Week 6 (AKA week 4 for ICT) Games Games and more Games

Today's lecture was primarily about interactive games for school stuents from the http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/ This is an awesome website, so much information and so many resources, another site for the memory bank when Im on teaching rounds!
 Greg went through the different areas within the website to give us an idea of the extent of the the resources available http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/for_teachers/sample_curriculum_content/tm_-_early_years.html. This was where we went over the types of games that were available.
I am really impressed with this website and plan to have a really good look into the resources available within it, especially going into placements in a few weeks. I am also planning on using this as a resource for an interactive game for my English lesson planner too.

In the workshop we started with the URL http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ a great resource for teachers teaching about Aboriginal history. It had class activities and ideas on how to teach, it also had explanations of the videos for the teachers to help them grasp the ideas before going ahead and teaching the unit.

The task was to recreate the story that was told in the animation on a concept map in inspiration. I took the main themes from the short clip and pasted them with a quick description of what was happening in each frame. The teachers guide was a blessing as it wasnt clear from the actual clip what the theme was or what was going on at all times. This is a great tool for testing comprehension, and listening skills as well I guess! I am still amazed at the use of technology in the classroom, it's been a long time since I was in primary school, short of where in the world is Carmen San Diego, that was the only education game available. I really am going to have to knuckle down and source all of these resources into the one spot for quick referencing for units of work I will be covering. I am really starting to get excited about being able to use the computers for teaching!

This is the concept map of "The Be"

The second project was making graphs in Excell and making them Jazzy!! Basically this required us to start familiarising ourselves with the Microsoft Excel program.
If I had of remembered to bring my packet of m&ms (not that they would have made it through the day with me being obsessed with chocolate) we were to count the number of each of the colours of m&ms. Once the data was put in the 2 columns we made a graph out of them. Once the graph was done we Jazzed it up! That was the fun part! I constantly use graphs in my job, but never made them quite so nice, much more fun and interesting with pictures! A great interactive way of teaching kids to be able to plot and read graphs without the boring old methods of doing it on paper. Definately a keeper for when I teach the subject.