The Bat and the Butterfly

My storyboard from "The Bat and the Butterfly"

Today's first task was to watch an Aboriginal dreamtime video from the ABC's Dust Echoes site and then re-tell the story using screenshots from the video. I chose "The Bat and the Butterfly", a story about a girl who is abducted and kept prisoner in a cave. Her family is unable to rescue her and eventually she turns into a butterfly to escape. Her kidnapper turns into a bat and chases her, but is chased back into the cave by her family.

The videos are actually great because they're not in a "storybook" format that children would be familiar with. Each video has different artistic styles (mine was claymation, Eliza's was more of an oil painted canvas) and the children will need to think carefully about what is happening. Once they have watched the video they need to identify the main events from the story, and create a diagram using Inspiration. My diagram was fairly basic, however others in the class designed some quite elaborate creations and it will be interesting to see what children come up with.

It's a useful exercise for the classroom to have children pinpoint key events, and filter for important information.


M & M's Maths

Clearly if you involve chocolate, 90% of your students are sold on the spot. (The other 10% are whinging about a friend of a friend who has a peanut allergy). Even 35 postgrad students were enthralled for minutes doing this activity.


There's an application for all age groups here. For the very young, simply sorting the candy into colours is helping to develop those logico-mathematical skills that form the basis of maths ability. Middle primary school students can colour in bar graphs to show the number of each colour, and talk about the results compared to the website statistics. 

For older primary students there is the opportunity to bring in some rich Excel work, and create colourful, annotated graphs with pictures and meaningful information. Eliza's chart was even prettier than mine, with pie pieces in 3D and in exploded view. The possibilities for children are fantastic, and having coloured M&Ms provides incentive to work out how to make each data set a specific colour. They can pull information from the M&Ms website and from other sources to include on their graph. 

While I understand that there are severely anaphylactic children in schools who cannot tolerate peanuts, I also think the world has gone a little mad (some schools have banned cooking altogether in panic). With the growth of healthy eating programs and schemes such as kitchen gardens, I think schools will eventually settle into a sensible plan for children. If there are peanut-allergic children in the class then obviously, this is an inappropriate activity, however otherwise I have no problem using it. 


Other suggestions for materials to use instead of M&Ms were alphabet soup mix (good, but 26 possibilities makes for a messy graph), Lego (fun - but I really like M&Ms website statistics of colour probability), and counters or play-money. You could even use something that kids like more, such as Beanz or footy cards, and this would also lead into studies of probability - eg if you buy 15 packets, what is the chance you'll get that one "special" one?

 

Ribbit

Design Brief

Design Brief


Problem to be solved: Make a frog jump.
Materials: 1 paper frog, 1 strip of cardboard, 1 rubber band, 1 piece of tape 6cm long.


Mary and I used a Design Brief form to come up with ideas to make our frog jump. First we thought we should twist the rubber band and somehow use the stored energy, but we couldn't work out how to do that. We then thought about some sort of slingshot where you flicked the rubber band, but that didn't work either. 

Our leaping frog design

Finally we thought of making a hole in the cardboard and poking the rubber band through. I originally put a pen in as an anchor, but as that wasn't part of the materials I cut a small piece of cardboard off. At this point we realised we could sit the frog on the little "shelf" we'd made, and when we pulled and released the rubber band, he was flicked off the cardboard. We also realised he would travel further if he was heavier, so we cut another small piece off the cardboard strip and stuck him on. We tested it and the frog jumped about 2 feet.


I didn't see some of the rest of the class designs but when we demonstrated ours, the frog jumped over onto the other side of the desks - maybe 4 feet. It wasn't a competition to see how far he could go, but I think ours would have won!!

Distance our frog jumped

This was a really engaging task that most people in the class enjoyed. Some pairs didn't get their frog to jump, but most had a reasonable go at it. The hard thing was knowing what to write on the design brief, I should have asked for more guidance afterwards so that I can model it properly for the students when I do it. 


Greg said that he did some sort of project like this at least once a week with his students, linking to the current unit. I love this idea, as it will get them doing hands-on activities, thinking about properties of materials, and writing their process. It could be a good springboard into other literacy and numeracy activities as well, eg: 

• Write about the day from the frog's perspective, why did he want to jump? How did he feel about your efforts?
• Average the distance your frog jumped over 3 tries. Graph the class results, find averages, means and medians.

Quia Games

We signed up for 30-day trial accounts with Quia Web, which, despite the unfortunate pronunciation of its name, is a surprisingly useful Web 2.0 tool.
You can create a class by signing up your students with free student memberships, and then tracking their progress. It allows you to create a class page with a message for the students, sign up each name and have the usernames/passwords emailed either to you or to each individual student, or both. One nice feature is the use of the child's name as the username with a number attached, and a word with a number for the password - "glad51" is a far better password for a child than sT0#xXn@.

Challenge Board Game

Once you have your class, you can create activities for them. These range from all sorts of quizzes (true/false, multiple choice, ordering, unscramble etc) to games like Rags to Riches (much like Millionaire), Challenge Board (a bit like Jeopardy) and the ever-popular Hangman. Note - if you don't like the hanging, you can use other variations. One I really liked was Scavenger Hunt, which asks students to go to particular websites to answer the questions.

Quiz questions

The assessments are nice and they are fun activities, but they act more as a summative assessment in many cases because even if the student repeats the quiz, they really only have to memorise the right answers in most cases.


Where the real learning starts to happen is when you have your students sign up as instructors, and create the games themselves. Getting them to do it this way means that the learning is almost hidden - they're not just learning for the sake of it, they're learning so they can test all their classmates! Even in the 20 minutes we had to create a quiz, everyone quickly learned how to use the controls, so it's not hard to use.

This Week's Lecture - Safety Online
The focus this week was safety online, both for students and teachers. Greg pointed out that security for teachers is important. Personally, I have my Facebook site locked down so tight that you can't even find me in Google. Most people don't realise it's even possible to lock down information from specific people (including people who are on your friends list), but it is. The other important thing is that I value my role as a teacher, so I'm not out getting smashed all the time with people taking photos and posting them on Facebook. I think a lot of people don't consider their public profile and then blame the technology when they get caught. You wouldn't stick photos of yourself drunk on the local bus stop; why would you put it on your Facebook profile?


The other side of the coin is more obvious, and pertains to the security of the students themselves. We need to teach them explicitly how to behave responsibly and safely online, and this means respecting others as well as protecting themselves. Greg's answer to this was to have students use "safe" search engines only, rather than Google, but I'm not sure that this is the answer. Certainly in lower primary, Internet use is best designed by the teacher and actively supervised. But a student in grade 5/6 is certainly using Google at home and at friends' places, and probably the local library, so it's up to us to instill good values and ethics when it comes to the use of search engines. Of course Google will give results that are useless or inappropriate, but that's where teaching smarter searching is useful. The worst thing we could do for these children is let them reach high school without having learned how to do their own Google filtering.


Parents will be a great ally in teaching children how to behave online, and I think that the more communication with the parents, the better. This sort of thing needs to be addressed at the beginning of the year, and preferably face-to-face. Let's face it, many adults don't know how to use Google correctly, so why not involve the whole family, send out some search engine activities for them to do at home? The more correct exposure to technology, the better, and ultimately it's probably at home that the students will have the most access to the internet, so having the family involved could be the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.


The Department of Education has clear processes to follow when confronted with a case of cyber (or other) bullying. You can download the Student Supervision document, and cyber bullying is in section 4.6.2.4.7.2. It is interesting to note that this is in the section for "child abuse and neglect", and not "bullying". To me that shows that even the Government still sees "cyber-bullying" as a strange and incomprehensible beast. Really the only difference is that cyber-bullying is non-confrontational and can be anonymous (or at least the bully hasn't realised he's left a digital footprint). This, however, really is no different from writing "Sarah is fat" on the toilet door or the bus stop, or slipping a nasty threatening note into someone's bag or locker. The sooner adults stop sensationalising what is just a modern form of bullying, the sooner we can get to the roots of the problem and explicitly teach children the behaviour we want them to display.


There are a growing number of resources to combat Cyber Bullying. Unfortunately I think this has become a buzzword, and the word "cyber" conjures up either "cool" (Gen X), or "scary" (older adults), depending on the age of who you're talking to. I remember at school when we learned about drug education and the teachers kept using words that felt like they just didn't get us - I suspect it's the same thing with upper primary school children and the Internet - "cyber" probably means "daggy" to them. We have to be careful not to talk down, and to really address these issues appropriately. Otherwise it just becomes an exercise in "how not to get caught". 

ePortfolio

ePortfolios are useful in two ways: first, to get a job and second, to implement in classrooms. Next year, the Ultranet is going to be the main way to create ePortfolios so using Publisher seems a bit outdated.
However, for my own ePortfolio I will use iWeb, and in fact I actually started this over the weekend. I now have extra sections I want to add and areas where I will enhance what's already there. Hopefully it will print nicely, I don't think it should be too hard. The screens I've used aren't all that big.

We started our session today with a discussion of what sections are in an ePortfolio, and then about the actual application and interview itself.

Diving in California - 20 mins worth of Brochure Design

Using MS Publisher, we first created a brochure of "the ideal holiday destination". I chose scuba diving in California, and with the clunky controls of Publisher managed to get something knocked out. Obviously in 20 minutes, not much actual design went into it. I just find Publisher really clunky to use, and user-unfriendly even to the point where the "print preview" displayed in black & white, with the "colour" button disabled. Their clip-art hasn't changed since the 80's and it's always horribly ugly. The seriously unattractive templates don't give children any examples of a well-designed layout, and they look daggy and unprofessional. Compare to a piece of software called Pages, which runs on the Mac. It's equally supported in industry (ie, not at all) but you can certainly export PDF files for printing. It's user-friendly, easy and quick to learn, and things just work the way they should, intuitively. If you add a circle and start typing, text will appear in the circle. Sounds simple but try doing that with Publisher. I actually even think that teaching children page layout on PowerPoint would be better than Publisher as it's far easier to use.

I feel that if you want children to learn more about creating publishing documents, either you'd find a user-friendly software product, or go all-out and teach them inDesign which is the industry standard. MS Publisher is not a cheap product, so why not spend that money on something that is actually going to be useful going forward?

Screenshot of the sample website created with Publisher

Our second task was to create a website using Publisher. Again, same thing. iWeb and countless Windows software products will do a far better job at creating a website than Publisher, and will be easier to actually upload and support across multiple platforms and browsers.

Reflection on this week's learning
This is just so basic. The lecture was good, about the student ePortfolio, but I feel like today's workshop time has been wasted. There's no way I'm using MS Publisher for my assignment, and while I understand that other people don't know how to use it, I would have loved to be given an extension task that actually challenged me. I feel like for most of this Dip Ed course, my brain doesn't even get engaged and I spend nearly all of my time waiting.

We are in a computer lab, and yet we spent 50 minutes listening to Interview techniques which could have been covered in a lecture, or better yet in one of our Issues workshops. It's not that the material isn't worth covering, it's just that we have so little time in the computer lab as it is, and wasting that time not using computers is, well... wasting time.