Online Dreamtime Stories and Excel Charts/Graphs

Today we watched a dreamtime story on http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/.

I selected the Brolga Song story and made a concept map on Inspiration where I retold the story.

The 'Dust Echoes' website is excellent - the animation and music are engaging for students and I made use of this website on placement. The fact that words are not used for the clips gives the students space to use their imagination and try to interpret the story. Many activities could take place from here including students making up their own story boards for dreamtime stories.

I learnt that it is possible to do a 'print screen' from video. This is great for literacy - it is more interesting for students rather than re-telling the story in their literacy books. They get to practise IT, be creative and work on picking out the most important parts of the story.

In the next part of the lesson we experimented with making graphs in Excel. For example I made up a graph that charted the amount of coloured M&Ms in a packet. This is great for maths and for enhancing student understanding to visualise comparisons in data. Please see below.

I also designed my own M&M (the one on the right) and imported his picture.

Design Briefs and Quia

Design Briefs can be great for relating to mathematics, science, design, hand/eye coordination, team work, building confidence in students, teaching structure and design/scientific language (for example in the frog activity the rubber band gave the frog more jumping energy, where the rubber band expanded).

Safety with scissors and rubber bands should be emphasised prior to the activity.

Through writing up the Design Brief students practice literacy and organise their thoughts. Through reflection, students come up with new ideas for design and learn from each other. They can also do research about some of the products used in their design.

Extension activities are important - for example in our frog activity, you could stipulate that the frog has to leap at least one metre if students finish their work quickly.

We then made a quiz on www.quia.com. My quiz is under www.quia.com/quiz/2513129. This program is useful for getting kids to research a topic and then make up their own quiz, either short answer or multiple choice. This activity could involve literacy, numeracy, or any other topic depending on what the quiz is about. Students can then swap quizzes. This is a fun way to learn and would be good for students who learn better by being active. The word searches would also be good for word study and spelling.

We also used Quia to make up an activity - I did one on the 'Rags to Riches' game which is similar to 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. See http://www.quia.com/rr/650282.html for my game.

E-Portfolio

Today we also learnt how to make a basic webpage which we will use to make our E-Portfolio. We changed the page names on the left hand side to suit our Portfolio. E-Portfolios are important to have at hand for interviews, they generally outline our teaching philosophy, CV and Reflections from teaching placement. E-Portfolios may also include photos, sound bites, and generally show professional development over a period of time.

Job Interview Advice and Using Publisher

In today's class we started off by discussing job applications and Greg gave us some job interview techniques.

Some tips I took note of were:

- To address the criteria.
- We should receive the questions we will be asked during the interview just prior t0 the interview, it's a good idea to make some dot points to help you during the interview.
- It is ok to ask for constructive feedback if we don't get the job.
- Many jobs are listed on the Department of Education website and some jobs are advertised in The Age.
- It's important to have a great e-portfolio which outlines many things, amongst which are my teaching philosophy, and application of theories to the classroom. I should be aware of child protection and privacy with regard to photos.

Today we played with Publisher. I created a brochure for San Christobel De Las Casas in Southern Mexico. Publisher is useful for designing brochures or advertisements using graphics, different fonts and layouts. I used functions such as cutting and pasting, importing graphics from Google Images, creating different effects with pictures and backgrounds. I learnt that by clicking on the green dot you are able to rotate pictures.

This program would be great for children to use to develop their ICT skills, for literacy and for humanities (the subject content of the brochure). In particular students could write persuasive text to convince readers to visit a certain place or attend an event.