Week 4 - continued - Dust Echoes

Story telling is one of my favourite past times. Nothing like introducing an idea, providing a narration - and popping in a few twists and turns along the way – and building towards a climax, a conclusion and end to the story.
But I have never told a story like this one – through animation and the Dust Echoes program. What a creative way of spinning a yarn.
We had to create a story from an abc.net program and then re-tell it in Inspiration. Quirky idea. I didn’t quite complete the task, but got the idea. I re-told the story of The Bat and the Butterfly. …. Where an indigenous man performs a cowardly act of kidnapping a young girl and taking her away from her family and camp …. The man’s behaviour has dire consequences for himself and the tribe …..it was a beautiful, but terrifying tale of one girls’ will to escape the evil clutches of her captor (by metamorphosing into a butterfly) and how the bad man pursued her (by turning himself into a bat) and coming up a cropper by the local tribesman who killed him.

I didn’t complete the task ... a sample is above.

In the morning lecture, Greg talked about directed, objectivist and behavioural approaches by teachers in technology across the curriculum.

What a whirlwind of a day.

Week 4 – Mmmmm and mmmmssss

The Olympics are over, two minor assignments (yaayy) are in the can and now I have to focus on completing Maths presentation by Monday and knuckling down on ICT Webquest. I feel a little jittery about Webquest assignment because of my minimal technology knowledge. Robyn and I have ideas on paper, but haven’t started tapping away on the keyboard. It’ll be a lot clearer next week when we begin concentrating more heavily on the project.
Today was about M and Ms or should that be mmmmm and mmmmmss … I ate the contents before the exercise was completed.
We had to count the number of M and Ms in the packet, graph them and stick it into the blog.
So here ‘tis :

Earlier, Greg chatted about new technologies in the 21st century and the science of teaching.

Am playing a little bit of catch up today. Head down. Go blog Go.

Week 3 - continued

Beeeb, beeb, beeeeeeeeb, beeeb …. Australia has overtaken Great Britain on the Olympic medal tally. Sigh. Only if it is for the next 48 hours …. Now back to technology across the curriculum. In the morning lecture we continued on with ethical issues, piracy, software use and copyright. This is a very grey area. At home, in the workplace in the class room, in the playground … in front of the TV – we use technology willy- nilly, not thinking whether we’ve forced the closure of a software factory in Calcutta because of our misuse with cheap DVDs from Bali or Thailand. I’ve long been conditioned to pay full-tote-odds for music and movies. Y-gen, however, have managed to turn that custom on its head and resorted to decentralised peer to peer and file sharing. The Napster case was a line in the sand. Even though the major music companies sued the napster crew over massive copyright violations, it was merely a finger in the dike. To beat the flood, the companies joined music’s new-found democracy movement and improved access for users – at a reduced cost. Now we have iTunes and only download the songs we want off those albums. If only the Angels had adopted this back in the 1980s … would have saved me some dough with their one-hit wonders on their albums.
Let’s get a wriggle on, then …..Rebus stories and search engines … they were the two subjects introduced into our afternoon tutorial. Rebus is where an image, picture, piece of animation that represents a syllabic sound in a sentence. A home-made example is attached. I think we called them pictograms back in my school days.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about rebus:
A rebus (Latin: "by things") is a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words; for example:
H + = Hear, or Here.


An example is above.

After an EARful of Rebus talk, we moved onto search ENGINES. Which websites were appropriate to use for primary school-aged children?

Is any search safe for or without parental, guardian or teacher supervision?
We looked through a few search engines and their validity in the classroom – it’s area fraught with danger no matter the best of intensions from the teacher. Greg showed us a few kid-friendly sites, including cricksoft, as well as suggestions as how these programs can be introduced to children with a disability.

Week 3

American Michael Phelps wins a record eight Olympic gold medals in the pool, Grant Hackett misses out on his third consecutive 1500m win ….. and it’s Monday in the technology lab discussing spelling, creative writing and reading to children.
Oh, and good news from the net. Anna Snowstill won gold in the women’s triathlon taking Australia’s medal tally to nine.
Now down to business … Greg opened up with an introduction to a spelling exercise which was quite cute. Switch on computer, create a word document, turn off monitor and repeat and tap away after me:

I have a spelling checker.
It came with my PC.
It plainly marks for my review.
Mistakes I cannot see.

I strike a key and type a word.
And wait for it to save.
Whether I am wrong or right.
It shows me straight away.

Switch on screen and hey presto, a mini spelling test without the spell-checker. We then discussed our mistakes in the typing and how to recognise children’s problems with spelling of similar sounding words (eg) straight and strait, plainly and planely.
We then moved on to creative writing skills – a ditty of an exercise. An example is below.
Create and write an introduction to a story for two minutes and then shift to another computer and continue on with the narrative. I think I gave a young character who enjoyed eating pastries, bulimia. But we won’t tell Sze.

A boy named Buddy.

He’s tall, dark and handsome and kicks plenty of goals for Hawthorn. He can kick goals from almost anywhere – except 20m out in front of goal. But all Hawks fans love the No.23 in the gold and brown jumper.
Of course, I’m writing about Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin – the star full forward for the mighty Hawks.

Well a hawk fan may worship at the alter of saint buddy, but as a committed Collingwood fan (and thus lifelong masochist) I find myself more often resenting the the draft system which rewards mediocrity, (more often though, how does Collingwood get it all so wrong so often) I also love to whatch the number of points that this supposed superstar manages to kick each game. Yes he gets a million shots at goal, but if he scores at less than 50% he’s useless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Buddy Franklin decided that he had had enough of playing footy. So went to Bali and became a Nun.

The exercise highlighted the skills required to develop a story – structure, detail, spelling, excitement, humour, sentence and paragraph structure, extending vocabulary and use of compound words, pronouns, common and proper nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Greg stressed that to undertake this exercise, you should know your class. We don’t want to encourage any cyber bullying or covert stalking in our classrooms.
At the morning lecture Greg discussed issues and strategies surrounding students working and learning in an online environment. How do we as teachers, protect children from cyber bullying and untoward websites, blogs, chat rooms and online communities? We must encourage students to behave responsibly and safely in such an ever-expanding cyber world and culture. Privacy and respect were the two glaring standouts for me in this discussion. Protection of privacy and property and respect for others – you treat other people how you would like to be treated – are the mantas here.
Greg has already got me nervous about introducing website investigations / projects / exercises into the classroom. I admit I’m a little old-fashioned in regard to using the web in class. I think it opens a can of worms, a genie in a bottle, a recipe for disaster … and there’s plenty more clichés where they came from.
And damn those Poms! They are going to beat Australia in the Olympics gold medal tally. Let’s hope for a few more Aussie gold and few more provocative technology issues before the week is up.

Week Two

Ahhh, Australia is winning Olympic gold in the Beijing pool and here we are trying to kick goals in class on a wet and wintery day in Bundoora. Greg dropped the W-bomb this week – W for Webquest – a technological learning program designed for school children. Personally, I’ve never heard of a webquest until enrolling in this course. Sounds like some 1970s US space odyssey starring Will Shatner. Greg outlined the vagaries of Webquests and their importance in the curriculum. I have to admit, I wish I had a crack at one of these in my days at Nunawading primary school 3140. Introducing the building blocks, we were taught a fancy program entitled Quia, not Kea, a native bird from New Zealand. Quia is quite enjoyable – brilliant for creating quizzes. A sample is attached below.
We then moved onto the always awkward task of finding a partner to tackle our Webquest task. Brave Sir Robin, will be my partner in peril, and after a few moments of consideration, we narrowed our Webquest area of interest to cricket and football. The summer sport won out on practical grounds - we could use the project in our teaching rounds later this year. We then narrowed our quest to The Ashes, the history of Test cricket between Australia and England. Great fun and great subject that will encompass and cover-off many parts of the curriculum – maths, english, history, geography, phys-ed.
Our major hurdle now is to come up with the major task for the students.
And rounding out the week, we were introduced to Microsoft Publisher, a bells and whistles program for the Webquest. We designed a travel brochure and how to set up a webpage. Scary stuff, but I’m sure it’ll be challenging and fun.