This morning Greg introduced us to “Dust Echoes”. Dust Echoes is a series of twelve dreamtime stories that originate from Central Arnhem Land. They are animations that tell stories about Aboriginal custom and law, loyalty, and love.
I absolutely love this web site. It is extremely visually appealing, thus I think it will be very popular with primary school students. There are many activities that follow from each of these stories. There is study guide, wallpapers and MP3 bonus tracks from the series.
Our task for the day was to watch a story and then try to put a story into a sequence using Inspiration. The story I chose was called the “Whirlpool Song”. It was the sacred story of the Limmen Byte River and why fresh-water people never make a sound. The sound and imagery were captivating, and the story was quite scary.
This website, produced by the ABC, is another great tool for early learners. It is a great way for children to learn about Aboriginal culture. There are so many resources for children and teachers, these stories could be used for a whole unit of work, rather than a once-off.
M & M Candy Chart
Another activity in class was learning how to combine ICT with mathematics. The above website is the American M&M website. On this website there are many different ways to use M&Ms for learning how to make graphs.
How many of each colour in milk chocolate packet?
Using M&Ms, we did an activity where we graphed our results of how many of each colour of M&Ms in one sample. We graphed the numbers on Excel, using the colour in one line, and number in the other.
Following this, we went onto the M&M website (American version) and had a look at the statistical information. Here, students can discover terms such as “energy” and “saturated fat”. From this web site, teachers could then explore these nutritional facts and students could bring in packets of cereal etc. from home for analysis.
I think doing a project based on M&Ms will be engaging for nearly any class in primary school. M&Ms are a desirable sweet, so students will not be able to resist being enticed into learning about what makes up an M&M. Also, using excel, students can learn how to represent data as a graph.
I find excel relatively easy to use basically, but quite difficult to master. At first glance, it looks like a very complicated program. And, yes, it can do complicated tasks (people use it for advanced accounting and other jobs), but it can also do simple tasks, such as graphing M&Ms data in the classroom. This would be suitable for year 5 and 6 students.
Learning Federation
This week, there has been a big focus on the Learning Federation (http://econtent.thelearningfederation.edu.au/ec/p/home ).
This seems to be quite an amazing web site, full of thousands of online resources for students and teachers across Australia.
Unfortunately, it is such a huge site, that it is a little intimidating trying to find your way around. It’s like being in a big city, and not knowing where to go. I did a quick browse and clicked on The Arts à Drama à Aboriginal Drama. Here I came across two lesson ideas from two different teachers regarding Aboriginal drama.
Following this I tried to find the video section. Is this website a library or a resource centre? I could not click on the video link on the homepage. So, i assumed that the video must be in each section. Gee Wizz! This site is rather hard to navigate around.
Hang on, I take that last paragraph back. Once I go into one of the links, there is a “view content” link. That is what takes you to the online media, whether it be audio or visual. Brilliant. Crisis Over!
So the lesson for me is, if I’m going to show the students, I must show myself first!
This site is a directory of nearly every Web 2.0 App on the internet. It is extremely extensive, free and easy to use. I highly recommend it to any teacher looking for more ways to engage their students online.
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