Week 4 Excell and Inspiration

My First Excell Graphs!
I've always had a bit of an aversion to excel.. I think I was asked to do a timed assessment using the program for a job interview once and failed miserably. After today, I'm not so scared. I like the way it's relatively simple to represent data in so many different forms using excel.. bar graph.. pie graph.. colouful or not.

We used M & M's in a chance and data activity to discover how many of each colour M&M's were in a packet? This would be a very engaging activity - kids love hands on learning and all the better that they get to eat the experiment! Of course it is important to keep in mind allergies when facilitating this activity.

Excel can be used with infinite learning activities. It's use is applicable to numerous curriculum areas, including literacy, numeracy, and ICT.

On my last placement, the kids in my class had done an assessment of themselves based on Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligenceshttp://www.multipleintelligencetheory.co.uk
You can do the test here:
http://www.mypersonality.info/basic-vs-pro/multiple-intelligences-test

Using the information they had about their individual learning styles, the students created a pie graph in excel to show where their 'intelligences' lay. The graphs were printed in colour, and pasted onto coloured card along with a written reflection of the students' own attitude to learning, and hung up on a line across the middle of the classroom. Of course, some students said they were awesome at everything, and so had a very evenly cut pie graph, but others had really thought about their answers. As soon as I walked into the room , I could see the individual learning styles of these students, and understand where their strengths and weaknesses lay. This use of excel related the students learning directly to themselves, and also looked great.

We visited a fantastic website today http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ It is a collection of animated dreamtime stories from Arnemland. Each story is accompanied by a Study guide, teachers notes, and classroom activity sheet to help teachers design lessons around the animations. As there

is no sound on the computers in the menzies lab, I found the story a little hard to understand at first, and needed to watch it a couple of times to fully understand the plot. We used Inspiration to find the main parts of the story, and copy and paste the pictures into a document, labelling them with what is happening in the story. Greg had a great idea to challenge students to keep breaking down the story into fewer and fewer main ideas, until they had only three or four main points of the story. I like the idea of this for a comprehension activity - it requires a deeper level of higher order thinking than those outlined on the accompanying classroom activity sheets, and also develops skills in ICT.

Week 3 Design brief

Design briefs

This was a fun, engaging task. I enjoyed observing the way different people in our class responded to the challenge - some cheated, some came up with great concepts.
Greg showed us how in technology, old design briefs were based upon:

Investigate design produce evaluate (IDPE)

This has now been revised with VELS, to become Investigate/Design, Produce, Analyse/Evaluate (IDPAE), shifting the importance to getting the process right, with analyse / evaluate being present at each process stage. This adaptation of the brief has created more scope for developing higher order thinking skills.

The task was:
Make a frog jump.

Resources: Carboard, frog, rubberband, stickytape, scissors

To do this task well, students would need hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, cooperation skills.

I think that when running this, or any, task in a classroom, it is important to make sure that students describe the process of their design brief. The task would be fun and engaging without this process of describing, but in order to develop higher order thinking skills, students should be able to discuss the means they used to get to the end. This translates into any subject area: For example it's no use getting a correct answer in maths if you have no idea of how to justify your answer - how can you be sure the answer is correct?

My partner and I chose to photograph our process on a mobile phone, and post it to our blogs. We also took a short film of the frog jumping, but enabling the video to be imbedded to the blog proved harder than we anticipated. Pairing design briefs with multimedia such as this would be a good way to encourage students to break down the steps they took, and describe each one. The design brief could be filmed in stop motion format, with students recording a soundtrack which analyses and evaluates each step of the process.

There are many design briefs out there which require readily available resources. http://www.enchantedlearning.com has some good ones. Or why not come up with your own?

Week 3 Online games development: Quia

http://www.quia.com/profiles/ebarrow17

http://www.quia.com/hm/668248.html

Try these quizzes we learned to create in the workshop today on quia

What a great program! I had no idea this sort of thing existed. I had heard of survey monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com , but this takes it a step further, giving more room for creativity in the type of quiz that is created. This is a fantastic tool, not just in terms of assessment, but also in empowering people in sharing what they know, and also finding out about their areas of interest and knowledge in a fun way. I can see this being used in a unit of inquiry - perhaps a teacher written quiz to begin with at the tuning in stage, which is revisited later on in the unit to find out what students have learned. Students could also develop their own quiz at the sorting out / going further stage to show how much they have learned.

I can imagine using this software in the first week of school at the 'getting to know you' stage. I would ask the kids to write a quiz for the class on something they know about, or are passionate about. It would be a step outside the square of writing a traditional story about 'me', and engaging too. It would give the teacher a good idea of where students interests lie, and points of interest for connecting with students on a one to one basis.

This is also a rich tool for assessment. It is easy to use, and provides the educator with easily accessible data of how students are performing.. I like it.