Presentations

I think that some of the presentations have been particularly relevant to teaching in classrooms.  It has been really helpful to see some new ideas and programs that we can take into teaching next year.  I have really liked the exploration of programs from some groups that can be used in everyday teaching.  I know that in my group we presented a youtube downloader that although very simple can be extremely useful for people in their teaching if they did not know how to do it.  Then we also presented another program that can be used to place review lessons or directed homework videos online for student to access.  This type of presentation can be useful for some and I have really enjoyed similar type presentations.

One online presentation that I have seen was looking at PE one of my methods and a number of i phone or smart phone applications that can be used to actually aid teaching within the curriculum.  It does seem that most students have smart phones and encouraging them to use it effectively can be great.  One of the apps was a fitness calendar and diary which in Yr 12 PE the students will have to create, participate and record a fitness program and rather than trying to get them to record and date and time everything by carrying the i phone on walks, runs and ride etc all of these records can be automatically recorded which means that it will actually get done rather than making it up.

Today I have really liked an idea from a presentation, of facebook groups for classes or year levels next year but I don't really want my facebook page linked with it.  Yammer was bought up and I really like the idea of having the closed discussion groups with the social communication that looks so similar to facebook that all the students will already have and use all the time.  It runs the same as facebook and so would probably be something that students would actually use and enjoy, more so than blogs or wikis where they have less say on what is on the pages.

I really feel that the presentations from each group has been the most useful part of this subject for my teaching next year.