Claymation

Today we looked at a few programs including Clay Animator, although we didn't go into it with much detail, i could see this would be a very entertaining program for kids to explore their creative side.

September 1: MovieMaker

Today we looker at MovieMaker, this was an easy and fun program which allowed the user to create and save a simple small cartoon movie. the program may not be appropriate for children as some of the charaters are a little skimpy.

Mindmap on Aboriginal Stories

Today's class linked education regarding aboriginal history with current software technology using inspirations mindmap. After watching an interactive aboriginal story, we used a mindmap to plot ideas and themes of the story. The interactive story telling keeps kids interested in learning aboriginal history. the mindmap allows kids to show what they got out of the story on a personal level.

Graphs

Today we used m & m's to demonstrate how to create a graph. Counting the number of each colour in a pack we then inserted this as raw data and converted it into a colourful graph using excell.

Week 4- tutorial 2 - Word Animation

Today we used word animation to demonstrate a creative way of involving kids with sentence formation. In my opinion, using visual stimuli in this example can be a great way for kids to comprehend infomration.

Week 4 : Story creation

The Happy Dog

One day a little dog was walking down the street when he found a sack of money.
He didn’t know what is was typically used for but he found it made a lovely warm bed.
Along came a cat who explained “ you don’t use that for a bed silly, there is a better use for it!”
“What is that little cat?” asked the dog

Because you can buy rolls of Kleenex which you can use to decorate the entire house. In side and out side of chair and table legs you can run and run and run. Trailing behind (not counting the people) are wonderful streams of white. ‘Oh’ said the dog I didn’t realise you could do that with money.

This was one smart little cat as you can see, so of course there was a cunning plan at work.
“Listen here little dog, if you like because I know so much about money and the fun things that you can do with it, how about you give it to me and I will go and purchase so much Kleenex you won’t know what to do with yourself!”
Well the dogs tail started to wag so much from excitement that he knocked the cat for six over the fence, by accident of course!
After a few minutes the cat came stumbling back and assumed that the dog liked her idea so she took the money and told the dog to stay there and she would come back soon with the Kleenex.

Lecture 4: Publisher

Today we looked at the Microsoft Office tool: Publisher. I found this very useful in creating information sheets eg. brochures. As this trial example on Sweden demonstrates.

Considering using Publisher for our upcoming Webquests, we then looked at designs more appropriate for the major task. Quality layouts and multiple options made it a very attractive possibility for our groups Webquest

lecture 3: Quia

Today we looked at a quiz-creating software called "quia"
A free 30 day trail was used to create our own quiz. I found it very easy to create a simple quiz using multiple chioce and true-false questions with the option to develop questions into essays, orderings, match ups etc if needed. i can see the site to be valuable in involving kids in a fun learning environment.

the quiz can be viewed through the following


http://www.quia.com/quiz/1448646.htm

Following this, we discussed our webquests in our groups. this time was useful to establish future meetings and create a theme for our webquest.

Lecture 2 - Setting up a Blog

Today was a little testing for many students having difficult setting up a blog to place this very information on! this is understandable in the early days of the course and should be sorted out soon. Although my computer skills aren't excellent, using blogger.com may have given me an advantage as i was able to create a blog, upload images, type away and post these blogs with ease.

Lecture 1: Inspiration

I found Inspiration to be a potentially useful program for the classroom. Explained well by Greg, i was able to create an idea on the screen which i could then develop at my own pace. In particular, the easy access to arrows used to link ideas together was very helpful. The vast range of pictures available on the program would be great for kids to play around with too. i can see the education value here whilst also maintaining interest and creativity.