Dust Echoes and M&M's

Today we used Inspiration, Paint, Excel and looked at a couple of websites (Dust Echoes and M&M's).

Dust Echoes is a website containing a number of indigenous stories. I chose to watch the video of Moon Man. It told a story about the moon being a man before it was in the sky. I paused the video on important parts of the story. I would print screen and put the image into Paint. I then cropped the image and copied and pasted it into Inspiration and added text to each image. The idea is to sequence it in a way that tells the story. We ran out of time so I didn't get to finish it but you get the idea by looking at the image above. I found the website to be very interesting and it would be a great resource for students to learn about indigenous culture.

Some of the stories are rather barbaric ('Moon Man' was one of those stories). I enjoyed this exercise but it was quite time consuming and like Greg said you wouldn't want students sitting down in front of a computer for this amount of time.

We also played around with Excel today. We were supposed to bring in a packet of M&M's for the activity but most people forgot or ate them before class. We entered colours into one column of excel and in the next column we entered the numbers representing the amount of those colours in the packet.

We created graphs displaying the amount of each M&M colour in the packet. I inserted a background image that I obtained from the M&M's website to link to the content of the graph and make the background more interesting.

The M&M website contains information that could be used in the primary school setting. Some things included are nutritional information, m&m recipes....

Design Brief and Online Games

Today Greg gave us the task of designing a frog that jumps using a small piece of cardboard, an elastic band, a piece of sticky tape and a little picture of a frog. Steph and I worked together to try to design our jumping frog. We didn't have success. The cardboard became flimsy the more we played around with it. The idea was to come up with the best design by first completing a design brief. This task would be perfect for primary school students as it offers a challenge and helps them to understand the importance of brainstorming and planning before jumping into a task.

We also created our own quiz game on the following website http://www.quia.com/web. I created a quiz aimed at younger students. It was about different types of pets. Go to http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513813.html to have a go. (N.B. I recently clicked on this link and it appears that my quiz has been removed). We also created other activities like hangman. Go to http://www.quia.com/hm/668181.html.

This could be good for students to pair up and create a quiz for each other based on something they had researched.

Using Publisher to Create a Brochure

Today we used Microsoft Publisher to create a brochure for a holiday destination of our choice. This involved adding images and pieces of information related to the destination. I chose North Stradbroke Island as my holiday destination. I haven't finished the brochure. I managed to add images and some text.

Greg presented examples of previous students' e-portfolios and spoke about the interview process and how to be prepared for an interview.

We also looked at creating web pages in Publisher. This will assist us in preparing our e-portfolios.

I have used Adobe InDesign previously, which is very similar to publisher however has more of a graphics focus and more flexibility in arranging the page layout. It is a very powerful desktop publishing package however it may be too complex for students and it is more expensive for schools to purchase.