Effective+teaching


 * Effective Teaching with a wiki and toondoo

Wiki** Using a wiki for this writing topic, students can create a page specifically for ideas and brainstorming, similar to the one shown below:



They can access and add to this page at any time during the writing process. They can list ideas they have for their story, including the characters, plot and possible illustration ideas. In traditional methods, this process is rarely evident in the students' final product. In making their wiki, students can also learn the importance of tags, which link the key ideas from the pages and make it easier for the reader to search for those ideas within the wiki. The sample wiki shows how the student tagged the pages:



The teacher can also use this tool to search for components within the writing topic. In traditional classrooms, the teacher needs to read the whole document in order to find the same information. This is evident in the sample wiki. The teacher can enter Gingerbread Man into the search and get the following results, because the student has tagged their pages:



Using a wiki for a writing lesson like this may see a role change between student and teacher. There are some teachers who do not have a thorough understanding of these technologies and are therefore afraid of making it part of their teaching program. Effective teachers have a different view. By walking around the class and observing them at work, they can draw attention to new features discovered by one student and pass the information on to the rest of the class. This is a co-operative approach to learning and students are encouraged to develop and use higher order skills to problem solve. As with traditional methods, students process new learning at varying rates. Students who have grasped new features and solved problems in the wiki can assist others, refining their own skills in the process. Because this cooperative strategy is practised in the classroom, teachers do not have to know everything about the wiki and can learn from and with their students.

When using Toondoo for a learning experience in Literature, students can create spontaneously into the toondoo clip. Toondoo is a fun and exciting way to make cartoon strips and small books. The opportunities are endless in conjuction with creativity. Students can choose their cartoon layout as shown below:
 * Toondoo**

Students can also choose characters, background and props to create their writing task. Using this technology, students explore their learning as they develop their cartoon, which is not possible in traditional methods. It is very easy to shrink and enlarge, change positions, expressions and colours. These features enable the students to personalize their narrative writing very differently to a traditional classrom, where illustrations are hand drawn. There is a large variety of speech bubbles to use, as seen here:



This feature allows students to explore the effects of direct speech within their narrative writing. For the sample and in most classrooms, clipart is most likely to be used for images. This is less time consuming for students, as opposed to the option in toondoo of adding the students' own photos into their cartoon. This also means the teacher can oversee the students working only on toondoo and not other applications. Clipart may have a limited selection of fairytale specific images or props, which requires students to use higher order skills to predict the outcome of their toon within the available artwork and edit their cartoon accordingly. Students can use a paintbrush to add creative flair, further personalising their cartoon. An advantage of using toondoo is that students can edit as many times as they wish, unlike traditional methods.

This technology is suitable for different learning styles and can benefit individual students' needs. The amount of dialogue within the cartoons may vary between students, as with the depth of illustrations and props within the cartoon. Students learn at varying rates and toondoo caters for this by enabling students to save their cartoon and continue working on it at a later date. Using this technology effectively, the teacher can get more confident users to show their new knowledge with the rest of the class, helping their peers and refining their own skills in the process. This also enables the teacher to observe the learning process in action, combined with observations made as they move around the room.

The teacher can decide to keep the toondoo book private for only the creator to view or make it available to their peers and teachers by adding their email addresses. The other option is to let anyone on the web view it. Toondoo can also be used as a whole class creation, making it available just to the teacher's own class. Toondoo is completely safe for the teacher to let the children safely create their toons on their own. This technology is designed to explore learning and toondoo promotes itself as an ideal tool in the classroom. Here is toondoo's promoted features: