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In week 1 everyone was introduced to the course they will be participating in. We weren't about the different elements of drama and a few classroom activities to encourage the students.

In the first session we had the nerves were very high. I was walking into a class to meet about 20 people I'd never met before, but once I got in I noticed a friend from my high school. Ms King put us through a few different ice-breakers which were rather uncomfortable to start off with as its easy to get embarrassed, but towards the end it got enjoyable as we were doing team-building/ice-breakers that we could also use on our future students to create less tension and lighten the mood.

In the first 10-20 minutes of the session I was extremely nervous, even though I had a friend there with me. It feels like everyone in the room is staring at you even though everyone is most definitely not, it can become overwhelming and be hard to handle sometimes. I'm sure this is similar to how a child will feel on their first day of school, it can be rather intimidating going to a school for the first time and meeting people, but for primary school kids I can imagine its even more nerve racking as its their first time at any school.

During the workshop I learnt that the way we were learning helps me more than watching a lecture and writing constant notes about it. Throughout high school the only form of learning that we would do was writing notes about the power point or what ever our teacher was talking about, this wouldn't work to well for me. Whereas when we are doing the techniques ourselves such as when we did the post-cards and ice-breakers it felt easier to comprehend and understand how we are going to teach the future generation.

Primary students will find it easiest to learn drama by doing fun activities to help them stay engaged. By allowing them to participate in activities it means they stay engaged and learn the techniques at the same time. Even taking the students to watch a performance of pantomime will help them to understand how performances work.

Overall the first week was intimidating and nerve-racking but it was still a fun experience and I'm looking forward to the rest of this Unit

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As a learner I would say personally I am a very hands on learner and can remember formulas better. All throughout high school I was bad at remembering theory and long definitions. So in AED1260 doing a large amount of the teaching techniques myself and learning from the experience helps me remember and understand the topic better than just hammering out notes.

In my third lesson compared to my second and first ones I feel a lot more comfortable to act and perform in front of my classmates. It was less embarrassing as everyone else had to do a similar thing that I had to do. Most people would laugh if something funny happened but would be respectful if we forgot something or weren't prepared enough. The workshops are always fun and engaging as we have to participate and take part in the workshop ourselves.

Collaborating in the workshop goes well most of the time. Your 9 times out of 10 with someone new from your previous group and it encourages you to interact with people you wouldn't usually. Everyone is willing and happy to work together so the group work usually ends up being pretty fun. Even if the planning that we do during the planning period doesn't work we always have a semi-finished performance to use.

Drama is a useful task to create collaboration and cooperation skills as it is rarely an individual task. Most of the time you are put into groups and have to collaborate with them to get a finished performance. It can encourage the skills that students need to develop to be comfortable and confident when it comes to collaborating and cooperating in future experiences, such as, high school and work place.

As we've done more and more workshops in AED1260, more people are starting to look comfortable during what would have been embarrassing in week 1. You can see that people are developing friendships as they have whispers to their friends and frequently sit next to them. There are people who seem to be opening up as on their first day they seem nervous and quiet, people are laughing and being more adventurous/out-going during the group performances like being louder. Overall everyone is getting more comfortable and less embarrassed.

Doing the group work means interacting with new people in the class. From interacting I haven't learnt a huge lot but I've learnt a few of us have mutual friends or connections or went to schools near each other. Just from interacting alone you learn that some of you had similar childhood experiences like what stories we were told or what sports we did. Some people even have a similar sense of humour so you get along with them pretty easily.

As the weeks progress its easy to notice people getting comfier around one another and opening up more and more. As we get further into the unit I'm sure more people will open up and I will get to know them.

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Today we started Module 2 which was Dance. Going into the workshop I wasn't excited at all, I was nervous and expecting to be embarrassed. Got in there, dreading the class. I was joking around with my friends about how bad it was going to be, but, I think we were all pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable and fun it was.

We started with a warm up which sort of broke the ice, made it less awkward between everyone as we were all doing similar things that we all found embarrassing. All of the different warms up that we did helped ease the air and made everyone more comfortable. It definitely made me more comfortable as I saw my friends laughing and doing the same thing we were laughing at each other and with each other.

Once we got into choreography our own dances it wasn't as hard as we thought it would be. The music helped create the dancing and felt as if it became naturally rather forced, granted they were all very basic dance moves, but it didn't feel too hard to put them all together. We worked well as a team and got the tasks done usually before the designated time and we volunteered to go first, it felt like a productive lesson.

Overall at the start of the day I was dreading dance but after today it seems as if its going to be a fun class.

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In week 6 it was our second week of dance. Everyone had got a little more comfortable around one another as we progress through the dance module. Some people who had previously done dance were starting to show that as they help others who haven't do feel more confident and help to choreograph some dances.

The practical activities that we are participating in during dance help me to understand how dance is a very expressive form of arts as the way that you can let your body flow and express itself how it wants to. It's a very creative and movement based art but it's also very emotionally based. You can understand how someone is feeling by how they express themselves during the dance, if its fast and sudden movements they could be angry, its fast and flows well they could happy, whereas if its slow and flows together it could be a more meaningful dance. I think as a educator dance allows for students to have an outlet for energy and emotions at the same time.

As I move further through this unit and university in general, I make sure to keep a solid schedule and write down everything that is important for me to remember so it's very hard for me to forget things. By having a solid schedule and system it helps for me to be organised and stay calm as I get more work to do. I try to stay on top of my assignments as well by getting a large percentage of the task done as soon as I understand what to do and am given the task, I try to minimise leaving the assignments to last minute as it minimises stress on myself.

In the last few weeks of this unit I've realise I'm not as creative and confident as I thought I was. I struggle to make the dances and come up with a performance or plot and then struggle to perform it in front of even a small crowd. I've also realised that when I focus myself and try to get work done I can get the work done and too a good level as well.

It was probably the most important realisation as it has allowed me to try and come out of my shell and engage in the choreographing of the dances more and similar things. If I hadn't realised I would have kept doing what I was and hiding and let everyone else do the work which would cause me to fall further and further behind.

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In week 9 we are one week into our physical sessions with Media Arts but 2 weeks into learning about the media arts. I personally believe that media arts is where I am stronger as there is less physical performing in front of a group a of people but more a few of people that you know, or not even performing but creating a performance or something similar.

I believe that some skills that are very important for media arts, are being able to create a plan that you can loosely base you whole performance or creation on such as a storyboard. You need to be able to analyse your work or other work to draw inspiration from it and use that in your own work, such as framing and camera angles.

I don't know a whole lot about media arts but I would say I have a basic understanding of most things in it, I understand things like camera angles, camera movements and framing from studying movies in high school. But i also enjoy watching movies so I understand different techniques that make things look particular ways, such as how a tilt shift makes everything look as if it is a miniature model. seen in the attached image. I have also dabbled in photography every now and again as I enjoy taking pictures of my friends as they ride bikes, its very basic photography but i still enjoy it.

I would personally like to indulge myself more in media arts as its a very interesting subject and has many different outlets, such as photography, cinematography and stop-motion. I plan to look into the many different forms of media arts and see which one interests me the most and expand my knowledge on these topics either by research or tutorials on youtube to broaden my strengths and understanding.

Throughout the unit I have grown more confident in doing the performances in front of the class but i still feel that I'm very hard on myself every performance that we do, at the end I will always be criticising myself in my head telling myself I could have done this better or done that with a little more effort. It can be helpful sometimes but it does impact my confidence as it makes me feel as if I'm not doing good enough in the unit and sometimes leads to me getting in a headspace that I'm going to fail no matter what I do.
I do think this also gets in the way of me fully embracing the workshops as I dont want to be thinking in my head what other people are thinking of me as I perform or what I will think of my performance once I've completed it. It's similar to a mental block but also just being extremely critical of myself and comparing myself to the others in the class.

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The whole experience of the arts in education unit has been overall pretty fun. We got to learn how to express ourselves in multiple ways and learn new forms art. Looking back on the unit my favourite was definitely the media parts section. It encouraged me to download a editing software called CapCut for my final performance and try out editing (seen in the screenshot above) which was actually really fun and interesting, including the filming section. it turned into an opportunity for me to express my humour and personality through the sound effects and how i edited it which was really fun for me.

I think when I first came into the unit I was unsure of how I would teach the subject to the students but after being in the lessons myself I've realised there is many ways to teach it and its easier than you'd think. Theres many different ways you can do it and many fun strategies to do that involve the whole class such as going around in a circle and getting the students to act out an action or mime holding an object. Its easy to make the class fun for the students an even fun to teach, so as a teacher you must learn what engages the students whilst allowing for them to learn as much as possible.
A few fun technique for the students to participate include pairing up and doing a short performance whether its dance or drama. Or you could do a contribution circle where they go around the circle and share a dance move or action that each student has to add too or copy back to the class. As long as everyone in the class doesn't take themselves seriously then the class will be fun.

For our final assessment, designing the drama, dance and media performance, we had a slow start. None of us knew what we should do and how to do it, but once we had come up with a plan we knew what we wanted to do and how. We started off with the idea of making the advertisement a lego stop-motion but we realised it was going to take too long to make we instead we made the filmed version. Before this assignment I had no experience with editing and capcut was really fun and easy to understand. We made the dance together as a group and we managed to create a smooth flowing dance that fit the music really well. Our weak part was our acting as none of us had ever properly acted or the only experience we had was in a primary school performance but with a lot of practice we got it to work and it turned out well. Inclusion with the experience we had and a lot of preparation we managed to make decent performance in my opinion.