m&m's Inspiration

                                                                                                                            

9/09/2010  

Hello,
In today's lecture we had learnt about educational soundness in the digital age. We had learnt that the digital revolution has provided opportunities in education to; improve learning outcomes, equip students with skills and knowledge and provide opportunities for collaboration world wide. Some great websites that I was introduced to in today's lecture that can be very useful in the teaching profession included;
Editure: Education Technology: http://www.editure.com/
The Learning Federation: http://www.thelearningfederation.com/ (This is a fantastic website, as it has over 5000 activities which cover all subjects).

In today's first part of the workshop we had explored the program Microsoft Excel. The activity we had completed focused on using our sorting skills, mathematical skills and knowledge as we had learnt to design bar graphs using Microsoft Excel. We had also used our  imagination to create an inspiring and colourful spreadsheet based on our findings of how many different coloured m&m'S their are in one small packet. The first step in completing this activity was to sort out the chocolate m&m's into groups based on colours; red, blue, yellow, green, brown and orange. We then counted how many m&m's there were in each group and wrote the quantities into our worksheet. From this, we then placed our findings into a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel in order to generate a bar graph, (as can be seen below). I believe this is a fun activity for students to complete, as it allows then to be creative while getting students to use their sorting skills, mathematical skills and knowledge as well as to create class discussion (what do students see? etc). What I had learnt from today's workshop when completing an activity such as this one is, it is very important to first check with the school policy of using chocolate in a class activity due to allergies and religious beliefs students may have. I learnt that if chocolates are not permitted you could still conduct the activity by using coloured stars or confetti. This activity is also a great activity in that it can be used as both a computer task or as a paper base task.  

The second part of today's workshop was to re-tell a movie using the 'create a diagram icon' in the Inspiration program. The first step in completing this activity was to pick any movie from the dust echoes web page   http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes.   The second step was to watch the movie, listen to the music, distinguish the characters and understand the themes that took place. After having watched the movie once, our activity was to re-tell the movie any way we want using the Inspiration program. I decided to replay the movie for the second time. This time I cut and cropped the main scenes from the story and pasted them into 'Insipration  create a diagram'.  In my diagram,  I had designed to re-tell my movie in the form of a step ladder (as can be seen below). The title of my movie 'Mermaid Story' was placed in the centre of the page followed by the main scenes around it . I clearly labelled the start and finish scenes so that viewers would not get confused.  I believe this activity is a great activity to get students to complete, as it allows them to practice their literacy skills and knowledge. This can be achieved by getting students to discuss what they saw in the movie, to work out the sequence of the story by cutting out themes/sentences and by allowing them to be both imaginative and creative in the way they decide to present their movie re-tell. This activity is a great activity to incorporate as part of a literacy block E.g. if students were learning about mermaids, they could watch the movie, create a diagram that re-tells their movie followed by creating a 3D mermaid or scrap book etc.