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.