Describe a key learning moment during phase one of your artefacts production and explain how at least two design decisions were made.

   The positive and negative experiences I had while creating the digital artefact informed my teaching and lead to many learning moments. One key learning moment resulted when using Smart Notebook. Although I had some previous experience using Smart Notebook software I did experience some technical difficulties when using the program. For instance, I inserted teacher tabs onto many of the smart board pages that outlined instructions for the relevant task, saved the file and when returning to it at a later stage realised that some of the teacher tabs were clear of text. Luckily I had another saved version of the document and was able to add the relevant text into the cleared teacher tabs. After trying to find out why the problem had occurred in the first place I realised that this problem was a result of a glitch in the program. This experience highlighted that when using technology and ICT resources in the classroom teachers should always have alternative activities and expect that technical failures will happen occasionally. In the future when working with Smart Notebook I will be sure to have multiple copies of the document saved and also make sure to print out any important text or other resources that would be inserted in case technical difficulty occurred.

   Research on ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘authentic activities’ influenced the decisions we made during phase one of our artefacts production. Digital Natives are people who have grown up with digital technologies and the internet as part of their everyday lives (Thomas, 2011). According to Prensky (2001) the students that we will teach will all be ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet and will find interaction with these resources engaging. For this reason, when designing our digital artefact, we decided to incorporate activities that gave students opportunities to use the Internet, and engage in online video games including ‘fuel for fun’. Furthermore, Prensky (2010, p. 4) highlights that “students want to create using the tools of their time”. By allowing students to create their original artefacts using Glogster, Wix, Prezi, and Animoto, students are given the opportunity to do this.

When designing our digital artefact we wanted to move away from traditional academic activities like textbook work and make engaging and authentic learning tasks the focus of the learning environment. Reeves, Herrington and Oliver (2002) propose 10 characteristics of authentic activities that assist teachers to design authentic activities of online learning. We used these characteristic when making decisions in regards to the activities we used in our digital artefact. For example, since it is suggested that authentic activities provide the opportunity to collaborate, we chose to include activities that enabled to students to work on tasks in groups and pairs (Reeves, Herrington & Oliver, 2002). In addition, Reeves, Herrington and Oliver (2002) also highlight that authentic activities create polished products that are valuable in their own right. For this reason we decided to include activities that would allow student to create polished products including Glogsters and Wix websites that were valuable in their own right and could be shared with others.