Aboriginal Dreamtime stories from Dust Echoes program

In today's workshop , we again worked on Inspiration The main focus of the Dust Echoes is retelling the story, with younger classes they can put pictures in order to retell the stories heard.

Played the story - Pressed pause which I wanted to paste on inspiration for retelling the story - Clicked print screen pasted on paint and- pressed on dotted frame and edit copy then pasted on the inspiration. Continued with different images I needed for my retell also added text under the images to tell the story. I have tried to add a creative twist by putting the images in the shape of the Brolga bird.

Today got Greg's help first hand and really got the hang of copying and pasting from inspiration and using paint .

I thought it is really practical way of retelling the story whithout speaking. Especially when done with groups it will involve discussions about the story , critical analysis, the layout and presentation , the thought gone behind it and the meaning of the story itself covers many of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains of Vels.

Today we also worked on Excel to learnt to create column graphs and Pie graphs using simple questions with M & m's . The question was how many m & m's are there of different colours. We can also do different and complex variations of the question like percentages , modes, averages to work on excel to create a graph. Using M & m's is a real life thing to use to learn maths.

Column Graph of the Mand m's

Pie Chart of the M & m's , showing the number of the coloured m & m's.

Learning federation website was very useful during my practicum , I used it as much as possible to explain different concepts on the interactive whiiteboard. It was useful to teach, place value. number patterns in maths and values of friendship and cooperation. I used some 'learning objects' repeatedly for students to understand. I feel such sites are useful for a very interactive , engaging , active lesson , with appropriate animated visual representation catering for visual learners. Checkout it is really handy! I also liked the ICT showcases on the LMS which give ideas of how ICT can be used in classrooms. I agree with 21 century the digital age and should be incorporated into our classrooms. But I will not deny the other thoughts I have like which may seem against the digital culture, the fine motor skill of handwriting found only in humans , are we giving now less emphasis on it as we are more into typing in computers and laptops and this skill is very important as part of the primary school. Technology is fanatastic for children with special needs like cerebral palsy , due to lack of fine motor skills theyneed not be left behind in learning , for them laptops come in great help.

As my mentor tacher often said , in VCE we still writing, are they going to introduce laptops in VCE. Is technology still a very easily accessible form communication? Every classroom has only 4 computers to be shared. Do they make our environments sustainable, apart from saving paper. In my practicum I observed the usage of paper was appaualing , the printed worksheets and wasted paper, children need to be taught recycling, saving paper and awareness among staff.

Jumping Frog

Jumping frog activity can be used for group activity for all primary grades, and complete the design brief . The lower grades should not be disadvantaged by sentence formation, grammer or spelling, they can be encouraged to complete the design brief by even drawing.

Investigate the design on the sheet and sharing with whole class after 10 mins of the design. The children who have finished can work on the extended activity like make the frog jump for more than 30cms or by using bigger cardboards and frogs.

This activity acn be one of independent activity or as part of a unit.

I am trying to upload the design brief which is in word format it does upload on the blog, I wonder if I actually need to use paint?

http://www.quia.com/ was a fantastic website for creating quizes for children can be done from preps and extended to yr 6. was very exiting doing the quizes. Can be used for formative or summative assessments in class.
My quiz which was on different terrains with clues of their features and the animals which live there. My quiz's URL is Http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513941.html

Created a game called battleship , it is similar to quiz with incentives in the form of games. My URL for games is Http://www.quia.com/ba/410300.html

The website Quia is a very attractive tool which I will be very inclined to use in my classroom as an individual assessment activity or just even a whole class activity on the white board.

I believe such kinds of summative tests are good , as an experience for the students, for the students to clearly see how much they have learnt and also helps the teacher to understand in fact how much learning has taken place, but the questions prepared in the quiz should not be twisted or tricky just by changing the wording or hard to understand language. I also think such quizzes should be done for testing each week which becomes a part of the revision process and also on a smaller content when it is still fresh in students mind when compared to end of the term or every month. Such quizzes will also help all students to be at par , as even if the missed out on learning they can still learn with the information given.
These tests are also easy to show to parents who wants to see something concrete. These can also be done in turns , a whole period need not be wasted with printed tests.

I liked the Enchanted learning website , which is of special interest to me as it has art and also craft for hands on activities on different domains of learning.
The design brief and a box guitar are activities which can be used as very engaging activity for thinking skills and also developing writing skills in literacy.

22/9 Two weeks back I read 'The reading Bug' by Paul Jenning i found it to be very useful , has got a lot of list of books which can be used for different ages , that is the just right books for the age appropriate. The list has helped me many times in choosing a book for the class .
Paul Jenning is also a big hit in my class.

Last term in my school rounds in grade 2 we just finished researching and writing on the famous aboriginals and australians and we also looked up some dreamtime stories on the dust echoes.

E portfolio on web

We got some directions on how to create an eportfolio , which can cutomised for a teacher or a student. It was amazing, when Greg showed a sample of e portfolio in the lecture. I have only seen my son's portfolio in his kindergarden in a big book form. In the e portfolio it had all the work done by the students with teachers comments setup in a creative way and also visual clips of the student inaction like speaking in front of the class , describing an artefact they had got from home.
Greg also showed us a sample e portfolio made by a teachr which included her personal profle, her experiences as a teacher, her philiosophy, some resourses she uses, her classroom setup , personal achievements and also the resume. I thought an e portfolio which includes much more than a resume is quite applicable for a teacher who needs to show the person he/ she is as a whole.

I also looked up at http://www.getideas.org/ it looks and sounds very interesting. It talks about communication, collaboration and sharing the power of knowledge, which are some of the skills required for the 21st century along with critical thinking, problem solving , innovation.
I soon plan to become a member of this site to learn more by communicating with other teachers and leading teachers around the world ie peers around the world and get support with ideas which inform my teaching thus my learning.

Upon reading, Australian digital portfolios model website www.pa.ash.org.au/natcom helped to bettter understand the purposefulness and resoursefulness of portfolios in a school environment. Now almost all schools are in the process of creating e portfolios by their students and which will evolve and develop as the students progresses through school. Upon reading I have come to understand e portfolios are the 21 st century based celebration of student as a learner, a structure to track progress, promotes student's ability to reflect on their learning and producing work for authentic audience and sharing learning among peers inthe school and other schools.

Brochure for Tasmania Tourism

Never used publisher found out it is great for preparing interesting brochures but need to get lots of ideas from the web or magazines or actual tourism before I can get students to work on it. I need to practise on it.

As Greg said introducing different types of brochures to children in class , I think creating brochers is a fantastic activity for literacy and covers a few domains in vels.
This workshop was a big load of information. It is great for the middle year students but maybe also the grades 2s and 3s to create a brochure of their favorite place they visited, this will also help children to learn more about the place through restrictmed research. Children can create creative brochures using their literacy skills, thinking and design skills. I think with lower grades they might get more carried away with putting up pictures.
In my previous practicum the students actually had to prepare a menu with the resturant name and drawing. Thinking this can be done in a more presentable way by using the brochure in MS publisher by taking turns in the computer.
My thought is when we are talking about ICT , in reality how many students have access to computers in a day for 25-30 students if there are only 4 computers in the classroom group ICT work will take higher priority in such classrooms than individual work. B ut this is still better than no exposure to computers and most common forms of technology.

On this thought, duing my practicum we had an opportunity to have laptops available for each stuudent in the classroom which we borrowed fromthe library, which was useful and worked out well for literacy lesson on my unit of work on Penguins , incorporating ICT for reading and writing. In the first week we also learnt using paint mainly for the printscreen function then cut and paste on blog.
In my practicum one of achievements was to finally getting students to draw their favourite penguin with special physical features by using paint and writing the information in the form of labelling , they learnt about their penguin in a previous session.