Foundation Program on ICT in Education FDP101X · Course Journal of Milind S. Marathe Foundation Program on ICT in Education FDP101X From 3rd August, 2017 to 7th September, 2017

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Course Journal of Milind S. Marathe

Foundation Program on ICT in Education

FDP101X

From 3rd

August, 2017 to 7th

September, 2017.

Week1:- 07-13 August, 2017

MOVING FROM PHYSICAL TO ONLINE CLASSROOMS

From Physical Classroom to Online Classroom

Tuesday, 8th

of August, 2017

Q. 1. Can you list one example of the interactions that happened between the three in a

normal classroom?

A1) In physical class room there are 3 basic elements namely The Learner, the content & the

Teacher. Teacher come prepared with content in mind, process of delivery pre-decided and

getting expected response from learner.

e.g. Teacher draw the diagram on black board and start discussion with learner about the

topic. He explains the operation related to the diagram already drawn. Then additional

information like related equations, graphs, are written on board and discussion resume. After

teacher completes the explanation then he shoots some questions to learner and expect

answer. If varied answers came from learners then teacher initiates discussion among

learners. Sometime instead of diagram on board teacher may use PPT, slides for the same.

Pedagogic Adaptations 1: Learning Dialogues(LeDs)

Q.2 What is the equivalent of such a video in a regular teaching-learning interaction

within your classroom?

A2) Instuctor in video is equivalent of teacher in physical classroom. Screen and information

on video is Contents and process in physical classroom. Learners are same in both.

Q.3) What additional features does the video provide you apart from the regular

information transmission of the content?

A3) a) Newness of the medium is very important and exciting feature b) Listening to the

video when I am( Learner) in fresh, receiving mood is possible. Otherwise I am (Learner)

forced to listen in class room even if I am tired, exhausted, not in mood. I can not turn-off

teacher to mute and re-play when needed. c) Capacity to full or part repeatability of the

“video instructor” if I (learner) could not understand the things in one go. d) neatness of

material, well-spaced, well-written, good diagrams in video along with the instructor. so



overall an integrated view of instructor and its board writing. Thus good presentation. e) I can

control speed of instructor and can download text or transcript of what teacher is talking. So I

can get notes.

Pedagogic Adaptations 2: Learning by Doing activities (LbDs)

Q.4) What advantage do you see in answering the practice questions immediately after

watching LeDs?

A4) Advantage of answering practice problem immediately after LeDs a) Optimum span of

attention is utilised.After small interaction by teacher , learner get break from listening and

get involved in thinking . Active participation of learner is ensured. b) Concepts get settled

and crystalized in the mind and intellect before they become volatile. c) After answering I

always see the answer given by instructor which gives me more insight about the question.

Few hidden points become clear after reading the answer by instructor and I get idea of

correctness in its totality.

Pedagogic Adaptation 3: Learning Extension Service (LxT)

Wednesday, 09th

of August, 2017

Q.5) What is the function of assimilation quizzes?

A5) Function of Assimilation quizzes are to test how a learner has assimilated the concepts

explained in LeDs.

Pedagogic Adaptation 4: Learning Experience Interactions (LxI)

Q.6) What are the advantages of having such a structured group discussion?

A6) Advantages of structured discussion:- a) discussion is very much focused as specific

question is asked to initiate the discussion. b) Many new points will be surfaced as many

brains are involved in the discussion with their own innovative thinking. c) Attitude and

realisation is developed to have many shades to a question under discussion. Integrated all-

round understanding is develop d) But sometimes discussion doesn’t remain focused or very

less participation is observed in discussion, defeating the very purpose of it.

Self Exploration Resources:- What is ICT?: Prof. Prabhakar T. V.

Large data + Fast computation = Information Technology and (IT)

Wired /wireless communication + Fast computing to take action on communication or

request = Communication Technology (CT)

Blending of the two is ICT. Computers are very much required in this. The example of

buying cell phone was excellent. It made clear the complete process. Hardware required +

Internet + software involved . Their interdependence.



Resource Creation 1: Course Journal

Thursday, 10th

of August, 2017

My key decisions about the process:-

a) I have selected my familiar document editor as Microsoft Word.

b) My outline of structure is a theme. I actually do not remember correctly the date and

time but now as it is mentioned that it is a must , I have tried to re-collect it and

mentioned. But I know that there can be 20 % error in day and time. I personally feel

that it is of secondary importance that on which date and at what time I wrote in

Course Journal but in next week I will surely keep the exact day and time information

whilre writing Course Journal.

As mentioned in the video I have written all answers to the questions posed by an Instructor

but did not ask reflective questions to myself. I wrote crucial points but did not categorically

written about my learning from this or any different idea that struck in my mind at that point

of time; it’s implications as whether it is feasible or not in present learning-teaching

environment. I will surely add these features from next week and will try to write “Good

Course Journal”.

Q.7) Write one advantage of writing a course journal

A7) Advantages of maintaining a course journal:- a) Evolution of concepts are sketched

when we write and re-visit the course journal. b) As the text is written at that point of time

and we are reading the course journal now , we can come to know how we were wrong or in-

complete in understanding and how our understanding got refined. c) Actually it is a good

document of our brain mapping related to crucial points of the contents of the course, our

understanding, our learning as we move ahead in the time, Our own ideas and their positive

and negative points and evolution of ours as time progresses.

Learning Extension Resource:-

Friday, 11th

of August, 2017

Yes.This is my first time in a MOOC, so as suggested by the course team I listened to this

TED talk by Anant Agarwal, the CEO of edX.

It was really excellent with disruptive ideas about education in today’s era. Education has not

changed in last 500 years. Now we should transform education in terms of Quality,

Accessibility through technology. Blended online and in-person Courses and Flipped class

rooms are the buzz words of this era. Young generation is tuned to technology and want to

learn through technology with their pace, their comfort able time and place. Learning by

teaching through discussion forum, gaming theory to build laboratories can be the aspects of

MOOCs.



It was an awesome lecture. I will surely take his course on Circuits.

Dr. Deepak B Phatak's introduction video to learners of a faculty development

programme:-

Too many seekers of education, increase in GER, Skills are also required for problem solving

skills. Weightage for practical is very low. Content creation is required. On line tutorials and

tests are getting popularity. This is the central idea of MOOCs. Develop capability to learn on

one self. It is the skill of learning how to learn life-long.

Dr. Phatak emphasis the need of blended online and in-person course run by we the teachers

and that is the main objective of this FDP.



Week2:- 14-20 August, 2017

Please note that now from this week, I am writing my Reflective thoughts, learning’s from

my experience in green colour.

(From experience and comments from peers about “Course Journal1” I decided to write my

“Course Journal 2” with some modifications. There was a comment in one video that you

must be able to write answers for graded questions from your course journal. So I tried to

write on note book as much as possible while listening to video lecture by using the facility of

rewind, pause and re-play, repeat for 2nd

time or some part for 3rd

time. Actually this is the

advantage of ICT in education.)

WEB PRESENCE FOR TEACHERS

Self- Exploration Resources

Tuesday, 15th

of August, 2017

Video by Prof. Geoffrey Challen, (Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering,

University at Buffalo):-

He explained “What is the Internet”.

Internet is basically a huge network of computers connected across the world bringing

billions of people online. Basic 3 levels of internet are

1) Physical level:- Huge computer network connected by wires for communication across

the globe.

2) Protocol level:- Protocols will help and co-operate to decide how 2 computers/more

computers, that are connected will communicate. They define set rules for this

communication between computers and networks in physical level.

3) People level: - It is very important what people are doing with it or working with it. How

they use physical level and their interconnectivity with protocols to exchange information,

contents, ideas and so on.

Video on “How the Internet actually works”, Internet Foundation, Sweden :-

Speed of internet is time taken to complete 5rounds around the earth per second. Information

sent on internet is digital and in form of 1s and 0s. Internet has servers. Servers have



websites, data, contents, and are located anywhere in the world. All devices like computer,

servers even mobiles, have their own unique address which is used for unmistakable

communication. These addresses are called IP address and have a long numerical format,

which are complicated and difficult to read and remember. Hence computers translate the

number addresses to letter addresses. Addresses with letters are called domain name and

servers have this domain names. There are over 250 million domains names in the world. In

some domain name abbreviations in last two places indicate the country where the server

belongs to. e.g.= dot. in is for India, dot.se for Sweden. This abbreviation is called as Top

Level Domain.

Video on “Web Browsers” by Google:-

Web browser is the most important program on computer which is free. Web browser is

neither an operating system nor a search engine. Web browser is a program which allows the

users to visit websites. When web address in enter in the web browser, the corresponding

website and web pages is displayed. Chrome, Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Edge are

some of the browsers available.

Mentors’ Web Presence:-

List of mentors is provided along with their web profiles and I visited few of them. But at this

point of time I could not appreciate much about their web presence. Only what I could gather

is that they are top performers of the last course and they have prepared their website as a

part of the course. Website they prepared was neat and clean and I was inspired about can I

develop my Wordpress website of similar or even better quality? But I immediately realised

that I am a very slow learner in ICT and perhaps cannot build very good website.

Tools for website creation:-

Wednesday, 16th of August, 2017

Why a teacher should have a website? This question was answered in a very motivational

manner. It was said that “Like all others, we have consumed content, but as teaching

and research faculty we also need to create content which is to be used by others,

particularly our students.”

Contents such as CV, research work, publications, teaching material can be the contents of

the website. Websites can be: 1) Simple – they can contain few page, a very simple menu and

or blogs (periodic pages). 2) Multifunctional – structured content possible, Complex

interlinking of pages, blogs, possibility of interaction sessions, enrolment, payment of money

and so on. Wordpress for simple and Drupal for multifunction website is recommended. Both

are open source& free. 3 methods to download and install Wordpress: 1) Open source code 2)

Bitnami package 3) Direct development on wordpress.com .In the above first two methods,



one has to download and install by himself but basic knowledge of Linux or Windows

operating system, web servers, databases is needed. The third method is quite easy but there

are limitations of storage and you are adhered to Wordpress domain. There is one more

method that is third part hosting but is costs according to their tariff plans. Then instructor

taught to create an account and setup a website in wordpress.com . I choose 20-16 theme. I

am not aware about this theme but I followed blindly the instructions and I was thrilled and

excited to create my first ever website “msmarathe.wordpress.com” . One problem was faced

by me here. There was no match between screen shots instructor was showing and what I was

getting. I struggled like anything to get wp-admin.

Basic Customisation in Wordpress:-

The website created was to customise the appearance of wordpress site now with using basic

configuration. A simple page containing default text is displayed on my website. It was told

that Basic customization is to be done through admin dashboard ( I struggled a lot to get this

dash board but without it I could customise some features.) Then I edited name, title or tag

line, logo, colour, background, font (not changed), header image of my website through edit

link in the customization option and published the same. Then I tried to play with Widgets

which are small application that runs within the website and simply displays text within it in

the side bar area.I added widgets consisting of the contact information widget with my

personal information & map. Slowly my confidence was built up that Yes, I can develop my

website in coming future.

Adding Basic Contents in Word press:-

Instructor explained 2 simple contents namely pages and blogs 1)Blog is a diary on the web

and is short form of Web-log. It has time bound releases, daily, weekly, monthly or even

occasionally un-periodic and can have commentaries, collection of pictures, reviews and so

on. Blog is added from add blog option and a blog consist of title and a body. Once the blog

is published it appears on the main page and gives an option to the users to comment. Blogs

can be categorized by adding hierarchical keywords or free text. Tags which are free text

categories, which can also be added to blogs and are useful in search strings.2) Page is

generic web-page and can appear in front page or menu items. page also has a title and a

body and can be added from add page option. It can be static which has no time bound and

can contain tables, lists, images, attachments and so on. They are typically static standard

web pages, arranged hierarchically and can have parent – child relationship. Slug is the text

which comes in your URL and gives a direct link to your web page from the browser.

Managing Contents in Wordpress:-

Thursday, 17th of August, 2017

Instructor told about how to manage various contents in the Wordpress namely Blogs , Pages

and Comments. Control panel is used for the same and for several other site level



actions.After going to mysite go to wp-admin and we get a administrative user Dashboard.

Control panel has edit, quick edit, delete, filter, search to filter options, publish and un-

publish. By using edit or quick edit you can control the actions to be taken on any content.

e.g. For post, we can change from draft to publish option, make any post as sticky one,

which will be the top most post on the page, posts can be deleted or move to trash,

individually or in bulk and so on. The same above actions can be performed on pages also.

Advanced Customisation in Wordpress:-

Friday, 18th

of August, 2017

Instructor told about few configurations which are not there in the default profile and can be

done through the dashboard. He started narrating the procedure to add Media to the pages

e.g.pdf files or power point files.WP stores all the files that are uploaded in a special location

named as Media Library which is nothing but the repository. To add advanced features,

navigate to the page where it has to be added and select add media. Select the media to be

added and drag and drop on the page. Then by insert option the media is uploaded on the

corresponding page and after publishing the page, any user can see the media on the website.

But if website is having many pages then user may find it difficult to locate. So” Menu” is the

solution to this. Menu navigates users from home page to different pages of the website.

Menu can be controlled from the dashboard under appearance link. Menu contains list of

various pages also known as current menu structure and reordering of it is also possible.

But as I mentioned earlier I could not get wp-admin for almost 2 days and so I have not

experimented myself on this feature. But now I know the procedure and also know how to get

dashboard on my site and so I am sure that I will be able to do it.

USING DRUPAL TO CREATE A WEBSITE:-

Out of 63 videos asked to be listened I could listen first 10 and then only 12 & 18 which were

mandatory. The main reason is I was unable to understand Drupal from those videos. Few

things that I could get from the videos are as follows:-1)Drupal was founded in year 2000 by

Mr. Dries Buytaert and in 2015 Drupal 8 th version is running. It is CMS and each page was

its own file and there might be hundreds or thousands of such pages. It is open source and

free. It can be used freely to use, download, change and distribute.It is safe and secure,

mobile ready,very much useful for big projects and supported by huge community to help

you out. Every 3 % of websites are using Drupal and out of top 10000 websites 15 % are

using Drupal.

Face to face Interaction with Dr. D.B.Phatak:-

Saturday, 19th

August 2017

Inaugural talk of 2 days face to face interaction at Remote Centres was very inspirational as

usual. He informed that around 7700 teachers can collectively work in collaborative manner



along with 185 associate teachers who were top 200 performers in last course and be the

“GURU” of modern era. Teacher’s role should now change from knowledge deliverers to

knowledge facilitators. Engaging students actively is very important for learning and it is

possible only if students apply mind + spend time on the topic. Otherwise learning will be

futile whatever may be the quality of material given.

In the session “ Web Presence for Faculty” instructor gave very good guideline to arrive at

destination and goal of the web presence. We answered 2 important questions as 1) who is

your audience? 2) What information do they seek? Detailed answer of these 2 questions will

give you sufficient information can be used in designing your website.

USER’s Story: - I am a ____________ (user ) and I want ____________ (this information)

so that I can achieve ____________. We must write this story as if we are user. Then

organise the information and construct a table with Title, Keywords, Abstract, images and

applicability. This tabular information will give us pre-requisite for putting the appropriate

material on website.

Then there was a demonstration of A-View interaction which is proposed with 185 associate

teachers and a group of 50 to 60 participants. Mentor and Mentee interaction will prove very

useful and targeted, meaningful discussions will be conducted. But there was lot of

disturbances in this session from technology point of view and so could not get much from

this.Idea of interacting with mentor by mentees is really bright and will prove very useful to

us. I as a participant is looking forward for this interaction .

It was told to undertake “Flipped Classroom Activity” by watching 2 videos developed by

Dr. S.S.Sahasrabuddhe on Visual Presentation Skills. Normal class room is teacher deliver

the material and students do assignments at home but in flipped class room teacher will ask to

see the video or learning material at home and will discuss key concepts, problems in the

class room.

Second day of Face to face Interaction:-

20th

August 2017

The day was started with discussions over the RCs about “How to make best use of this FDP”

. It went well but my observation is the discussion could not remain focused to the title as

there is very wide variety of participants. So out of one and a half hour discussion around 50

% was useful for me personally. But It is natural so I do not have complaint about it.

Visual Presentation Skills:- Dr. S.S.Sahasrabuddhe’s session was very enlightening and

interactive. I feel that concept of Flipped Classroom Activity proved to be very successful. As

I came prepared by listening to the 2 videos and making some notes of important points, the

class room discussion re-enforced the concepts and some minor details were revealed in the

interaction. I also visited Wordpress website of Dr. SSS and was very much inspired to

navigate through it.His website was his personality reflected in the website. I could



appreciate that he must have followed Plan – Execute –Impress method which he mentioned

in his video with letter and spirit.

He explained how to do “ Peer Assessment Activity” with forming rubrics for the same and

weightage for various criteria.

Week3:- 21-27 August, 2017

It was told to undertake “Flipped Classroom Activity” by watching 2 videos developed by

Dr. S.S.Sahasrabuddhe on Visual Presentation Skills. Normal class room is teacher deliver

the material and students do assignments at home but in flipped class room, teacher will ask

to see the video or learning material at home and will discuss key concepts, problems in the

class room. I watched 2 videos by Dr. Sameer Sahasrabuddhe.

While preparing presentation 3 steps namely Plan- Execute- Impress should be followed.

Visual Presentation comes in end of 2nd

phase with graphic support and in last step where

various types of graphics are used. Note titled “Graphiucs for Learning 2011” by Clark and

Lyons was introduced by Dr.SSS for further reading. After graphics comes colours which

conveys mood, expression, conventional meaning. Thumb rules and general guidelines were

narrated for contrast, choice of colours, fonts with italics, bold,quote marks and so on. Create

a hand out and distribution of the same is very good practice. In conclusion Dr.SSS

emphasizes that Content and Form both things are very important. Inadequate attention to

either will end up with inefficient communication and excess attention will lead to chaos. So

fine balance should be achieved between form and function.

Let the Content choose the kind of Form is the moral of the whole story.

For me it was very inspirational session. Dr.SSS took me along with his presentation

without losing my attention for even seconds of time. He also told about what should be

on my website as it is also a visual presentation. Word-press website of Dr. SSS is

awesome. My reflection after the session was to develop a very good word-press website

for me.

Exploring MOODLE and MOODLE in IITB

MOODLE is a Learning Management System (LMS) and it is open source. It is very widely

used in many academic institutions and also extensively used in IITB. Prof. Uday Bhandarkar

explained through 6 videos about Exploring Course Settings inside MOODLE. He navigated



all of us through Editing sections in course, adding resources, creating assignments,quizzes,

discussion forums in MOODLE.

For me to be frank with myself due to Ganesh Festival at my home I could not devote 6

to 8 hours for this week’s study. So I am very weak in understanding MOODLE . I

could not listen 37 videos mentioned in Learning Extension Resource.

Week4:- 28 August 2017 -03 September, 2017

Creating your own Video Resources

In this week the focus was on creating our own video resources using a methodology which is

known as “ Screencasting” or “Screen Recording”

Dr. Kannan Moudgalya talked about Open Educational Resources (OER). Various OERs are

available but Spoken Tutorial was considered for learning. Open the URL spoken-

tutorial.org which is the initiative of NMEICT, MHRD, government of India. Then I selected

title and language and I found that number of spoken tutorials are available. Play and ponder

with all possible spoken tutorials of our interest. It was amazing to note that there are tutorials

in 22 Indian languages available.

In next video by Dr. Kannan Moudgalya he gave brief ocerview of how to make such

tutorials? Spoken Tutorial Technology was the subject of discussion. Various software were

told which work on various platforms like windows or linux.

CamStudio an open source software available in windows explained. recordMy Desktop was

for Linux. Then Kazam

Softwares which are marked as GPL (general public license) can be used freely and modify

the program where as non GPL softwares mentioned as screencast-o-matic, Techsmith jing,

Techsmith Camsttia,Quicktime and many more are popular. Comparison of screen casting

software was done in the Wikipedia link very nicely.

Learning Extension Resources

As we were aware about and attempted screencasting , some simple but yet elegant

principles of Multimedia were explained so as to make our screencast better.



People learn more deeply from Multi-media (MM) . Matt Gerberick and Prof. Richard E.

Mayer ( Chief contributor behind MM Principles, explained few basic principles of MM

namely Redundancy, Coherence and Spatial Contiguity.

1) Redundancy:- People learn more deeply from graphics and narration than from on-

screen text, graphics and narration individually.

2) Coherence:- People learn more deeply from a MM message when extraneous material

is excluded rather included. We should not go for too much load on the screen.

Human brain has very limited working memory and so if we put lot of material, detail

equations then human being can not concentrate and thus get distracted. So keep the

material relevant, simple.

3) Spatial Contiguity Principle:- People learn more deeply from MM when

corresponding pictures and words are posted near rather than posted far off on the

page or screen. Human being if forced to look back and forth for picture and text then

get distracted.

4) Segmentation:- Instead of making a video of full material of long duration

segmentation id to be done for good attention. Keep videos shorter 10 to 15 min

maximum.

It is not a methodology of teaching but the good design of instructional set with clear specific

learning objectives will make the learning. Mere good quality videos will not make learning.

Discussion Forum for Mentors and Mentees was good initiative.

Week5:- 04-10 September, 2017

Creative Commons Licenses

Tools for Smart Classrooms

Some open source tools were given under Learning Extension Resources like Open

Sankore for interactive white boards, Mediawiki for asynchronous collaborations

Github for collaborations particularly for teachers.

Following few are paid and proprietary tools named as ConceptBoard or Realtimeboard

for real time collaborations and Confluence as a team collaborations.

Summerizing FDP101X

Week No. Technology Activities and Learning

01 IITBombayX

Document Editors like MS

office, Libre office and Google

Doc

File Sharing Sites like Google

drive, drop box and one drive.

Familiarization of the course and Online

pedagogy. Concept of course journal and

sharing of it with the help of google drive.

Use discussion forum, peer review of course

jornal with specific parameters decided for

reviewing.

02 WordPress for simple and

Drupal for multifunctional

website.

Need of web presence of faculty for

knowledge creation was specified and

Familiarisation of Content Management



System (CMS)

03 MOODLE Going beyond CMS we studied Learning

Management System (LMS)

04 A-View

Screen-o-matics

Learning A-V content creation using

screencasting. Mentor –Mentee Interaction for

doubt clearing

05 Resource Creation Assignment

My final reflection is this course gave me very good flavor and most importantly

confidence in how ICT can be used in Education. I could form wordpress website of

mine. Though it is very raw at this point of time, I will surely use it in my future. I could

prepare screencast. Though I could not follow 100 % procedure mentioned to create

website and video I can do it now.

It was a great learning experience!!!

Milind Marathe

A.P. Department of Electronics Engineering,

K.J.Somaiya College of Engineering, Vidyavihar, Mumbai 400077.

Documents

Foundation Program on ICT in Education FDP101X · Course Journal of Milind S. Marathe Foundation Program on ICT in Education FDP101X From 3rd August, 2017 to 7th September, 2017