Week 4 - Dust Echoes Inspiration Recount, M&M's Mathematics, Web 2.0 Technology

Dust Echoes

In this workshop we created a recount of an Aborigional story from the ABC Dust Echoes website http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/. Being able to retell/recount a story is a very important skill for our students and is part of the VELS curriculum from level 1 -4. It is a vital tool for comprehension.

I chose "Mermaid story", which was about an old man who leaves his family group and finds a waterhole with Mermaids, anyway if you are interested in what the story was actually about click on my recount and have a closer look.

To create our recounts we used 'Inspiration'. We chose the 'create a diagram' tool and then took screen shots of the most important parts of the story and placed them in our diagram, I connected the parts of the story in order and created a caption that I attached to each image. In the end it ended up looking like a really nice story board. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this activity and found the "Mermaid story" to be quite moving tale!

Initially I arranged my recount like this

I then decided that I wasn't really happy with the visual aesthetics of it. As I had attached my sentences describing the story to the relevant images I could then easily drag the images around and resize them to make it look more appealing. The arrows link one image to another so as I moved the images around they also were automatically readjusted. It was all very simple and I think produces an effective result.

M&M's Mathematics

We then moved on to M&M's mathematics. In the classroom, students would tally the number of each different coloured M&M in their bag of M&M's. As I didn't bring a bag of M&M's I jsut made the figures up!

We placed our data into two columns in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, highlighted the data and then fiddled around with the different options for graphing the data. We played around with the different graphs and worked out how to change colours to correctly depict the colour of the M&M. I also worked out how to label my graphs, which is important as I belive you shouldn't teach graphing with out teaching how to label the graph. With out labels a graph means nothing or could mean anything!

Storybird

On LMS this week there are a whole heap of interactive resources that we can use in our classrooms. I had a look at the 'Complete Web 2.0 directory' and found another excellent tool for creating story boards called Storybird. See my screen shots for more details...

This is how one image of your story board looks, you can leave space to write next to your image or create your story board without any text.

This is what the whole web page looks like when you are creating your story board, you get thumbnails of images to choose from. The range of artwork and artists was amazing, I think all of my students would be able to choose from Storybird something that interests and inspires them to create a story around.

Once you are finished creating your story board you can publish and save it to share.

I was amazed at the amount of free web 2.0 resources that are available. There are resources ranging from children's stories to upload to your ipad or iphone, chess instruction for children and a whole heap of collaborative resources to name a few.

Week 3 - Design Briefs, Quia games and activities

Design Briefs

We began this weeks workshop but completing a design brief and making a jumping frog using: cardboard, a rubber band, sticky tape, scissors, glue and a picture of a frog. Greg reccommendsthat we use the I/D, P, A/E format for design breifs.

Here is a screen shot of our design sheet that I filled in MS word (thanks for the template Greg).

My partner Josie and I chose to stick the frog to the cardboard and make a spring type mechanism out of the rubber band. We did this rather than sticking the cardboard to the table and creating a catapult type contraction that was the most popular design for our workshop group. The main difficulty was that the rubber band was too large, we overcame this by twisting the rubber band many times between the two sides of the cardboard (see design brief).

Here is a picture of our jumping Frog, he was a wee little ripper!

Press down on him and release to make him jump. Notice the twisted rubber band.

This would be a great activity for students to refine their scissor and fine motor skills as well as stimulate the use of their brains, not to mention the team work that was required.

On the left is a design brief template that I created for my students in my first practicum class to aid in their design of a new purpose for an old cardboard box.

Quia

Next Greg introduced us the program Quia.

Quia is according to their web site "a collection of tools for creating online content". These tools are in the form of a range of quizzes and interactive games. You can create your own based on your own content or search for already made quizzes by subject area.

Quia has the potentail to be used for the purpose of formative or summative assessment or just as a fun activity. You could assess students by having them create their own game or quiz or complete one that was created by you, or even better still students could create their own quizzes and test out the quizzes of their class mates like we did in our workshop.

This is the link to the quiz I made using Quia, it's about the capital cities of the world.
http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513873.html


I then created a hangman activity on the topic of types of pasta and sauces.
http://www.quia.com/hm/668209.html

I also created a 'pop up' activity af basic addition questions
http://www.quia.com/pop/432537.html

This week on LMS there is a whole lot of information about copywrite, cyber bullying and acceptable use. I played the game Piracy Playgound : First Adventure of the Three Cyber Pigs. This game comes with an accompanying teacher's guide and was interactive and interesting enough to help students understand when they should and should not give away their personal details or those of their families and the potential consequences for doing so.

Week 2 - MS Publisher & E-Portfolios

Microsoft Publisher

In today's session we learnt how to make brochures in Microsoft Publisher. We made a brochure about the Shrine of Remembrance for our Humanities assignment in semester one using Publisher so I am vaguely familiar with the program. I quite like using the Microsoft programs as you can use the help menu to find out how to do pretty much anything. Or if the help menu is a bit confusing whatever you need to know you can always find on Google (along with a whole heap of rubbish you didn't need to know but got distracted by!)

I made a brochure about Kyrgyzstan, I visited Kyrgyzstan with my husband in 2007. I have taken photos from our online photo storage with Picasa and used them in my brochure. The text is from a blog I wrote about our experience staying in the Yurt Life Camp in Tash Rabat.

Kyrgyzstan is a brilliant place, I highly recommend it as a travel destination (even if my very rushed brochure doesn't do a great job of selling it).

MS Publisher looks like it could have some great applications in my Primary classroom, the only limitations being mine and my student's imaginations. The range of templates that you can use mean that students have a good base to work from and hopefully will not waste too much time fiddling with the format and be able to concentrate on the content. From my limited experience so far with children and computers I have realised that a lot of time can be wasted fiddling with fonts, headings, backgrounds and layouts and a lot of ink can subsequently be wasted as well!

Just so that I wouldn't forget I wrote down the steps that I followed to create my brochure.

Creating a brochure in MS Publisher:

• choose brochure


• choose template


• choose colour scheme


• fill in the boxes, you can: cut, copy, move and resize them


• it's bit tricky when your text flows over a page but cutting your text from MS Word helps to fix this


• it's also sometimes a little difficult to paste pictures directly into the brochure but by pasting into MS Word first that will fix this


• choose file/web page prievew to enable a good screen shot that can then be uploaded to your blog or anywhere else

E-portfolio

This week we were also shown an E-portfolio for a Primary school student in our lecture. I shuddered to think how much work the teacher and student had put into compiling the portfolio however, it was a very impressive way to showcase the students work and progress. I imagine that if the school had their E-portfolio's well set up (template wise) then it wouldn't be too hard to do one for each student especially in upper primary when the students could help to compile their own portfolios. In contrast to this though I can also imagine a lot of hours spent putting them together especially for younger students who aren't yet better at ICT than I am!

This is a page from my developing E-portfolio. I intend to use this as part of my material when applying for jobs in the future.

I am a Mac user at home so created my portfolio using iWeb. iWeb is simple to use and the templates are quite nice. It's a little bit fiddly to change all the colours and font but I think that is probably my own fault at this stage.

I managed to work out everything I needed to do by watching the video tutorial and Googling a few things that I was stuck on e.g how to save it!