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.