Tuesday 8 May 2012

Head Student Assembly - Technology





Key
Nicholas – Red  Rhianne – Green  Annette – Blue Vasco – Brown (All converted to standard colour for readability on the blog)

Change Slide – White  Other Actions - Black


Good morning everyone,

Technology has had huge advancements in recent years and it has improved the way we lived in one way or another. The use of technology in school has also made advancements, from the integration of the Mac Suite a few years back and the laptops that have been provided to the year 9s.

However, the devices that we possess aren’t being used to efficiently. Technology when used to its full potential can be a bigger asset than it already is. It can make our learning easier, more convenient and more effective. Today’s assembly is to inform you on a few ways technology can improve your learning. To begin, we shall show you a video of what you guys think about technology in our school currently.

Open shutter of projector
Play video titled “Video Interviews” (make sure it’s full screen)
When video ends, close shutter of projector
Close video
Start PowerPoint presentation
Open shutter of projector


After hearing what some of you thought technology could be used to our advantage for, the team put together a collection of 5 resources that will aid and enhance your academic life, increasing the efficiency, and productivity of learning.


You’ve all heard of Google I’m sure, but today I’m going to talk about a different kind of search engine – one that is, in some ways, a lot more powerful. Wolfram Alpha, a personally favorite of mine, is extremely handy when it comes to finding specific answers on a certain topic. Take, for example, your average math textbook. Most will contain the answers to the exercises in the back pages but none will actually ever show you how those answers were figured out. Step in Wolfram Alpha.

If you have an answer that conflicts with the textbook or you simply want to understand how the answer was found, all you have to do is type in your question into the search bar and hit enter. What follows is a page filled with information regarding your question.


The brilliant thing is that Wolfram Alpha isn’t just for math…it can specifically answer questions on any subject of your choice and can even work as a dictionary or thesaurus! Whenever possible, Wolfram Alpha will even show you a step-by-step process on how to get from the question to the answer. This is really useful because then you can compare your methods to the correct one and see where you went wrong. Even better, like I mentioned before, Wolfram Alpha is a lot more specific than other search engines and every time you search for something, it won’t come up with thousands of other links to pages, most of which aren’t related or reliable.

Instead it will show a single page containing all the relevant information. You can search from things as simple as ‘words ending in the letters I-C’ or ‘who is Henry VIII’ up to things as complex as solving 2nd differential equations. This is some pretty powerful stuff and it may take some time to get used to how Wolfram Alpha works, but once you get the hang of it, this website becomes incredibly useful for when you are stuck on homework or when you simply want to know an answer to a question without having to sift through hundreds of Google search results. Thank you.


EBSCO is a search service that gives you access to a number of different databases. A database is a collection of data arranged for easy retrieval and contains information from a wide spectrum of subjects,


From politics, science, literature, you name it. EBSCO contains periodical articles, which are magazine, newspaper, and journal articles yielding from 15 different databases creating a massive range of reliable sources to choose your research from.


What you might be thinking is, why should we use academic databases when information is already overabundant on Google? Well, the surplus of information is exactly why students should opt for EBSCO when researching for essays, case studies and detailed reports.


Databases provide information over a broad range of topics but also helps to keep researchers focused, giving them only scholarly articles that are reliable and more credible than information on Google or bing that are more vulnerable to bias, subjectivity and manipulation. For this reason, EBSCO is the recommended search engine for university students and professors. Access to EBSCO is very pricey so be sure to take advantage of this fantastic resource the school has generously paid for.

Close shutter of projector
Minimize PowerPoint

Linking in to the next two topics that we will talk about is a short sketch that we made starring Tara and Elaine as typical IB students. However, only one of them is using technology to its full potential. Enjoy!

Open shutter of projector
Play video titled “Video Sketch” (make sure it’s full screen)
When video ends, close shutter of projector
Close video
Maximize PowerPoint presentation and go directly to [Slide 10]
Start PowerPoint presentation
Open shutter of projector

Who do you think was more stressed in that video? Tara or Elaine? Using Khan Academy, Elaine was well informed, even about topics that she may not have learnt yet whereas Tara will now have to make that long trek to the 4th floor if she wants any reliable answers.


Khan Academy is a website that posts educational and academic videos explaining a huge variety of different scholastic topics. It includes lessons on biology, chemistry, physics, math, history and economics to name but a few. They also have a very popular YouTube channel, containing all of their videos.
Once you get onto the homepage you can either click on a topic of your choice such as “humanities” or you can scroll down the list of 3100 educational videos categorized alphabetically. The videos can range from 10-30 minutes depending on the difficulty of the topic and obviously the more complex idea the longer it will take to explain.
Khan Academy can be used to further enhance your knowledge on a topic you are interested in. Or if you’re unsure of a particular area you have learned in school and your teacher is too busy to help, the lessons can give you visual demonstrations that should hopefully clarify any uncertainties you may have. The use of color, drawings, voice over and subtitles are a new and innovative way to enrich your academic understanding of certain topics

Have you ever been in the situation where by you have just got to school, and then you realize your homework that you have done on your laptop had been left at home and your USB is nowhere to be found? I am pretty sure many of us have. It is especially frustrating when you have put so much effort into that homework but your teacher still gives you a detention because in the end you still don’t have anything to hand in. If this is happening to you Dropbox will be your savior.

This neat little tool, that is available to all of us, will soon outdate the easily misplaced USB. Dropbox is an application that allows you to put documents, videos or pictures onto an online folder so that you can access anywhere in the world as long as you have Internet. After you have placed all your files onto the online folder, you can access it by logging into your Dropbox account on their website and you can download or view your files from there.


Placing the files onto Dropbox is a piece of a cake. Dropbox appears on your desktop like any other folder, and all you have to do is drag and drop your files into that folder and your files will now be available online. Dropbox also has a new feature that allows you to create a shared folder so that your friends can view the files you put inside of it. In the preparation of this assembly the 4 of us shared files using this feature so that we could see what we have done so far without having to email files to one another. Dropbox is an asset to us and it will help improve our learning experience, so I strongly recommend that you all give a try.

The Evernote web clipper is a free note taking software that acts as a digital notebook.


You can clip any article, photograph or web page you find online with a click of the Evernote icon and save it into an online notebook. This way, you can tap into the resources you’ve collected at any time, on any computer or android device by signing in to your Evernote account.

Like a real notebook you can add notes to your clippings, and yet the web clipper is better because you can tag clippings and allocate them to a specified folder thus organizing your information to ease future access. Also, you can always return to the original page to look for citations. Nowadays there is so much information around us that we cannot remember everything we read, and saving it on an online notebook is the most efficient solution. Evernote will help get our information (and ourselves) organized, making it an excellent resource to use for schoolwork or to pursue our own individual interests.

Hopefully, now, you guys understand the importance of using technology efficiently in order to aid our learning. Not only that, but all these useful tools can help with personal matters as well such as getting yourself organized or storing and moving files over the internet. Therefore, I strongly suggest that all of you go either to the Z-Drive or StudyWiz sometime this week to get a more detailed copy of this PowerPoint presentation (which also includes several other helpful websites and tips for the average student).

Before we leave we’d like to thank Mr. Turner for giving us this opportunity to speak to the school and also Tara and Elaine who gave up their spare time on short notice to help make the video sketch. Tara isn’t here today but I still think they both still deserve a round of applause. Thank you!

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