WEEK 5- Animation

This week, we used a lot of Internet websites to create animation movies. Greg suggested the educational value was significant for students and teachers alike. Most of the websites that we were shown in today’s workshop were simple and easy to use. I just became frustrated when I was rushed through them just as I was beginning to enjoy experimenting with them! I found all of the animation websites to be very useful and I feel most students would be engaged and interact with them in a classroom setting. As this blog is turning into an epic, I will briefly list the websites below and give a sentence or two describing what I liked or didn’t like about each animation website. Where I can, I will also provide snapshot pictures.


http://zimmertwins.com This website allowed for the most basic ICT user to create a movie storyboard from scratch. The concept was simple but could be expanded upon to make the animation as simple or as complex as the user is capable. As my first introductory lesson to animation, I found this website to be a good starting point. If used appropriately, I think many students and teenagers would enjoy this website.


http://xtranormal.com I didn’t get to use this website but I was told it was great for providing excellent lip synching in movie animations. The online tutorial suggests this website would be ideal for creating; school presentations, literacy news report, talk shows, soap drama or a music video. It seems the ideas are endless. I think there is a lot of opportunity to explore the use of this website for the purpose of student assessment across the many streams of the curriculum (Arts, Literacy, Science, Mathematics etc). It appeals to the different learning styles and abilities of the students.


http://www.sketchswap.com/ I particularly liked this website the most. I could sit there for hours and sketch and swap drawings. However, as much as it is fun and addictive, other then from a visual Arts perspective (where I would be assuming students would be set the task of drawing a particular way? E.g. line, shape, texture etc), I am unclear as to what the educational purpose of using this website is? I think it is a good tool for engaging and encouraging students to sketch however, as Greg pointed out, you never know what image you will receive back and also if you are not monitoring students closely, they are likely to misuse the website. For example, I sketched a dog and received back a picture of Batman (see pictures).


http://www.reasonablyclever.com/ I like the concept of using leggo to make animation. I found this to be a similar process to Claymation and the kids at my primary school loved that! I think the younger students would definitely relate to creating animation in this way. Using real life materials is engaging and at some stage in their life every person; child and adult has played with leggo. I would definitely try and use this concept and website in my classroom.
http://www.storygames.com/TeachmanPF/Rebus.html I have used this kind of activity whilst on teaching rounds and it works particularly well especially, with the younger age groups (Prep/1) as they explore the concepts of does it sound right? Does it look right? Rebus activities helps to build upon students basic English skills and teaches them the difference between; “two”, “to” and “too” and it is a great exercise for visual learners. I think it is an excellent idea and many more teachers should include this kind of activity in their teaching. The students find it fun and engaging and it helps them to begin to understand the meaning of words. It is also a great idea to have students create a Rebus of their own! Greg pointed out, that students can do this by creating their story in a word document, then import gif picture images (from any website) and when they have finished writing, spellchecking and inserting pictures, they can save the file as a webpage so that the gif pictures move. (To do this click file, save us, other format, webpage). See picture for example.


http://catchmentdetox.net.au/ Interesting website has great potential. The website would work well in conjunction with studying a unit on Water wise or environmental sustainability.


http://www.dfilm.com This website is not recommended for children. An example of what you can do can be found in the previous blog posting!






That is all for me, I hope you enjoyed reading Blondie’s Blog!!!

Heidi Smith 20/08/2010 ©

Blonde and the Beautiful- soap opera by Blondie

Reflection: Teaching Placement & the use of ICT

After just completing my last teaching placement, I thought I would leave a few observations, comments and opinions about the use of ICT in the classroom!

While on my last teaching placement ever, I was fortunate enough to oversee the implementation of Interactive Whiteboard's in my year 6 classroom. In conjunction with this, I was also working in an open plan teaching environment which was also very exciting!!! i found the use of incorporating ICT into every lesson very interesting, challenging and engaging. Students loved the ability to interact with myself and the whiteboard. Students were also particularly fond of touching the Interactive board and thus I tried to incorporate its use into my literacy and numeracy group rotations! As a class, we completed online quizzes through BrainPoP (http://www.brainpop.com/), completed funny literacy games using acronyms, nouns, verbs etc on Wacky Web Tales (http://www.wackywebtales.com/), used interactive Atlas CD's and watched interactive videos on the digestive system! The Interactive whiteboard is beneficial and appeals to a wider scope audience of different learning styles. In one lesson, the use of the Interactive whiteboard can appeal to visual, linguistic, musical and spatial learners. Also, no matter what a students' learning style or level of ability is, everyone in the class is engaged when the lesson is centered around interactive learning, including the teacher!

I was also fortunate enough to introduce my year 6 kids to online games using the http://www.quia.com/ website which Greg had recommended. My students created many games in their literacy groups based on either the texts they were reading in their literacy groups or around Australian concepts and geography (e.g. money, cities, suburbs, animals, places of interests etc) of which they were studying in our integrated unit on Australia. By the end of my placement, most students had mastered the art of creating online games and they loved it! I also introduced the students to the concept of WebQuests and Wikis. I am proud to say, my mentoring teacher continues to use online games as a literacy rotation group, the students are currently completing a WebQuest on Australia, which I co-designed and the whole of year 6 has implemented a teacher-student wiki where students can submit their homework online and have an ongoing discussion about school work with their teacher- how awesome!!!! What a wonderful and exciting teaching career I have to look forward to- now for a job!!!!

Heidi Smith 19/08/2010 ©

WEEK 4- Dreamtime stories & M&M Task

Reflections on the Workshop

Dreamtime Stories

In the first part of the workshop we watched two Aboriginal cultural based videos; “Spear” and “Mermaid Stories” (one Greg showed us and one we selected ourselves) from the ABC website (http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes). After watching the short videos, we revisited the Inspiration software we used in week 1 and we created a story retell concept map (as pictured) using images from the video we selected. We then wrote a sentence under each picture describing what was happening in the story. Once we finished, we exported the Inspiration file into a jpeg file to upload to our blog (a process we have used in earlier weeks).

I liked this task and I think the overall concept of what we were required to do during the workshop had strong educational merit. The educational value for students completing this task gives an integrated approach to story retell, order and sequence of events. Greg mentioned in today’s workshop that students become board with the “black line teaching approach”, that is handing out a worksheet and asking students to simply number the events from 1-10 in chronological order. By using online videos and computer software such as Inspiration adds another element into my teaching pedagogy such as ICT into what can sometimes be a mundane English classroom. Also, the incorporation of videos, allows for further English lessons such as analysis and discussion of song/music choice (i.e. what instruments did they use? Why do you think they used that particular instrument? How did it make you feel? etc). It also incorporates other disciplinary areas such as visual arts and drama etc. Videos also appeal to Multiple learning intelligences catering to many of Howard Gardiner’s learning Intelligences; linguistic, musical and interpersonal learners just to name a few (http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm).

My concern however is not the process we used in the workshop but the choice of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories we had to select from to complete the task. Our task was to retell the story but due to time constraints, we looked at the teacher study guides. Ideally, students would not have access to this and would therefore need to retell the story as they viewed it. Personally, I don’t know whether it is because I am an adult and have lost my sense of childlike qualities in my University years but I struggled to understand the two Dreamtime stories I viewed. In Mermaid Stories for example, I just saw a man (that looked like his beard was made out of a bush) swim around with some creatures that I presumed were evil mermaids, turtles and fish! I did not pick up on the story of an unhappy man leaving his family to swim and explore under the sea with mermaids to only return home to an unhappy son who son forgives him! I can also say that seven classmates in a 2 metre radius of where I was sitting in the computer lab also struggled! Therefore, I would be curious to implement this activity on my teaching rounds or future career and see how the students respond to the videos. Overall, I loved the concept of the workshop but I think the choice of videos is perhaps questionable.


M&M Task

I really enjoyed this task also but I found myself a little hungry after the first task that I ate some of my mini M&Ms : ) while Greg was in the middle of explaining the task so perhaps my excel spreadsheet may not be as accurate as everyone else’s? In the pictures on my blog you will see a picture of the Mini M&Ms on the M&Ms Candy Colour Chart (which I took with my iPhone and uploaded to face book and then saved to my computer to upload to my blog!) as well as two graphs I created in excel (one before I ate some M&Ms and one after). In both pictures, yellow and orange were mainly the predominant colours. This is an interesting starting point for children as it introduces young children to the concept of probability in mathematics. Asking them such questions as to what colours they think will be predominant and why do they think there was more orange and yellow M&Ms then any other colour. Also, why is there pink mini M&Ms but not any pink in normal M&Ms? Generally, I really like this activity because it has so many mathematical elements to it. Not only can students use Excel to graph their data but they can use this activity for probability, fractions, addition and subtraction and it’s a fun way to link learning to everyday life and chocolate. Unfortunately, due to severe allergies in children the activity may have to be altered so chocolate is substituted with a non-food item.


In sum, today I definitely felt very confident using the Inspiration software. Although at first I had forgotten how to insert images into an Inspiration file, once shown by another classmate I quickly picked up on the skills I had learnt in the past lessons and breezed through the task. I also found I was extremely proficient using the paint application to help cut, paste and edit video images from “Mermaid Stories”. I am impressed because my ICT skills have dramatically improved so much so that I was helping other classmates with the process that only two weeks ago I was struggling to comprehend the steps and constantly asking Greg to help because I had forgotten! Again, the lesson learnt here is you need to try and keep using your skills otherwise you forget and they become wasted skills. Also, once you retain a certain skill, even if you don’t practice it, once shown the steps again you soon remember.


Heidi Smith 18/08/2010 ©

WEEK 3- Online Games Development and Technology Design Process

Reflections on the Workshop

How to Jump a Frog!!!

In the first part of the workshop, Greg introduced the class to the old Technology CSF design brief. He also mentioned how the old design brief had been updated since CSF had changed to VELS. Using this brief Greg set forth a challenge for the class to work in pairs to make a paper frog “jump”. As part of the process we had to use the design brief to Investigate/Design what we were going to do, then we had to ‘Produce’ our design and finally Analyse and Evaluate our design. Greg provided us with the following equipment; paper frog, rubber band, sticky tape and a piece of cardboard (about the size of two matchboxes) stating that ALL equipment must be used in the design and implementation of the frog jump.




I worked with Emily and we decided to create our design based on the scientific notion of energy transference. We created a diving board out of the cardboard letting half of it overhang the table and sticking the other end onto the table with the sticky tape (see photos). We used the rubber band to pull back on the cardboard (in a catapult motion) and released it to let the motion created by the pressure of the rubber band on the cardboard allow the frog to jump! I was impressed at other class mate’s solutions such as sticking the frog onto the cardboard and making it into a slingshot!

I particularly liked the exercise and I believe primary school students would enjoy it and the design brief, as Greg mentioned can be applied no matter the activity taught. I think it is a good way for students to order their thinking. The exercise also allows for students to be creative as there is more then one possible solution to reach the destined outcome. It also requires them to use their higher thinking and listening skills, build on their relationship with their peers and help them establish negotiating skills as well as the ability to work as part of a team.


The hardest part of this activity was documenting what we did trying to use modern technology! Emily and I took video footage and still images of the materials we used and the design and implementation of the design using my new iPhone. From there, I was able to upload the images and video to facebook and save the pictures to my hard drive. I then edited the images in paint, using the skills I have acquired over the last two weeks and I was able to upload them into the blog. However, I was unable to save my video using the same process. I therefore uploaded my video from my iPhone to YouTube but I encountered further problems. Greg taught me how to embed a video and save it to a website called http://keepvid.com/ At the point of writing this blog, I was still unable to add the video to my blog (but let me assure you- it was quite reverting stuff and is still available on facebook! :) ) However, I will definitely try to use that website at a later time.

Video Dramas Revisited
Week 3, Greg and I discovered if you copy the embedded html (video) code from YouTube and then paste the html code into a word document and then copy again and paste the html code into the blog, the video will finally upload to the blog!!!

Creating online Games and Activities using www.quia.com

In the second part of today’s workshop we used the website http://www.quia.com/ to create online games such as trivia, hangman, jumbled words, word search, flash cards and rags to riches (similar to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). Firstly, I created a North Melbourne Trivia game (which can be found online at: http://www.quia.com/quiz/2514023.html for anyone who would like to try it!). I then attempted to create a very basic hangman on zoo animals (see pictures). I found this website particularly easy to use and useful for the classroom. I think it works well as a great tool for teachers to help assess student knowledge on contents taught as well provide a creative tool for students to explore what they have learnt.

There are however a couple of concerns I do have about using this website. Firstly, as Greg pointed out, you can use the 30 day trial period for as long as you wish (i.e. you can keep renewing it) however after the initial 30 day trial period elapses, all online games will disappear unless you pay for a subscription (approximately US$40) and this will continue to happen after every 30 days. I also find it disappointing that valuable student work will disappear if a school is using the website by trial and does not subscribe. The other negative factor I found was it appears that games and activities created can not be downloaded or printed??? This means if work is created for assessment purposes it is strictly viewed via the PC and neither the student nor teacher has access to the activities and games unless connected to the Internet and PC. My question here is, if you choose to incorporate a lot of ICT in the classroom by using quia.com how do you show parents how well or how poorly their students are travelling if you cannot produce written or printed evidence? Personally, I would like to be able to say, “This is what I have asked them to do… and this is what Jeremy has produced.”


Heidi Smith 11/08/2010 ©

WEEK 2- ePortfolios

Reflections on the Workshop

Applying for Jobs in Victorian Schools and the Interview Process

Today, we spent the first half of the workshop discussing ways we can successfully prepare for applying for teaching jobs and how to thoroughly prepare for the teaching interview process. Some of the key issues Greg discussed were:

· Do your homework on the school (read school policies, newsletters and website)

· Avoid a generic application by ensuring to answer criteria according to the school’s beliefs and philosophy etc

· Make your application standout by ensuring that it is grammatically correct and the font type and size is legible and most importantly do not go over the page limit!

· Write about something about yourself when addressing the criteria (for example if the school has a sports program, it would be to my benefit to include that I have participated, watched and coached many types of sporting teams including cricket, football, volleyball, athletics and hockey)

· Include referees who like you and any referees who can prove your links to the community such as Church Leaders, sporting coaches etc.

Greg also, gave some general “hygiene” hints that I found were basically common sense no matter the type of interview you were to attend. Finally, to quote Greg, one of the major keys to a successful interview (other than content knowledge and articulation of verbal communication) is to “dress well and play the game”.

Generally, I found Greg’s ideas very informative and helpful. I only wish that I had known this information earlier, when I completed my Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education in 2004. Unfortunately, I learnt a lot of what Greg had to say by actually going through the interview process myself. Although, I have heard most of this information from past mentors and learnt through my own experience I think it was a beneficial discussion to have with the class.



Brochure using Microsoft Publisher

In the second part of the workshop, we were introduced to more technology!!! Although, we were rushed, we managed to slap together a “brochure” using Microsoft Publisher (see picture). Personally, I struggled a little to use the software correctly because I kept accidentally deleting things but after the workshop I had a little more of a play and experimented with different images and designs. I am rather fond of this software and I think it provides a great tool for students to be creative. For example, in my webQuest I am creating, I have asked students to design a menu for Africa and I think that using Microsoft Publisher for this activity would work very well. With the use of this software, students will be able to combine their ICT skills (cut, paste and design) with their English skills (ability to read informative texts and summarize information into their own words).



ePortfolio using Microsoft Publisher

Again, we were briefly introduced how to use Microsoft Publisher to create our ePortfolio which is not only needed for assessment but will hopefully is a winning asset to have in a job interview! We did not work much with aspect of the program today but I can see similarities between Microsoft Publisher and Dreamweaver (software program I have used previously). More to follow!



Heidi Smith 04/08/2010 ©

WEEK 1- Learning Technologies (ICT) and 21st Century Education

Reflections on the Lecture

The lecture Greg delivered this week was very interesting. I was a little shocked by some of the issues that arose from the use of modern technology in everyday life (such as identity theft and students looking up teacher's facebook accounts!) However, I could also strongly relate to a lot of the issues and concepts Greg mentioned in his lecture. One of the most fascinating statistics Greg reported was by Gonzalez who stated...

“One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD)."

I strongly concur! Before undertaking the primary DipEd, I resorted to undertaking some personal development training in IT. This was mainly due to the fact that I am not all that confident in the use of modern technology and I wanted to have the slight upper hand on students in my classroom. While, I can switch a computer on and use the basic functions in Microsoft Office Word and some other Microsoft products, I am by no means a computer expert. Unfortunately, what I learnt 5 years ago, I have pretty much forgotten and the skills and programs I used (VB basic, Flash, Dreamweaver etc), I have had no need to use them nor have I seen them used at University, work or in the primary classroom. Whilst, on teaching rounds, I ironically, had year 5/6 students show me how to use software on the computers- a dilemma I had tried to earlier avoid! So here I am, back in the University classroom learning how to use technology again!

Reflections on the Workshop

Concept Mapping using Inspiration
In the first five minutes of the workshop I honestly had no idea what was going on! Especially, when Greg Powell showed us the “complicated” ways to export a creation made using the Inspiration software and upload it to our Blog using the paint application! However, I could see how this method would benefit primary school students (with lower primary school children often experimenting with the paint application in their pre-school years) but at the moment I do not feel comfortable using this method due to my beginning ICT skills.
Fortunately, when Greg Powell explained the “simple” export process, within minutes, I found myself using the Inspiration software efficiently. (Note: I am still convinced my grade 5/6 students would have been more effective). I created a concept map on space because I couldn’t think of anything else. By the end of the lesson I was able to import images from Google (as well as use the basic images within the software), create hyperlinks to WebPages (i.e. the space shuttle image is hyperlinked to the NASA webpage), add notes (i.e. include information about space shuttles), label the images with text and change the colour of the text, links and the background.

In sum, I think this software is great and I would definitely like to experiment with this software and implement it in my own classroom. I particularly like how it appeals to Howard Gardiner’s Multiple learning Intelligences providing a very strong visual and linguistic element. I also noticed for those more competent and if I experimented around, there is an option to import sound and videos.
Mind Mapping using Inspiration
The other option, we used today was creating mind maps using the inspiration software. I personally, was not a particular fan of using this software to create mind maps. I found the lines too confusing and I would rather the old- fashioned way of writing down my ideas on a piece of butcher’s paper. However, I would not stop my students from using this as an option. It is a great way of incorporating ICT in the classroom.


Heidi Smith 28/07/2010 ©