Miss Alice

Apr

miss-alice

In this weeks technology workshop, we spent alot of time going through different websites that might be useful when teaching primary aged children. The site that I think was really a wonderful idea was sketchswap.com, which allowed people to draw pictures annonymously and swap them with an unknown person. It was really quite exciting anticipating the picture that would come back to you. I guess it's sort of the same thing as having a penpal...but it's more of a annonymous picturepal that responds immediately. This is an example of one of the pictures I recieved from sketchswap.com :

Another one I really enjoyed was buildyourwildself.com. This site allowed us to put together our own characters from pre-designed features. This website would be particularly good to use with children for storywriting, so they could actually build their story characters online.

The most interesting activity of today (I'ld have to admit) was this dictation piece we had to type out. In this activity, the whole class was instructed to open up a new word document page, switch their computer screens off and start typing out a piece of literature that the teacher dictated. It was a great idea to help students to learn how to type, and yet at the same time keeping learning funa nd mysterious. The whole idea that we really could not see what we were typing until the teacher finished dictating made me feel really eager to know how it would appear on my screen when I had to switch my screen back on. Here is the result of my typing:

I had actually expected to have alot more mistakes than I ended up with.
I would definately use this idea in my own teachings. Thanks Greg!

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Mar

Week 4: Skittles & Story retell

miss-alice

Today's task was to count up the number of different coloured skittles (or m&ms) in a packet.

With the data we compiled from the counting, we were asked to create coloured bar charts to graphically show our data

(as shown below).

We had to decorate our bar chart with pretty pictures that we found on the internet.

The next task was to create a story re-tell based on stories from the dust-echoes website on inspiration. I did mine on the story of Moonman. We printscreened pictures from the website and added captions to retell the story. This is how it turned out:

The last task of the day was to sign up to the learning federation.

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Mar

Week 3: Find me a job! Make me an ePortfolio!

miss-alice

In this weeks workshop, we learnt about eportfolios and their importance to finding a job in the real world! So what is an eportfolio? My understanding of a 'portfolio' is that it is a piece of ongoing documentation about yourself, your achievements and learnings as a teacher. It should provide the reader with clear and concise details about the person writing the portfolio, in particular to their views and experiences in the educational field. Reflection plays a great part in portfolios, the writer must continually review and reflect on past experiences to gain from the writing of a portfolio.

So with that in mind...I present you with little printscreen snippets of my portfolio:

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Mar

Week 2: Jump frog! Jump!

miss-alice

First task for the day:

Design a frog that jumps using the materials provided:

Cardboard paper
Picture of a frog
Elastic band
Sticky tape
Glue

INVESTIGATE / DESIGN:

We decided on making a paper spring to join to the paper frog, so that it would bounce. This requires only sticky tape, cardboard and the paper frog. We realized after the initial idea that we needed to make use of all the materials, and so we had to rethink the design to include the elastic band. We then decided to join the elastic band to the spring so that we could shoot the frog out and let it bounce on its paper springs.

PRODUCE:

Analyse/Evaluate:

The design that we produced required us to pull the elastic band attached to the springy frog, to shoot the frog into action. The idea/concept of it was really good, but when we actually put it to the test, the outcome was not what we had expected. The Cardboard paper that was stuck to the table (used as a launching pad) was holding the elastic band back. The jumping frog that we produced only jumped on certain "lucky" occasions.

We observed what other people had done, and they had come up with much simplier and effective ways to make the frog jump. I guess we overcomplicated the situation, but it was great fun!

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Mar

Week 1: The learner

miss-alice

The focus of today's class was to learn about certain technologies. Technologies such as wiki, blogs, and inspiration 8.0 which have existed for quite a while, and yet have not been discovered by many people (like myself).

First Activity: In groups of four, we were able to create our own wiki. The purpose of the wiki was to allow us to post summaries and reflections of our weekly class tutorials in order to share our learnings. I found the video from the lecture "Wiki in plain English) extremely helpful in guiding my understanding of the wiki concept.

After the wiki, we created our own blogs. This (as you can see) is my blog.

Lastly, we created different maps with inspiration 8.0. The idea of the linked maps was to learn about different activities that we could create as teachers, to scaffold a child's learning. The instructions for creating the maps was very clear and concise, and provided us with an array of ideas as to what activities could be used in class to teach technology.

This is what I

created:

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