Week 5 - Concluding Remarks

During my practicum I took every opportunity to use technology to enhance my teaching and learning and as result I feel confident that I can do so in my own classroom next year. I found that using Interactive Whiteboard activities at the start of my lessons stimulated whole class discussion and helped me ensure that students were actively involved in the learning process.

Firstly, I used the education software I worked on at Pearson as the starting point for many of my literacy lessons. For example:

• The activities on Pearson Places Handwriting came in useful as a means of reinforcing students' knowledge about letter formation and placement.

• The A Sound Way Interactive Whiteboard CD activities worked well as a means of testing and reinforcing students' knowledge of long and short vowel sounds.

Secondly, I adapted the M&Ms activity from the Week 4 workshop for use in the numeracy unit on collecting data. I used Clinkers for the activity rather than M&Ms and as a class we recorded how many of each colour there were in the packet. Having collected the data we then created a bar chart and discussed what which colour was most common, least common etc. Unfortunately due to limited access to computers I wasn't able to teach the students how to create their own bar charts using Excel, but this activity was a fantastic and engaging way to introduce bar charts in a Prep class.

Finally, I used activities that I had created using the Quia software which allowed me to customize them to fit my integrated lessons. For example, as part of the Integrated Unit on Pets and the Farm the class had living eggs in the classroom which then hatched and therefore having looked at a PowerPoint about the lifecycle of a chicken I used a Quia quiz and hangman activity to test students knowledge and understanding. These activities can be viewed at the following links:

• Hatching eggs quiz: http://www.quia.com/quiz/2683189.html?AP_rand=126135913

• Hatching Eggs Hangman: http://www.quia.com/hm/696825.html

Overall, the technology workshops have opened my eyes to the range of resources that are freely available and the educational value of integrating these into my lessons as teaching and learning tools. I look forward to putting more of the ideas we have explored into practice next year and to discovering other sites and programs that can be used to effectively integrate ICT into every day teaching and learning.

Week 5 - Animate to Educate

In recent years animation has become a buzzword in educational circles and as a result of software developments in schools more and more teachers are getting the chance to explore the educational value of the animation process. According to 'The Educational Forum' in the UK, animation has a whole range of cross-curricular benefits including the exploration and development of ideas (The Arts), the ability to generate and communicate ideas (ICT), the development of storylines and characters (English), etc. According to the Senior Minister for State Education in China, meanwhile, 'the educational value of animation...lies not only in its stimulation of the creative instinct in pupils, but also in its encouragement of the team spirit', this ties in with the Interpersonal Development domain in VELS.

In this week's final Technology workshop we looked at a number of programs and websites that can be used to unleash the educational potential of animation in our own classrooms. I thought that the Build Your Wild Self and Reasonably Clever websites were a really good starting point for discussions about character creation and development. I particularly enjoyed using the Build Your Wild Self site and I think students of all age groups would find this an interesting exercise and a good stimulus for writing activities in English or Integrated Studies.

The Zimmer Twins website, meanwhile, could be used to teach students how to storyboard their ideas and how this process links to the creation of the final animation. There were some limitations in terms of the type of actions or ideas that you could include in the animation, but it would be a fun starter activity that could lead on to a more detailed and open ended exercise on storyboarding ideas.


While the Dfilm site was inappropriate for primary students, I did think that the structure of the Moviemaker program linked in nicely with the need to think about all the different elements of an animation such as setting the scene, choosing the characters, establishing the plot and creating dialogue. During the workshop I used the site to create the following animation on stranger danger so perhaps it could be used as a teacher tool if you where careful about the scene, characters and plot that you picked.

Finally, given the importance of linking students' learning to life beyond the classroom I think that looking at interviews with professional animators would also be really beneficial. On the Rollermache website for example there are interviews with Darcy Prendergast and Marisa about how they went about creating their clay animations. On this website there are also tips and activities for each stage in the animation process: Get Rolling, Story Telling, Storyboarding, Character Development, Props & Set, Animating, Editing and Sound. It is easy to see how you could develop a whole unit of work based on this site.