Week 4

What a task! We're having a look at Dust Echoes dreamtime stories today. What an interesting site. I looked at the Moon Man story which involved a father killing his sons. Quite confronting really! We've been asked to create a story board by copying images depicting what is happening in the story and pasting them into inspiration.

Here's mine so far:

While I found the process quite rewarding and it consolidated my understanding of the story, I found it to be quite time consuming. I'm not sure, after a period of time how much students would get out of completing this entire task themselves. It could be a good group activity whereby the class collectively create the story board. My mum is a teacher at a special school. She teaches autistic kids and to assist them in preparing for what's coming up the next day (they don't deal with change too well as I'm sure you'd know), she draws up a story board with all the days events listed on them. She does this in a word document, but I will most certainly be pointing her in the direction of inspiration for this.

As much as I would have loved to finish my story board, we're moving on to Excel. Moving quickly today! I have some experience in excel (the basics), but by the looks of things we're looking at graphing today, so I'm hoping I can pick up some tips!

In conjunction with this, we're looking at the ways we can incorporate m and m's into maths and other areas of the curriculum. On my last teaching rounds I used smarties for graphing and fractions and the kids loved it! It's amazing how effective a little bit of chocolate can be! I had to be very wary though because one of the students in my class had allergies to yellow food dye so I tampered with the packets a bit to make sure he didn't have any yellow in his. I didn't know about all the information provided on the m and m website though so I'll keep that in mind for next time. We looked at colour coding our data.

Here's my m and m's graph:

After this, we then added data labels by simply right clicking on the mouse and selecting 'add data labels'. See here:

I like this website: http://learntech.ties.k12.mn.us/Excel_Classroom_Projects it suggests some great ideas for using excel in the classroom. Notice there were some ideas for using excel and m and m's!

I noticed a few people in the class today were quite new to excel. Do schools provide excel training for staff? At my previous employer (I was working in an office, so perhaps a bit different) we were provided with basic excel training. I can definitely see some benefit in this for teachers.

If you're willing and able to train yourself, some training applications can be found online too: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/training-FX101782702.aspx

Although not completely relevant to this week's topic, I stumbled across this while planning lessons for my Integrated unit assignment. While I have the opportunity I wanted to share with you some of the brilliant ICT rich learning opportunities suggested by the Tasmanian Government. What a fanstastic document, demonstrating numerous creative ways to integrate ICT into the curriculum. You must have a look:
http://www.education.tas.gov.au/curriculum/sustainable/ict/ictrich
(Click on the standards to view lesson ideas).