Build Your Wild Self is a great web site which is very suitable for students. Students get to choose a variety of characteristics to make themselves have different animal body parts. I would use this in my classroom. Possibly, I would use it as a starting point to write a creative story. It could also be used by students to allow them to express the kind of person they are. Possibly, a really lous person would give themselves a lot of lion characteristics and a really musical person may give themselves a lot of bird characteristics. I would require the students to explain their reasoning for choosing certain animal characteristics. This would be a good activity at the beginning of the year to understand more about the students and to help them learn about each other.

First week back after 2nd placement

After returning back from practicum it feels very strange to back. I have learned a lot and I really just want to start teaching. My second practicum school had an interactive white board in the class. I really enjoyed using it. Last technologies lecture we were shown how to make animations. It is possible to use leggo, clay or other material. You just have to start and stop the video and then put it all together with a computer video editing program.


However, if this is not possible, there are a variety of other options are possible. This includes just simply using powerpoint and making animations with the words. Also, you could slowly change each slide to make an animation. It is even possible to use a phone book and have them just draw images on the corner of the page.

It is important to teach the students the process of making an animation. This involves, creating a story board. This also involves learning how to use the technology. For example, how to speak in the microphone, start and stop the video, and use the computer program.

Today, we also learned about dfilm.com. It is a great little web site to create short animations. Although, some of the characters are inappropriate for young students.

The other computer program we learned about was Zimmer Twins.

With this web site you can make cute animations and choose what they say. You need to choose the make from scratch option.

Week 4: Graphing made fun!

This is an example of what you could do with your students to make the graphing tasks a little more fun. Students love to choose pictures from Google images and creating something that is individual. Allowing students to choose a graph style and the other graphing options makes it more exciting for them too.

Week 4: Graph Task

It is possible to teach maths with food. In this case smarties. You could have the students make predictions about what they expect they will find in a package of smarties. They could simply graph their findings. They could also survey other students about their 'Smartie' preferences. You could teach them how to color their graph to make it relevant to what the graph is about. Simply, right click on a column and choose 'format data series'. Then, select 'fill' and then choose the color.

Week 4: Student Comprehension Task

These images were taken from Dust Echoes: Ancient Stories, New Voices web site. It is a great website with a variety of Aboriginal stories to choose from. Some of the stories may be too scary for some students and this needs to be considered.

You are able to get the background information on the traditional story and you are able to watch a picture animation of the story as well. This is a great example of a task you could ask your students to do, which would be educational and fun.

Ask the students to become knowledgeable about the story and then create a story summary using the images and the Inspiration program.

This requires the students to press the control and the print screen buttons at the same time. Then they will past the image in the paint program. Next, the students cut the content of the image they want. Next, they paste it on a new paint page. Finally, they save it as a JPEG and open it up in the Inspiration program. This example, was places in a circular formation because the story it was based on "Morning Star" is based on the circle of life. The pictures were number as well to clarify the order. More text could easily be added.

This type of task requires students to choose the important parts of a story and use computers. This task will help with story comprehension. Doing it, is a lot for fun than putting random sentences in order to reflect the proper sequence of events. I will use this in my future classroom.

Week 3: Fun Online Quizzes

Week 3: Fun Online Quizzes

Today, we also learned about a great program which allows you (i.e. the teacher) or the students to make fun quizzes. The types range from flash cards to a variety of other games. One is called "from rags to riches." They are fun and relatively easy to create.
1) Go to www.quia.com/web
2) Subscribe to the 30 day trial offer
3) Create a user name and password
4) Go to "create a new quiz"
5) Choose the quiz type and create the title, questions and indicate the answers.