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.
I remember having to write a travel brochure when I was in year six. It went throughout the term, with our teach corresponding with me asking for specific information to do with a package holiday to Nepal. I think the last thing I 'sent' her was her itinerary. It was all hand drawn though, so the technology looks useful and practical.
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