Reflection five, the last of the digital technologies

The tool I investigated as apart of the group 4 digital technologies was Zooburst. I found Zooburst very easy to use. It is an interactive story book that starts as a blank book but allows you to add pictures and text and change background and text colours. I think this would be good for a teacher to create for young students prep-3. For example you could create a book about the Amazon rain forest and each picture on the book could be an animal or a plant, when you click on it their could be a brief description of the plant or animal and its place in the eco system. The studens could access this themselves and click on the animals or plants they are interested, this allows for level of self directed learning.This interactive book scaffolding makes the learning more exciting and is therefore more likely to engage learners and gain learning outcomes, they think its a fun online story book, but they are actually learning about the environment and the world around them.
I think because this tool has such user friendly scaffolding, it would be a great tool for young student to have a go at using themseves. They could make a book of their own quite easily. For example, a grade one student could use this to assist their show and tell/morning talk. If they have just been on a holiday their parents could help them create a book,putting up pictures about their holiday assisting them to add facts about the places they've been. This can allow the parents to take part in their child's learning experience and then when they show the other students in the class they can learn about this holiday destination as well. This would also open up a discussion about different places in Australia or even over seas, it gives them an opportunity to see other cultures and be excited and engaged about learning. This type of tool also shows evidence of the learning theory of connectivism as it foucuses on the way students are able to locate and access new information through this Zooburst story book. The below Zooburst is one I made about my trip to Cambodia as a bit of a example of what the students could make. As I have demonstrated it is also very easy to embed into a blog which the students could do, allowing them to access it from home and allowing other students to access it also. Even if they didn't have a specific morning talk time allocated during class, a class could be asked to make one any time they go on a holiday and students would be able to access them via other students blogs any time they like.