Week 4

http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/

We started the tutorial by watching a video from the above website named "Mermaid Story", this story was about an aboriginal elder who was wondering the land and later finds himself swimming with spirits. There are a number of different short videos on the website and there are some wonderful study guides and literature to go along with the videos.

Our task is to watch another short film and take screen shots that we believe represents the film

We see a story of good magic fighting bad magic, and triumphing.

This story is told mostly to children to keep them close to the camp at night. Namorrodor is a night creature, who should be feared. It also tells of the power of medicine and the knowledge of the elders in the camp

The main message is about being aware of and protecting yourself against evil and harm.

Excel Exercise

The next exercise involved m&m's and the graphing of different colours. First we talked about the dangers of allergies and how we as teachers need to be very particular about what sort of food we give kids as they may be allergic. Kids may also be allergic to things such as fruit, band aids etc

The above graphs were a screen shot of my excel inputs, they represent the number of different colours found within a packet of m&ms. Kids should attempt to read the graphs as they are however you can add numbers to the columns to help them interpret the graphs/pie charts. In this tutorial we have colour coated the graph and added a picture to the spreadsheet.

Many people find excel hard to use and do not like using this software, I have always found it easy to use and it is very valuable for many subjects within the school curiculum.

Week 3 -Teaching Design Briefs and Online Games

Week 3 - Design Briefs and Online Games

This week we are looking at design briefs, first we explored the old and new systems of designing:

Before - Investigate, Design, Produce, Evaluate

After - Investigate/Design, Produce, Analyse/Evaluate

In the Ivestigation/Design stage you brainstorm ideas and think about how you can solve the problem

In the Production stage you create your response to the problem and then analyse/evaluate if it worked

An important aspect of the new system is to analyse as you go and if necessary go back to the investigate/design faze and change the design.

Above is an example of a design brief, it involves the new system described above

Online Games - www.quia.com/web

This website enables you to create your own quiz

The quiz I created is on Michael Jackson knowledge and can be viewed on the website below

This was extremely easy to use and can definantly be used in the classroom, it is importanrt however that you keep an eye on the kids to ensure there is no bullying going on during class

http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513802.html

The next activity i worked on was to create a jumbled word quiz, I choose to do AFL teams and at first I thought it would be easy for students to get but after seeing it in action, it is harder than first thought

To access the jumbled word quiz see website below

http://www.quia.com/jw/387044.html

Finally I created another activity, this time based in the Hangman format, to access the quiz see below website

http://www.quia.com/hm/668189.html

Week 2 - Microsoft Publisher

Hi

Today's date is the 4th of August 2010, in this blog I am going to be focusing on Microsoft Publisher.

In a classroom lesson, you may be able to ask the students to create their own brochure.

From the above screen you can choose from many templates that suit your needs.

The above brochure was created using publisher in about 15-20 minutes.

This was the first time I had used publisher, I'm extremely confident that I would be able to run a lesson on publisher and teach the students how to use the software. I believe this software would best suit grades 3 and up. A major benefit of publisher is that there are many templates to choose from, this can help the students decide which template best suits their subject.

Publisher can also create webpages, which I will be using to create an ePorfolio for pespective employees to view.

I created a quick ePortfolio webpage, it is very east to use and asthetically great. Below is a sample of my home webpage.