This past week we had a guest speaker, Dave, from Live It Earth, an online educational organization that offers programs, blended learning resources and education challenges that connect the classroom to the outdoors.
For me, because most of my professional experience has been as an early childhood educator with the 0 – 6 age groups, and being someone who intentionally refrained, when and where possible, to limit screen time with children in the formative years, I do not have a lot of experience with online sources for education. More than that, however, I probably also need a lot more convincing than those who have grown up in the tech age.
Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced education to go online for a time, I do recognize the value in this type of resource and how it could supplement online education (especially for the demographic who were, up until the pandemic, technologically unversed). Now that we have all been released from the lockdown, I would hope, however, that educators would take advantage of utilizing the outdoors for outdoor education. But, thinking about those communities that are too urban, too remote, or experience too extreme weather conditions at different times of the year, I think, if used to compliment an already outdoor, hands-on, feet-dirty program, that there could be benefits. Still, my only hope is that educators would not subscribe to a pedagogy of laziness and just turn on the programming because it’s easy – no matter how well-produced it may be.
For this week’s tech-task, we were asked to produce a screencast. (I had to type the question in a search engine, ‘What is a screencast?‘ After following the instructions and convincing myself to accept less-than-perfection, I managed to create a screencast introducing an online Japanese-English dictionary resource. I was able to add a title page but was unable to edit the sound, or do some fade-ins/fade-outs. But, with this first experience of creating a screencast, I can confidently say that I would be able to do it again, and I hope that I would become more apt with the editing aspect in future experiences.
https://watch.screencastify.com/v/TfDmGtK9xDSSZ7Eo6VWb
I also turned on the H5P plugin, and I am about to attempt to something interactive to this post. If it doesn’t happen on the first attempt, I will continue trying!
Let’s play a game of Memory!
Hi James! Tell me more about the H5P plugin! I loved the memory game!
Mareike
Hi Mareike, well, my simple answer is – if I was able to create this Memory Game using the H5P plugin, anyone can! If you have a specific question, however, I may be able to help guide you…to Andrew, who will definitely be able to help you! I’m (half) just joking. Within the plugin, there were a variety of games to create to choose from. I recommend giving, at least, one a try. For this one, the most work was to create the .jpg images of the words I used, and I think I used Canva to create these as flashcards, saved them to my computer, and uploaded them into the H5P plugin when prompted. It was relatively easy, and again, if I was able to do it, anyone can!