Week 4 - Two brolgas + an m&m pie

Brolga Song

This storyboard is a retell from of an indigenous dreaming story animation from the ABC's Dustechoes site (abc.net.au/dustechoes). It was made using the diagram function in Inspiration 8IE. The stills where cut down from screen shots in Paint. My friend showed me how to export an image from Inspiration. I found this task a fresh take on the retell, suitable for grades 4 up.

Dust echoes is a rich collection of indigenous stories. The twelve animations are each a few minutes long. None of the stories that I looked at had any dialogue, but my tech savvy friend found that you can add some narration by clicking the "mash up" button on the main menu page. Short quizzes accompany each story and check for inferential comprehension. Detailed teacher notes (PDF) are most useful for understanding narrative complexities. They have some basic lesson suggestions. I'd recommend screening the stories before using these stories with primary children because some contain violent themes (see particularly Namorrodor).

Activity 2: Excel

A sophisticated twist on a classic classroom chance and data activity.

Tech skills involved: data entry and chart drawing, recoloring sections of the graph, adding a title, importing images from the m&m website, and resizing different components.

A real world, hands on activity. Extends easily into percentages and fractions, and graph literacy. Student might look at a variety of graphs for the same data set: are there some representations that distort the proportions? Are there some which communicate clearly? What happens as the data set gets bigger?

Anaphylaxis worries will prevent chocolates being used in many classrooms. Additionally, I have some hesitation about guiding my students through the m&m website which is child-targeted marketing of chocolates. Some alternatives that were suggested today are: confetti, plastic stars, counters chosen at random, play coins, lego pieces, soup mix. Of those, lego is probably my pick as they may be sorted in a number of ways - shape, colour and function - and is an educational and engaging activity in its own right.

Week 3 - Frogger

Lets get technological.

Design brief: Take a small piece of cardboard, sticky tape, one rubberband and a tiny picture of a frog. Use all these parts to make the frog jump.

... and wait for the variety of solutions to emerge...

Initial investigations reveal that just folding the card in half will make a flippable projectile. We needed to extend ourselves a little. Final design was radically different. The elastic band was crossed to create tension. The card was flattened and then released to launch. Success.

A range of solutions were offered by my classmates and in the end everybody was able to produce something - a very accessible activity. Our instructor's suggestion is to incorporate adesign activity weekly and use a design brief IDPE (investigate, design, produce, evaluate) process and technological vocabulary. I can see enormous value in allowing students to follow up with the same activity in another session. They often continue refining and thinking about what they've made after class. This self motivated thinking and learning should be supported by class scheduling.

Scanning

This scanned image of our design brief is the product of a lot of learning on my part and I achieved it by a topsy-turvey method in the end.

I can't get my Mac to scan. Perplexing. I'm sure the computer and scanner are fine, it's me.

A uni mate suggested using Image Capture and I could see the image on the preview but the "scan" button was unclickable and there was no option to 'save' or 'save as'. So I took a screen shot (had to look online to find the shortcut) then downloaded Paintbrush (helped online again), then had many trials to get the image to fill the screen size... realised I had to save it as a JPEG... and finally, there it is. Phew. Lots of useful learning but I would still like to be able to do it the 'scan then save' way. If you know how I might do this, please comment.

Games and Gaming:

Part two of the lesson introduced Quia games. I made a 5 question mulitple choice quiz (http://www.quia.com/quiz/2511798.html) and a 'hangman' style game (http://www.quia.com/hm/667567.html). Check em out. I also made a wordfind (http://www.quia.com/jg/1991816.html) with a typo (I meant to write splendid, I wrote slendid, couldn't work out how to edit the game I'd made - again, if you know how, please comment).

In the classroom, I'd use the 'hangman' and wordfind for (weekly or otherwise) spelling, it's perfect for small group literacy rotations. I love that the word find resets into a new configuration every time. It gives the technology a clear advantage over a printed wordfind - students could do the same wordfind multiple times to practice spelling and scanning.

I'd like to see students designing their own quizzes because I think that the higher order thinking skills of analysing and ranking that are required to write good questions (in addition to the literacy practice) are more educationally beneficial to students than the knowledge recall of answering. However, a teacher-designed quiz could be a very efficient way of checking student's understanding of a topic mid way through a unit. The teacher could have the test open on a computer and students could visit it throughout the day and print out their answers for the teacher to review later.

Week 2 - Publisher!

I got a little swept up in the detail today... Asked to design a brochure for a fabulous holiday destination, I picked Jupiter and thoroughly amused myself with writing the spin.

The learning intention of the excercise was actually to explore Publisher, which was new to me today. I found it to be very user friendly, and I'm pretty impressed with the professional look of the final piece.

Application to primary classrooms:

Brochure writing utilises features of persuasive writing and may be especially useful for teaching about summarising information within a word limit. Features of journalistic writing also abound.

If students were to try and "sell" a planet as part of a space unit, for example, I can see potential for this task to help students visualise the physical realities of their planets. It is a challenge to express information such as number of moons, or events in the history of discovery, in engaging prose.

ICT skills can used in the research stages of the unit. The main skills specific to making a brochure were: saving an image from a website, importing and resizing that image, text formatting and ordering objects. Primary students would need a few sessions to complete the task.