The appropriate applications you have used to support your teaching.

 The appropriate applications I could use in the future would be Padlet, I think it would be a really good way of getting my students to communicate in a new and innovative way as well as keeping the discussion on the topic and knowing that everyone can voice their opinion in class. “One of the good features of it is that educators can make their wall posts interactive, by dragging and dropping different media and uploading files to them. With features like export, subscribe, email and social sharing, educators can easily make their wall posts collaborative” (Team and Written, 2015).

Hot Potatoes is useful as it had different types of activities within the application and I could use all of these with my students. I could use the competitive nature of them and make a game out of it so the learning is fun and engaging for them. I think they would respond to this very well. A review done by Language, Learning and Technology (LLT) Vol5Num2 review of hot potatoes explains “They do not require programming knowledge, yet they still offer flexibility for teachers who have more advanced knowledge.” 

Getting my students to use Wordle for them to remember key terms would be great as they can choose the layout and the colour scheme for them and it is a creative way of remembering terms they would need to write in their logbooks. (TeachersFirst review – Wordle.) explains that it is a terrific visual tool to share on an interactive whiteboard. It is a way to help students see and memorize text, especially visual learners.

Reference

LLT Vol5Num2 review of hot potatoes (no date) Available at: http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num2/review3/

Team, E. and Written (2015) Padlet - paper for the web. Available at: http://edtechreview.in/reviews/243-padlet-paper-for-the-web

Barriers to the effective use of technology in education.

The barriers to the use of technology in education depends on the classroom facilities. If the classroom you are teaching in does not have the facilities to use technology to teach then you cannot use technology to teach. These days everyone assumes that everyone has the technology but unfortunately, it is not always the case.

For instance, research has shown that the ways of teaching can be different depending on teachers' different beliefs even when the teachers have similar knowledge and skills (e.g., Ernest, 1989). This statement made by Ernest is true, as a drama teacher I don’t believe it would always be appropriate to teach with technology.

It would also depend on the places funding for the facilities. Some educational establishments unfortunately do not have the funding for the facilities the use of technology to aid the learning and teaching of the subject.

As a teacher, I feel that is more important to find out how your students learn as it is more important to teach the learners in the style that best suit them. Different student learn in different ways and we are taught to help learners learn by applying our knowledge of how that students.

References

Kim, C., Kim, M. K., Lee, C., Spector, M. J. and DeMeester, K. (2013) ‘Teacher beliefs and technology integration’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 29, pp. 76–85. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2012.08.005.

How technology has changed the way we learn.

Technology has changed the way in which teachers take lessons, there is a lot more interactive learning with the development of technology. Ahead Program (2009) mentions some of these skills, as identified by The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) that will help students to work and live in the twenty-first century. The skills include conducting independent research, thinking critically, solving problems, using technology to communicate and collaborate, and understanding societal issues related to digital citizenship. Knowing that this is the direction in which education is moving would incorporate technology into their classes or into the students learning.

It would be hard to incorporate technology into one of my acting classes as the classes normally take place in rehearsal rooms, studios and theatre spaces which are more open and there are no laptops or technology within the rooms. To incorporate technology into the lessons, I would book out a computer lab for my lessons and for the students, or a classroom with an interactive whiteboard. For example, some use an interactive whiteboard only to project content while others use the board to support interactive student inquiry processes (Hall, 2010).

It would also be helpful to get scripts on phones and be able to highlight them instead of having them on paper, therefore students would constantly have their scripts as when they have paper scripts they can forget them.

References

Kim, C., Kim, M. K., Lee, C., Spector, M. J. and DeMeester, K. (2013) ‘Teacher beliefs and technology integration’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 29, pp. 76–85. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2012.08.005.

Njoku and Udochukwu, C. P. (2015) Information and communication technologies to raise quality of teaching and learning in higher education institutions. Available at: https://www.questia.com/read/1P3-3688346891/information-and-communication-technologies-to-raise 

The value of mobile technology in teaching and learning.

The value of mobile technology in learning is growing immensely, and will be used more frequently in the future of education. “Such wide application of technologies, in a sense, can be attributed to the purpose of enhancing effective and cost-effectiveness of delivery of education” (Wong and Pang, 2015).

For the subject I teach, technology would be hard to use. Acting has always used technology within the subject for lighting sound and projection which is something new within acting and performances. Programs like Qlabs are becoming more frequently used on courses to train the students on how to use the technology that is advancing.

Martinez states that “Technology enhanced learning (TEL) has shaped the way we teach and learn nowadays” (2012). “The internet and the technology advances have provided a virtual space where learning can take place outside the classroom.” (de Andrés Martínez, 2012) . A great way of using technology within acting is to encourage the students to write their logbooks as a blog, this will help the lecture to know that the students have not copied or plagiarised. This would help the teachers to check the work for plagiarism to get them to submit their blog through turn it in. An example of this would be, Turnitin is used for detecting plagiarism and marking electronically, and it has been found to be very valuable for teaching staff (Buckley & Cowap, 2013).

References

Buckley, E., & Cowap, L. (2013). An evaluation of the use of Turnitin for electronic submission and marking as a formative feedback tool from an educator's perspective. British journal of educational technology, 44(4), p.562-570.

De Andrés Martínez, C. (2012) ‘Developing metacognition at a distance: Sharing students’ learning strategies on a reflective blog’, Computer Assisted Language Learning, 25(2), pp. 199–212. doi: 10.1080/09588221.2011.636056.

Wong, B. Y.-Y. and Pang, S. (2015) ‘A framework for effectiveness of institutional policies on technology-enhanced learning’, in Technology in Education. Transforming Educational Practices with Technology. Springer Science + Business Media, pp. 175–186.

Photostory

I liked Photostory straight away as it was very easy to use. This would be a useful and effective program to use within my subject. I think it would be effective to use for the students to look at physicality and facial expressions to gain the mood and atmosphere of the play being looked at. It would get students to evaluate and analysis the way in which they convey emotions and how they show it through their facial expression and body language.

Blog Review

The blog I am going to review is http://actingwithoutthedrama.blogspot.co.uk/ . This blog is written by Ben Hopkin who has different acting classes throughout America, the use of the blog is to inform previous and new people into the acting classes provided. The blog has a lot of information in its post and is really long and informative about the type of acting classes, what is would cover, how much it cost, who the class is aimed at (Newbies or experienced) .

I like the design and layout of the blog. The first thing that drew me in was the photograph of Shakespeare. Ben likes to use images a lot in his blog and I find that refreshing it breaks up all the information he gives to you, this is such a good thing to give to the readers as it gives their brain a break from loads of information. The images have a humorous caption with them too, something that is taught in acting (light comedy relief). The colour scheme represents acting as black is a colour that is used often within the area. The font was a clear one used like Calibri (Body) but the text was small and could have been bigger, but that is totally a personal thing as I like bigger text as I find it easier to read and I liked the fact that the majority of the text was white as it kept it neutral. The things that the blog wanted to emphasise to the reader was in red or blue and pieces of the blog were even underlined for extra emphasis. This helps the readers see the important information quicker and clearer because if it was all in red and the important bits were in white I don’t think it would stand out as much. I also noticed that any payment information was in a light blue and was underlined for the reader to notice the difference in colour and it was important information.

Ben has also put his twitter feed down the side of his blog so you could also follow him on social media, this is very clever to link your blog and social media together, as it can link the people from social media to the blog and vice versa.  

 Overall after looking at a few blogs, I think this has been a good blog for me to review as I was unaware that you could use a blog to inform audiences in this way about acting classes as I have never seen it done and I think it is a really good way to advertise acting classes. Blogs are often something used by performers to inform people about their work on a production. But for Ben Hopkin, the creator of this blog has gained a following through his blog and used it to advertise his acting classes.

Do Schools Kill Creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED Talks

This Ted talk in particular is inspirational to me because it is linked to my subject. I have already studied this speech for my third year degree as my political speech. It is a speech about Creativity and education. At the beginning of the speech Sir Ken Robinson states that “throughout all the Ted talks that day no one knew what the world would look like in 5 years’ time”. Yet we are meant to be educating the children for the future. In this speech it is also stated that children are creative and innovative from a very young age. As the speech develops, the point is made that we “unlearn” our creativity and come to focus on simply providing teachers with the correct answer and become scared of being wrong and taking a risk or being creative. This is what the education system does as children get older, they get more aware of being wrong. Robinson asserts that “all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.” Robinson points out that each individual has particular talents and that it is important to focus on these talents that in some ways are naturally occurring; they are the areas to which we are most inclined. However, the education system forces children to learn a range of skills, many of which they have no interest in. This he implies wastes creativity and potential. We should nurture creativity and the willingness to take a risk even though that may at times turn out to be wrong. We learn from both the right and wrong choices. This talk applies to the performing arts because students must be prepared to experiment and at times fail because only then do they find out what succeeds. The process is a whole; both the success and the failure.