Once again I find myself falling behind with my blog postings. I work full time, study full time and have many other commitments. At the moment I have been super busy with assignments and other commitments and I feel like some of my uni work has been slipping away from me. I find that EDC3100 is very time consuming compared to most other subjects I have done so far. Now, I feel like I am preoccupied with prac, and while EDC3100 stops for prac the three other subjects I am doing at the moment do not stop. I hope that I will be able to keep up with everything and get back on top of things soon.
Blog writing methods
I have had to basically write my 3 weeks of blog posts in one day! Not a good feeling! However I feel like because I am doing most of them all at once I am in a really good mindset and am able to reflect one what has impacted me lately. I know that for the first assignments blog posts I was trying to write them after work and uni, just before bed. But writing them today I feel more connected to my blog and just keep thinking of new things to blog about. For the next assignments blog posts I might try to combine the two methods and write 3 at a time for each week. Let’s see how I go at sticking to this goal!
Word Counts
Every time I have an essay with a word count I think to my self oh my god how will I ever write that many words about this! and then every time I get to about the middle of the essay I think to my self oh my god I am going to have to cull so much of this because I have written way too much!
When I saw the justification essay for assignment 2 had a word limit of 500 I didn’t feel like I usually do. I knew that I was going to struggle trying to limit my justification to only 500 words. I have read through a few other students blog posts about this and agree with Kristen it would be so much easier to stick to word limits if we could just use dot points 🙂 but that is wishful thinking. So, instead I am becoming great at culling my essays!
An awesome feeling
I received feedback for my first assignment for EDO3472 – children’s and young adult literature. I really enjoyed this assignment and I put in a lot of effort because I loved it so much and it paid off. I don’t think I have ever received such a great mark (46.5/50). It is a great feeling to receive positive feedback when you put so much into an assignment.
If any of you fellow students have any interest in children’s literature then I would defiantly recumbent this subject. It is so interesting and engaging. I really love picture books but here are a few of my favourite Australian authors:
Nick Bland and
Upcoming Placement
I live in Katherine in the NT. We have 5 primary schools here. I work at one so I can’t do a prac there. I have been to two for previous pracs. So I only have two more left to go to. The school I have chosen to go to for this prac has a very large Indigenous student population and I am really excited to get in there and begin. I am going to be in a Year 3/4 class (I really like years 1/2 and 5/6) so it will be interesting. I have had a Year 3/4 prac class before and to be honest they didn’t make me fall in love with the age group 🙂 but I’m hoping these kids will. I have heard that the school is well resourced and uses a fair bit of ICT so am looking forward to seeing how they do things differently to the school I work at. While I am on the topic of prac last year another student and I had the best experience and went to Bathurst Island of the Tiwi Islands for our pracs. It was incredible and was so much more than I thought it could be. I hope that I love this prac as much as I did with my last one.
ABC Splash
My assignment 2 was based on Year 6 Science. It was about natural disasters. I have seen ABC Splash used in a few classes that I work in but I have never explored it myself.
I LOVE IT!!
It’s great. It is linked to the Australian Curriculum and has interesting videos, interactive games, web links, topics and articles. It covers a whole range of different topics from different subjects for each year level. It’s kids friendly and teacher friendly. I will defiantly be using this website as a go to when I become a teacher and I am looking forward to using it while on prac soon.
This is a link to one of the videos I used in my assignment what huge forces cause tsunamis
Thoughts on assignment 2
I found assignment 2 more challenging and time consuming than I thought I would. I had an idea of what I wanted to do from the start but along the way I kept questioning myself and the use of ICT in my plan. I am happy with what I have submitted and I feel as though I learnt a lot while doing my assignment so that has to be a good thing.
Like Amba I have taken a few things away from completing this assignment. Such as
- integrating ICT in lessons and units for the right reasons
- using a wide range of ICT that assist the students’ learning as well as asset them in being able to demonstrate their knowledge and understandings
- planning an inquiry based unit
- planning a fun and interactive science unit (I thought science was scary before)
- using the standards for the rubric
- understanding how general capabilities fit in with subjects such as science
While it was a lot bigger than I assumed it was going to be I did end up enjoying assignment two because I learnt a lot along the way.
Not enough time
Since submitting Assignment one I feel like I have lost my uni mojo. It always seems to happen to me in the middle of the semester when I have so many things that need my attention. This is the first semester I have done four subjects and its now in the middle of the semester I can really feel it. I work full time and have many outside of work commitments. Out of the four subjects I am doing this semester this one is the most time consuming. I was happy to submit my Assignment two a day early but I unfortunately have really neglected my blog this time around. After reading other students posts I can see that there are others like Steph who hate feeling like they are falling behind. I hope that I can step it up and get back to my blog for the next assignment.
Glogster
Through the subject EDO3472 – Children’s and Youth Adult Literature I came across the website Glogster. We had to use it to create a multimodal poster for our assignment. You can upload personal photos or use images of there internet (referenced of course). You can select from a range of backgrounds, picture frames and texts. You can also add links to webpages on the actual poster which was pretty cool. I’m sure there are many other amazing features that I didn’t have the time to discover or use. It is a paid website but we were able to create our posters using a 7-day free trial. I will definitely be using this handy website when I am teaching.
Assignment 1 feedback
I just opened my EDC3100 Assignment 1 feedback. I am happy with my results however I was shocked to find there were two instances when I had ticked a box but had not written any information next to it. I swear I checked and rechecked and checked it again – so how did I miss these two sections??? I find that once I think I have finished an assignment and have done some editing, I find it difficult to find the remaining errors. Usually my poor partner or work colleagues are asked to read through my assignments but for this assignment because it was a little different I decided not to ask anyone to read over it. I have learnt a valuable lesson from this – read and check assignments more that THREE times before submitting!!!
sjmaloney 