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.