Digital Pedagogies, Week 5 - Personal Reflections 

I found the presentation tools examined this week to be quite interesting and will add well to others that I have discovered during this course. Although I found some quite complex and difficult to use, others were user friendly and were enjoyable to use as well as providing an effective visual learning aid. I am partial to these type of applications as I have always connected best with visual learning aids and believe they would assist me well as a teacher of a class. For my demonstration of some of the visual aids, I chose a mind map that I was able to complete via bubbl.us. I found it really simple to use yet quite effective visually. Different colors, fonts, size and position of boxes can be adjusted easily. The tool allows me to brainstorm ideas for key topics and create concept maps. Multiple tabs can be added and linked to a central point. Further tabs can be created branching off sub topics. This could be used in the classroom as a demonstration from the teacher and then given to students to create their own. I looked at other applications for creating visual learning such as Gapminder which I found a little more complex to use and would be best suited to display technical information such as statistics. In my 2nd teaching area, Geography I will find this particularly useful in presenting information such as population growth. Additional tabs can added to the same data, with options for maps and colour coding representing different values or occurrences. An impressive ability of gapminder is the motion chart that can present a time line that indicates changes over certain periods of time. Another tool examined was, Dipity that is a tool that I am sure will find useful in particular in History classes. Time lines can be created by the entire class with all students work visible to others. Events on the time line can also be made interactive with additional information or links being added to the event. It is complex to use and the user needs to have pretty good technological knowledge to operate but the visual display of information is worth the effort required. Although I particularly like dipity, I did not choose to use it for an example as it is hard to upload information and even getting my head around what seem to be basic concepts were a challenge. The tool is something that I would like to invest more time into over my studies as it will make a valuable teaching tool.   


The mind map below, made through the bubbl.us site seems to only have minor representation through the SAMR model. In terms of its transformation of educational pedagogies, the Redefinition part of the model does not apply here as the form of a mind map is achievable without the technology and has been completed previously on paper or in books that can be handed out to the class.  Partial elements of Modification are present as technology has allowed for significant redesign of the task in the form that the information in text boxes can be added to or changed by multiple users and the map can be accessed remotely rather than just in the classroom. In terms of the enhancement side of the SAMR model, Augmentation is present as the technology can be used by the teacher/student as a direct substitute for previous methods, such as the map on paper and handed out to the class and has functional improvement. As mentioned text can be edited, or pictures or other audio/video clips can be added to the squares, allowing for more user interaction. Overall I feel that the visual learning tools will compliment my teaching approach in History and Geography and can be used to explain new information or for students to create their own, demonstrating that key concepts have been understood.