Interactivity with Technology

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References: 
Presentation by Hannah Meiklejohn

Slide 2-
www.nhs.uk/dyslexia
www.dyslexia.com/famous
www.athome.readinghorizons.com
www.xtraordinarypeople.com

Slide 3 -
'Reading and Writing' Presentation by Hannah Meiklejohn
'Living with Dyslexia' Presentation by Hannah Meiklejohn

The Pros and Cons of presentations

Wordle and Things

So this is what the content of my blog looks like when it has been 'wordled'.  On the whole it is what I expected.  Phone has come up a lot -  of course! Bibliography and referencing - yep; I am a study skills mentor so I am not surprised that these words have cropped up.  Other key words: Excel; Word; Function; Writing; Microsoft and Macintosh.  Again, all these make sense considering the purpose of this blog.

However, I am concerned with presence of one particular word on my wordle: Things. What are 'things'? Can I have a slice of vague to go with my imprecision please? This is a word I tell my students not to use in essays. "Be specific.  Instead of saying 'like the Olympics and things' say 'such as the Olympics and other sporting events'"

Care for a slice of vague?
(photo: my own)

I was very curious to see where I have used this offending word, and it's not as bad as I first thought.  All but one of the total uses were on my Microsoft and Me post which was kind-of-intentionally-foggy since nobody really wants to know the specific uses I have for spreadsheets and formulas (do you??).

Going through this process made me think about how my students can benefit from this. What if I get my students to do wordles of their essays?  They can find out if they repeat the same words over and over and make suitable adjustments; pick out words that have no place in academic text (like things, ahem) and get a nice overview of the keywords used. Brilliant!

Our Aire of Questions

How can online questionnaires be used to benefit the teacher?

Questionnaires can be a great way to engage the class in something fun, whilst at the same time finding out essential information about the class.  In the questionnaire below, we sandwiched silly questions between sensible ones.  Asking participants their favourite colour (but only giving obscure options) added some playfulness to the questionnaire, but we also found out some useful information, such as: 

• The aspirations of our fellow classmates
• Valuable input on what they believe is important when teaching
• Ideas for delivering an inclusive lesson.

Doing something similar as a teacher could provide me with information such as the range of abilities, the expectations of the class, and the students' previous experience.  Depending on the questions, it could also be used to encourage deep or critical thinking about the subject being taught.

Word Bibliography

Today I attended a Word Functions workshop to find out how to create a bibliography on Word, using the referencing function.  I have known about this function for a while but never bothered to look at it.  I thought it was only really useful to people who struggled to reference correctly.  I know how to reference.  It's not hard to type the references up - I do it as I go along whenever I'm writing an essay.  I know the alphabet so putting the bibliography in the correct order isn't a problem.  So why would I need this little helper when I can do it perfectly well myself?

Now that I work as a student support mentor and a specialist support tutor, I thought it was about time I learned about the bibliography function so I can pass it on to students who aren't so familiar with referencing.  Oh boy, what have I been doing typing up all those references this whole time?! Admittedly the function was not available when I first started my undergraduate degree (I believe it has been around since 2007), but all that time spent on typing up the references for my MA, articles I've written and short courses I've taken in the last few years - wasted!  The bibliography and citation functions are great tools, even for those who are good at referencing.  Students - get on it immediately!

Fish don't really need to know about referencing.  But for everyone else, let Microsoft Word create your bibliography for you...
(photo: my own)

Using headings to simply create a contents page is another invaluable function on Word.  Again, this is not something I used for my degree until I wrote my dissertation...

...thank goodness I discovered it before writing my dissertation :-o