teach IT courses in the areas of web design and development, database design, multimedia and programming. All these courses are very practical in nature and most entail logical challenges for which students need to find creative solutions. I teach students from Year 1 to Year 4 in their bachelor program. Needless to say, the teaching and assessing strategies differ as students progress in their studies. Why do students learn? - Mostly students learn to get good grades, to progress to the next semester, get a good job - all extrinsic factors. Learning is just a way to achieve their goal. Learning in this case is not deep and does not last for long! There are very few students who are  who are passionate about their learning   motivated by intrinsic factors such as gaining knowledge, curiosity, expanding their skills, interest etc.   As educators we try to foster deeper learning by making learning fun and authentic at the same time, by creating good and engaging ...

Hi Everyone, Here is a link to my final Presentation . Please feel free to leave comments in my blog or in glogster. It is my first attempt at creating a glog. My group member Sharmila who has used this as her technology for her Module 2 project can better judge how effective I have been in using it to convey the information required for this presentation. Happy viewing!

As we prepare students for future jobs,  improving their digital literacy skills should be a major area of focus for us. By embedding these skills in the curriculum or in our teaching practices we can ensure that students gain confidence in not only using these skills for their learning but also at their workplace. I always try to latest technology tools in education not just for teaching purposes but also for communication with students.  For example using a screen annotator to highlight things on the screen, using a color picker tool to pick colors for a website, using googledocs to share notes with students etc. I also try to establish a communication channel with my students through Facebook and whatsapp to share new ideas, cool short cuts, cool iphone apps, videos, links etc with them. I encourage them to use new technologies while highlighting what problems it would solve. For example students downloaded and used notepad++ for writing their html and CSS code. ...

The article by Lombardi (Authentic Learning for 21st Century) and by Rodgers et.al. (Teaching  the 21st Century learner) seem to suggest the same thing - Changes in society needs revamping  of current teaching practices. But does this mean that we need to incorporate technology in  our teaching methods and this will make it 21st century teaching?  Having said that, it is also true that traditional teaching practices have been around for  centuries and therefore cannot be totally disregarded. As with all generations, the new  generation is different but not because they know technology more than us, as suggested by  Marc Pernsky, but because they interact with the world differently due to the technology  around them. Teaching Practices required in the 21st century should utilize the best  practices of traditional teaching, while inventing new practices that would help students to  be successful in their new world. Authentic learning, ...

It was interesting to read how the psychology and mechanics of gaming could be applied to the learning process to engage the students and create a rich learning experience.  Initially when I read the title of the report I assumed gamification meant to add more activities and games in the learning activities. But this is exactly what it is NOT! It's about understanding the mechanics of gaming that keep the users engaged and translating those design mechanics to the teaching and learning process. What a brilliant idea!   Although I'm not a serious gamer, over the years i've played several games that have completely hooked me so I can totally relate to many concepts being explained in the article such as the the thrill of mastering a level in a game or anticipation of reaching the next level and encountering new challenges. I particularly liked the idea of the flow channel. This means that learning should be designed in such a way that it's incremental and allow stude...

The two articles I read for this task were Design Principles for mobile learning and Chapter 6: incorporating mobile technologies within constructivist-based curriculum resources. I found the articles very insightful. In consideration for the use or application of various design principles for mobile learning to my own learning activities, I realized a few things: From table1 summary of substantive and procedural elements of projects in chapter 1 as well as from chapter6 , it was clear that most of the research that was done with mobile technologies involved the use of the camera and recorder in these devices for the purpose of capturing images, audio or video for a digital story, creating how to videos, recording interviews etc . This made perfect sense because this is what we do in reality as well. Despite the fact that we may have expensive high tech digital cameras or handy cams, when it comes down to taking pictures on occasions, we find ourselves using our mobile phone...

So far from the articles and papers that I have read, I found all positive experiences with social bookmarking tools. In her blog , Silvia Rosenthal suggests that social bookmarking tools promote skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking.  I tend to agree with her.  I found mainly three uses of social bookmarking systems in the literature: For organizing and managing research collaboratively by group of students in a project by tagging, highlighting and sharing content with each other. The collaborative nature of the social bookmarking tools is ideal for this. This is the same purpose that I intent to use the social bookmarking tool with my students . To organize pools of resources related to content teachers are teaching and share it with students To organize and manage information gathered by students in a course. To search for information in the social bookmarking systems instead of using google or yahoo since content is newer and ...

If you were following my blog, you would know that earlier I had planned to use Facebook and a Social bookmarking tool as the technology I would use in my class.  However, there's been a slight change in my plan. I recently attended the e-Learning in Action conference in Sharjah and came across a tool called TeamBox which I decided would add value to my course. So finally here is my implementation plan. The course that I’m going to implement the technology for this project is CIS 1203 – Web Technologies .  This course introduces the basic concepts of the World Wide Web and its underlying technologies. The course also describes current popular web applications like search engines, social networking, wikis and blogs as well as emerging web technologies and trends. The course provides the students with basic skills to plan, design, develop, and publish static websites using an industry standard web authoring tool. The assessment strategy of this course includes two group pro...

I'm an IT teacher and teach mainly practical courses that involve technology applications. One such course I'm teaching this semester to two section is CIS 1203 - Web Technologies . Throughout this course students learn about the web and emerging web technologies. They learn to evaluate websites and plan and design their own. This course is a very hands on and practical course. I've decided to use education technology tool in this course. There are two Web 2.0 tools I want to use in this course. The first tool I want to use is  Facebook , as a means to build a PLN between the two sections taking this course. The reason for the choice of this tools is two fold. One thing is that students need to be exposed to various web based emerging technologies as part of the course. The other reason is that I would like to expand the students understanding of the potential of social networking tools beyond entertainment.  I've read a lot about how facebook can be used in a clas...

Fourteen years ago I got my first job as a programmer. Being a newbie and an amateur I faced many challenges which made me realize that there was a lot I didn’t know (duh!). In my quest to figure out how to accomplish the tasks set ahead of me, I found an online resource called Experts Exchange. This website was kind of like a point based discussion forum. Members could ask technical questions in any category of their choice like SQL, VB, Java etc., and other members (the experts) would try and solve their problems. Once your question is answered some of your points get transferred to the person who answered your question. This site helped me a lot to get my career started. Not only that, after finding solutions to many of my issues, pretty soon in my spare time I was making contributions to this site by looking for unanswered questions which I knew something about. The motivation being - to increase my points and thus increase my ranking on the site. There was a certain thrill in know...

Hi everyone and welcome to module 2.Find out more about me  here. As an educator I’ve used several education technology tools for various purposes – teaching and learning, assessments, delivering content, activities and now recently to create a learning community. The tools I’ve used are as follows: Digital Media & Learning tools - Youtube, TedTalks , Camtasia, Commoncraft, Qwizlets, Voki, Capzles, web portfolios  Social Networking , Collaboration & Communication tools – Blogs, facebook, discussion forums, chat, google docs, sharepoint LMS – Moodle, BBVista I agree with the writer on all the ten reasons for using education technology. One of the best experiences I’ve had with a technology tools was when I used Camtasia to record lessons delivered in class while using screen annotators and MS OneNote (instead of whiteboard). Students could download and view the lesson from bbvista –they could go over it again and make up if they missed a class. The...

Learning, the way I see it, is by default lifelong and always has been that way since the beginning of time. Learning has no end. I don't think there was ever a time period where one could have said -'OK, now I learnt what I need to know in school. It's time for me to apply what I've learnt at my workplace and not learn anything new in the process!' Whether information age or not, this was never the case. So what's new now, in this knowledge society? Well, it's not the fact that we need to keep learning but pace at which learning needs to happen. The rate at which technology is changing is so rapid that we constantly have to learn and relearn new things. We need to prepare students for jobs that do not exist yet and prepare them to be proficient in their work in a short period of time. According to Toffler (2001), "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." ...