Online Student Protection/Creating Quizzes & Activities
Before I reflect on this week workshop I wanted to touch on a few points that were mentioned during the lecture on protecting students online. As much as we encourage the use of technology in everyday learning in the classroom it is important to remember the potential issues and threats that could occur if students are not protected whilst using technology such as the internet. Even though the internet offers numerous benefits to students’ learning, the internet involves some risks that teachers and students need to be mindful of in the 21st century. Students access to online resources needs to be monitored not only in the classroom but at home to prevent potential threats such as; exposure to harmful material, cyber bullying, privacy of identity, spam and viruses from occurring. I found the information provided by the DEECD on cyber safety very helpful and useful and I plan to make an effort to encourage the teachers I work with, the parents of my students and the class I teach to be conscious of internet protection. I will provide them information to equip them with the knowledge of how to behave responsibly and safely online.
During the workshop this week we completed a number of activites that we could use in our future classrooms. The first activity was to use a design brief with the components; investigate/design, produce and analyse/evaluate. The problem we were given to solve was how to make a frog jump with the materials we were given; cardboard, tape, a rubber band and a paper frog. The activity required us to first design something using the materials that would best increase our chances of making a frog jump. I have included the design brief we completed during the workshop to demonstrate the process we went through to achieve the final outcome. I found this activity very interesting and engaging and one I will definitely store away to use in my future classroom. The activity is perfect for an inquiry based component in the classroom as it requires students to first think about their design and what needs to be included before using the resources. Once the design is constructed to students test their designs and determine whether it is successful, if not, what needs to be changed, if yes, how can it be improved. Creating a design brief encourages students to use their higher order thinking skills to collaborate and research a topic/issue that they must solve based on an inquiry question to determine the best outcome through analysis/evaluation. It is designed to get them to think of new ways of doing things 'think outside the box' and helps develop and build their creativity and thinking skills.
For the rest of the workshop we experimented with an online program QUIA, a website that provided you with the tools to create and develop your own activites ranging from quizzes to cloze activity to word jumbles. The following links are examples of the different activities you can produce using QUIA:
