KimP’s Blog

Have A Look At What We’ve Been Up To

The AllStars have been searching through “Oceans of Info”, following a variety of interests, and have now reported their findings.

Their task last term was to “Create Something Extraordinary” about oceans.

First they puzzled and wondered about things that interested them.

Next they spent time reading, researching and learning about their topic.

Then they negotiated a rubric to support them in “creating something extraordinary” using web2.0 tools to present their learning.

After that they experimented with a web2.0 tool they hadn’t used before.

And…..

Finally they got down to creating.

You can see most of the presentations as they come up over at the 08AllStars site. 

Oceans of Info 1 a voki and a Toondoo

Oceans of Info 2 a pirate voki

Oceans of Info 3  “Mermaid News” video

Oceans of Info 4 Vokis by a marine biologist and a pirate

Oceans of Info 5 a Voki about the sinking of the HMAS Sydney

Oceans of Info 6 a video about whaling 

Vokis, videos, puppets and comics are some of the ways the students chose to share their information creatively.

I am truly proud and amazed at the wonderful ways that the kids told their stories. I think that the AllStars are ALL stars!

 Image: ‘ooooo!‘
www.flickr.com/photos/50502690@N00/431856206

Mind Map Magic

I am so excited about being able to embed things like this into my class blog, that I had to blog about it here too

How cool is this?

Last week we tried out a mind mapping tool called mind42.com to organise our thinking about Natural Disasters.

We had just been introduced to Natural Disasters through some wonderful hands on science activities from the CSIRO and we thought that we would like to investigate further.

This is what we came up with - have a look at the map above - you can move themap, make the text bigger/smaller, open and close the nodes. WOW

AllStars - leave a comment about the area you would like to investigate.  

Gunning for MissionMaker!

Spent the beginning part of Term 4 trying to complete our MisssionMaker games to put on our blogs. The kids took many hours tweaking their games, adding special effects and tricks, which in the end probably got in the way of the games they were making. 

I was really impressed with the way that they took on the challenge of making the games. They were not given much input into how to get things to happen in their games. Word of mouth and “experts” helped them along, trial and error and lateral thinking also enabled everyone to come up with a basic game. 

Of interest was the depth of focus of the students. All were totally focused on bringing their historical knowledge to the fore. They knew exactly what they wanted to do and there was very little use of guns within the games. I hadn’t given any instructions re guns and violence; I thought I would just see what evolved as they were making their games.  

I had discussed this issue with John Westwood from Lower Wyche C of E School in England, and he had noticed that his students had a bit of a play with the shooting aspects, but then moved on and concentrated on other areas of the game making. I found that this happened in my classroom as well.  Most of the class played with shooting things, but quickly moved onto making their historical game – we had explosions and fires but no death and destruction as such. 

The big exception to this happened when I received some “extras” into my class at the beginning of Term 4. These students hadn’t done any research into an historical period, and the MissionMaker game making was a bonus activity, rather than a purposeful way to demonstrate their learning of a topic. In these student’s games shooting was the be all and end all of the game. There was no other purpose to their games but to hunt and kill opponents. Interesting, but hardly surprising! 

Unfortunately the license for MissionMaker ran out at the end of the school year – not sure if this will affect our ability to post our games onto our blog for everyone to play or not.

MissionMaking a Game

Our negotiated task for this term was 

to create a game, based on our study of history, using the MissionMaker program. 

Here’s a brief outline of how we went about it……. 

1.    Exploring world history. “Taste testing” periods, people, stories from 3 eras:           

• Ancient history          
• Medieval history           
• Modern history 

2.    Focusing in on a story that they enjoyed –            

• Researching         
• Familiarizing          
• Comparing info/accounts of the story 

3.    Playing with MissionMaker

• Playing MM games           
•  Watching training video for ideas, ways of using the props, objects, rooms           
• Exploring the program themselves 

4.    Negotiating task requirements«           

• Pick up 5 objects           
• Use a story from history           
• Demonstrate knowledge of your period in history           
• Rubric 

5.    Aligning historical story with MissionMaker game. Deciding on worlds, characters, objects that are available in the game           

• Mind map of possibilities – who, when, where, what, why, how          
• Physical map of the game – rooms, characters, objects, clues

6.    Making the game – this is where we are up to now

7.    Presenting the games for play 

It’s school holidays at the moment so we have had to take a break from game-making for the next two weeks, but will continue when we get back to school.  

I have been encouraging the students to blog their preparations and plans as we go. To “see” what they have been up to please visit our class blog -  07 AllStars and click on their individual blogs down the right hand side of the page.

First Few Days Scratching …..

 A few quick observations on trying out Scratch this week in my classroom:

“Can’t see a thing…”

• we all had to find a way around the problem that the screens on the old computers in the classroom are too small
• not all of the Scratch screen is accessible
• kids came up with quick and easy work around  

“I did it my way ……”

• M went to the Scratch site and spent time looking at examples of games and animations to get ideas before she began
• two girls went for the “Getting Started with Scartch” manual we had printed off the website. They didn’t even open it though, just sat on it as they played around
• T sat alone at the back of the room - added sprites, changed background, and played around with sounds

“Looking for backgrounds …..”

• Yell outs: “How do you change….”
• Scuttling for the book/manual  ( me! )
• Admissions - “I did it, but I don’t remember how …….”
• “Try this …..”
• “I think I did this …..”
• “What about ……”
• “Ummmm …………YES!”

“Just a suggestion…..”

• Could we use photos as sprites ….?????
• I want to …..
• Maybe we can …..
• I think it would be good to …..
• What about …..
• Hey, do you think that ……
• Lets try …….

Scratch

We have had a quick little “look see” at Scratch: a programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab.

Scratch allows the students to snap together little pieces of programming to control and mix graphics, animations, music and sound.  Students can make animations and games and there are lots of ideas and projects to look through on their website.

I think we could do some really interesting things with Scratch, but the kids weren’t too sure what it “was for”.

So I have set a challenge to my class: “What can you do with Scratch?”

Because I want the kids to be able to use Scratch as they see fit, to use it as a tool to help in their construction of their learning, I plan to have a short, sharp burst of exploration for a week or two - where the kids will be able to play with the programming tools to see what they can do.

 In this initial period they will be encouraged to use aspects of one of the curriculum areas we are working on at this time in their exploration of Scratch. I’m hoping that this will enable the kids to have a basic idea of the capabilities of Scratch, and it will become another tool that is available to use when presenting their learning at various times throughout the year.

It will be interesting to see what they come up with - has anyone else used Scratch with their class? It would be great to hear what you have been up to    :)                       

Samorost

Since playing around with “Samorost” last week, my head has been full of ideas and possibilities for using it as a stimulus for developing setting and character descriptions in my students’ narrative writing. 

Here is how Ewan MacIntosh describes it: “just full of potential for some creative writing - the art in the landscapes is surreal and beautiful, with all kinds of nooks and crannies for our imaginations to rumble in.” 

Each step of the game provides a detailed and unusual setting that is explored and used to move onto the next stage. The scenes are visually rich and provide a common starting point that the class can share to practice their descriptive writing.

Descriptions of any sort seem quite hard for my students to write – they consist of basic details of what can be seen, without any emotional connection to either character or setting. I’m hoping that the beautiful, fantastic and surreal Samorost environments and creatures will provide an engaging and tangible starting place to build up experiences, ideas and some background knowledge about writing descriptions. 

My students need to use details and sense impressions to bring places and people alive.  At the moment both people and places in their stories are “flat” and perhaps “cartoony” – characters are either happy or sad, good or bad; stories take place in a school or in a shopping centre  or at home. Word choice and sentence structure are basic and rushed, or overlooked completely.

I’ll plan writing lessons around these ideas and will post student responses and writing samples as we go.

Game2Learn

Spoke yesterday morning at the Centre for Learning Innovation about the Game2Learn Project that my school and class took part in last year. The Game2Learn project used the digital gamemaking software Game Maker with Stage 3 (Years 5 & 6 students) to design and make their own arcade game. The purpose of the project was to produce a set of “How To”  tutorials to place online so that teachers from around the state would have the opportunity to use digital game-making to enhance learning. There have been a number of different projects using Game Maker software in different states of Australia over the last few years, and this Game2Learn Project was a way of the NSW Department of Education dipping their toes in and trying it out for themselves.

Nicholas Perkins from the CLI, visited the school once a week for an hour per class to lead the hands-on, computer lab actual game making strand of the project. In-class time was spent on a “Critical Literacy” strand during the rest of the week as well. In this strand we looked at what games were, who plays games, types of digital games, features of games, games reviews, games narratives and game design. This strand was vitally important as it gave the students the language to talk about games, as well as some important concepts (such as immersion, challenge, fairness etc), it also provided the basis for some writing work we did on games narratives. I’m really interested in this aspect of using games in education - the other learning possibilities and connections that are part of games and game making.

The students (with a partner) all started off making the same game each, as they worked through the activities/tutorials that the tutor had prepared on a game that he had made himself. This  gave the students the opportunity to become familiar with the program and to become aware of the basic features of the Game Maker software. After a couple of sessions, the students were encouraged to start a game of their own, using the skills they were learning in the whole group session. This really pleased the kids as they were excited and enthusiastic about making their own games - which we had been discussing, planning, thinking about and writing about in the classroom.

The kids worked hard to complete their games in the short period, the filming took place, and the various sections (Teacher talk, tutorials, and student responses) are ready to be re-packaged into a single presentation that hopefully will be trialled in a larger number of schools next term, and ready for public release later in the year.

PE? No, it’s PWii!

My class has just started to work out how we will use our brand new Wii in the classroom this term. The first thing decided upon was to change our regular PE (physical education) lessons to PWii (physical Wii) lessons, as the kids decided that PE was obviously the curriculum area that would be ideal to start with.

We held discussions about which games to play and how to organise sessions and a number of ideas were put forward:

• Each group of students would tackle a different game and teach the others to play
• Combining inside games on the Wii with outside games
• Integrating skills based lessons outside with Wii sessions inside.

After much discussion (using our De Bono’s Thinking Hats) we decided on looking at Tennis first up. This was primarily due to the fact that the skills in tennis fit most closely with NSW Curriculum requirements.

The class group will do some initial research on tennis - history, equipment, terminology and rules - and then smaller groups will research individual skills. Each small group ( of 2 or 3 students) will then take the lead in outdoor skills sessions in our regular PE times.

After some initial reading and sharing, we were able to come up with enough specific tennis skills, and more general movement skills, so that every group would have an area in which they could teach the rest of the class.

Each group is responsible for:

• Identifying and defining their skill
• Demonstrating the skill - including correct body placement
• Prepare basic activities for teaching the skill including:
  • Warm up
  • Activity
  • Cool down

The class also thought it would be interesting to investigate various body systems - skeletal system, muscular system, respiratory system, digestive system, circulatory system - in science to help understand how the body works. We will also be drawing on Maths skills in graphing and data collection on pulse levels as well as skill levels.

The Wii will fit into these plans by being the “real-life” application of the new skills being taught in PE lessons. Students do not have access to tennis courts (either within  or out of school) so the Wii will be set up in the room, with groups in a rotating timetable to use it whenever we have the time, as well as at set times during the week. Not sure how much work will get done by those not on the Wii :(  - we will have to see how this goes :)  .

We will be doing some basic pre testing of the kids fitness levels before they start and at the end of the unit.

What do you think?

Have we left anything out?

Derek playing Wii tennis at the LTS Consolarium

Gail playing a Wii game of tennis at the Consolarium