It is just the beginning of my learning curve .....

"Huh.... the course is just going to end soon". I think this is a 'relief' sentence that always comes to our mind whenever we have finished a course in our tertiary education. Most of the time, we only use only small of amount of knowledge that we have learnt (formal learning) to apply later in our employments. Students always lack of higher learning skills in the conservative learning environment. Because of new generations and the advancement in technologies, I believe that our students can benefits more from learning with technology, that is what is all about in the course - "NEW LITERACY ".

Although this is the first time I am exposed to online course, I find it is interesting, flexible and making me think deeper than I will just learn from the classroom. No doubt, in the classroom, there will be very interactive and spontaneous. What I see here is different learning environment will give rise to different learning outcomes.

From this course, I have learnt how to use and evaluate educational technologies tools that will benefit me and help me improve my PLE. I have built my own blogs and start to write something on it. I have learnt to use wiki in order to work collaboratively in small groups in jointly creating an online presentation, social bookmarking which allow me to tag and share my favourite website with others, to aggregarte some of the tools using Google reader/ snowflakes, to use RSS 'feed'/ send information to me.

Tools are only devices created by us but how we are going to utilize them need another skill. I have done quite a number of reading on the emerging tools for learning with technology through this course. From there, I have learnt about the functions and limitation of each tools. Now, with some of the 'seeding'/basic knowledge provided in this course, I going to apply some of these tools for my class in coming semester. I am thinking of blog, video presentation to explain some basic concept or theory (something like common craft), and may be create a social network site from Ning. Plenty of ideas and need some time to execute them. I think what I would like to explore later is to find/ learn a tool like "Moodle" to coordinate my course and allow me to assess some my students' assignments.

Physically, the course will end but my spirit to research more technologies for teaching keeps on burning....

Bye!


p/s: To all course-mates, do keep in touch and share what have learnt....

Personal learning environment... what do I have?

After reading the article by Attwell (2006), I am agreed with the author that our learning environments are not just limited to formal or informal learning, but also how we use educational technologies to share, to gain and to create new information/ knowledge. Most of us are familiar with formal learning, which receives much recognition. This will help us in our employment indirect, however, most of us also know that informal learning environment is very important. In this course, I read and search for authentic information (theory and concepts) but indirect, I have learnt about self-discipline, time-management, exploring new tools to use for teaching. As this course is designed by professional educator, it has created a 'fun' environment for me to learn more. I believe I could do it by myself by exploring the internet and find the appropriate tools, but it may take me a much much longer time to do it or I might lose my interest in between .. :-) Thus, we should evaluate our PLE from time to time...

To create a life long PLE, I believe that we need to choose the style of learning that we prefer and suit to us. And with the helps of educational technology tools, our learning curves are exponential! But, as point out by Sha, everything goes back to availability and technology. I am totally agree with that.

Educational tools by themselves may not create an effective PLE but integration of different components as discussed in the article by Attwell (2006).

Let's me do some reflections of the tools that I have learnt from this course:

Delicious - social bookmarking (share popular and relevant bookmarks)
Facebook - social networking (connect almost everyone)
Blogger - multiple blogs with different topics (to voice out)
Google tools (i.e. mail, alert, iGoogle, Goole reader)
Solidcasts/Podcast - audio files hosting
Endnote- Management of references
Audacity - audio recording for podcasting
Skype - internet communication
Wiki - contribute various knowledge
Jing- screen capture video to create demos
Web brower - safari, firefox, opera
Search engines - Google
Mozy - online backup tool to save all your important data
Adobe suite - photo editing and other design works


All comments are welcome.. bye


Reference:
Attwell (2006) Personal Learning Environments. The Wales-Wide Web website. Retrieved on 4 December 2008 from http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/6521819364