Encountering E-Learning Education

I found a useful a news, information and resource blog for teachers in the UK called Primary Teacher UK. On this blogging page I found a useful entry entitled Me and My Movie. This CBBC program is a unique film-making initiative inspiring and enabling children to make movies and tell their own stories. The website provides fun, interactive film-making tutorials and a safe space where children can upload, share and rate each other’s films. Students can enjoy publishing and tagging one another’s movies on the web. I watched a movie called The Worst Present by 12 year old Catherine. It was a short video of two girls miming. The scene was based around two girls exchanging a present. I thought it was lovely that these two young students were provided with an opportunity to publish and perform their piece of mime to a world wide audience online. The free Me and My Movie film-maker’s pack for children is also available to download from the site in the How To section. This looks like a really interesting and interactive site which would be useful in the classroom. It is visually really appealing to children and easy to navigate.

Images accessed from: http://www.pastornet.net.au/gifs/eternity.jpg

http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~fuhrmann/eternity.jpg

I found Michelle and Amy’s Vodcast very interesting. They used two metaphors to represent deep and meaningful learning. The first was the eternity sign which they referred to the way learning is a continuous and ongoing process. I agree with this idea although sometimes it can seem overwhelming. Children sometimes need to be inspired by the never-ending nature of learning but conversely may need to be provided with small and manageable learning tasks to gain a sense of achievement. They also used the metaphor of a road in that learning can take you in many different directions depending on the path that you select. From my teaching and learning experiences I have also realised that being able to determine your educational direction certainly does increase the depth of learning.