Online tutorials

Week 13

Khan, S (2011) Let’s use video to re-invent education. TED2011.

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in maths. “He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.” (Khan, 2011)

Khan academy began from very humble beginnings; 5 years ago. Khan began to upload YouTube tutorials which he was using to help to tutor his own cousins. Since that time he has received positive feedback from parents, users, and teachers. Khan academy now has over a million students a month with between 100-200k videos being played out across the world per day.

Khan believes that this content will never grow old, because he argues that YouTube videos are timeless and enables its users to learn at a pace which is suited to them. Learners are able to paused, rewind and listen to lessons as many times are possible. Khan believes that not only can this be beneficial to children but it could help adults who need to refresh their maths skills.  He states that by eliminating the added pressure of humans interaction, the learners can focus  their  brains around understanding a new concept. Khan admits that he did not ever believe that the Khan Academy would become a mainstream source for learning, but for home schooling or just students who are motivated to learn outside of the classroom.

Some schools in America are using Khan Academy and are incorporating the online tutorials in their maths lessons.  Khan believes that the khan academy revolutionised teaching, he believes that his online tutorials remove that “one size fits all”  and brings in a humanised experience. A positive of using Khan academy is that the children who are in need of extra help are granted with more one to one time, however  a downside to this is that the children who are already high achievers are in danger of missing out on learning from a teacher. Although Khan academy does encourage peer learning, Khan believes that he can transform children who are regarded as “slow” into children who are labelled as “gifted and talented.”  He does this by allowing children to have a liner style of education in the sense that they being with very simple maths for example, addition and once a child gets 10 correct answers they are allowed to move onto the next topic which is deemed to be slightly harder. Khan says that all he is doing is building on what a student does not know.  Khan academy empowers teachers as well, because they are able to monitor students’ academic progression they are given data on how fast a child is learning, how many questions they have answered correctly, by having this information they can help the students who are struggling.

Khan’s aim for the future is to produce a global one world classroom.

Working with the Media

Week 12

Unfortunately I did not attend this weeks lecture due to sickness, however I did catch up with the work content on Moodle. This weeks lecture focused on working with media on the web.

From the lecture I understood that there are different types of media such as:

• Images
• Audio
• Video
• Interactive content
• Slides

The Moodle course and  the website which I am creating will  incorporate different types of media. I have been encouraged to use my own original media, so therefore I will keep secondary media to a minimum.

The lecture idenitfied the best places to store media.  Images should be stored on Flicker, audio can be stored on SoundCloud , videos on YouTube and slides can be stored on slideshare. I was advised to store my media on the web. Once it is on the web I should be able to bring it back into a moodle course. Later on in the lecture I discovered how incorporate media into HTML, I still need to pratise the new skills which I have learnt today, So after the lecture I had a play around with adding video into HTML.

Working with frameworks continued

Week 11

Another unstructured week….  Pete oversaw the lecture and was lovely to work with. He did try to provide help for myself and the rest of the group, but again (for the second week running) I believed that the whole lecture was a waste of time and regrettably pointless. Perhaps I felt this way because the lecture lasted only an hour,  and due to everyone having such individualised websites Pete could not help all of us in the hour session.

 

No progress was made this week.

Working with frameworks

 

Week 10

This week differed from the previous weeks due to the fact that my lecturer was away. The lecture was unstructured which I found difficult because I work best when I have structure and routine.  I attempted to add parts to my website, but made very little progression this week.  Pete was available if I needed any help, but I felt so demotivated to do anymore work, I believe this may have been down to my own frustration of not being able to understand how to add new pages into my website. I just felt as if this week was a waste of time.

 

CSS

Week 9

This week’s lecture was a continuation of HTML. We learnt about CSS and I began to apply it to my website. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  It is described by Howe as the  language of style and design (Howe, 2013). CSS made up of three parts, these are the element which you want for change for example the body, P, H1 etc, secondly the style properties of a given element (font size, text type) and finally the different values of these properties (12px, blue etc.) Similarly to HTML, CSS also uses brackets however instead of angled brackets from HTML we use curly brackets as demonstrated below:

Howe states that there are multiple different ways to declare values of and below is an example of long and short forms of CSS.

It  is important to note that both short  CSS works just as effectively as long hand CSS. 

Howe identify that “HTML and CSS give you the ability to leave comments within the code. These comments can be used to help with organization, set reminders, and manage code more effectively. Comments are particularly useful when there are multiple people working on the same code. Any content wrapped within comments will not be rendered on the page”. (Howe,2013)

Once I understood how to use CSS I began to apply it to my work, I first began to play around with colour schemes, and then looked into changing front styles and colour. I thoroughly enjoyed using CSS and I believe that it is equally important as HTML, although it does not provide the information. CSS is responsible for a person’s first impression of that website, for example if a website is multi-coloured with comic sans front it could be seen to captivate a child centred audience. In addition CSS has the ability to convey a specific mood or feel to any website and therefore has the responsibility to ensure that the correct mood of the website is delivered to the target audience.