Week 4

English and Mathematics Activities for Classrooms using ICT

This week's workshop showed us how to equip students with the skills and knowledge to use technology in mathematics and English. Below is a great example of how to engage children in mathematical enquiry. Taking a traditional works sheet to record how many different coloured M&M's were in a packet, our challenge was to present the information in a more dynamic way.

As Greg pointed out, this is a great ICT activity for primary school students especially when they get to eat the M&M's afterwards! The activity in the classroom would be to pair students up and give each pair a packet of M&M's and have the students sort the M&M's into their respective colours. Students design the spreadsheet as creatively as they like and then enter the data onto their spreadsheet. I had never done this before but in a short space of time could produce some quite effective results.



Each pair then print out their spreadsheet and students discuss the colours they found in the packages. These groups then form bigger and bigger groups until the whole class has an overview. Greg explained that this process is known as “jigsawing”, where students are in small groups then join bigger groups as they discuss the issues. One spokesperson reports on the groups findings. The teacher can then enter the data into a class M&M spreadsheet or get groups of students to add their data as they finish designing their own.



This could then lead to a class debate run by the teacher asking questions such as: How many M&Ms were found in each packet? What is the range of colours found across the whole class? What would happen if the company just put all of one colour into the packets? Why do you think some colours don’t appear too frequently in each packet? A teacher could use more mathematical terminology by asking questions like,' What colours were found to occur more than others?' Chance and data activities could be developed from this one activity through investigating students' favourite colours and their reasons why?

This is a great fun activity that I would definitely use in class. VELS involves learning and engagement across a number of strands and disciplines most notably mathematics, interpersonal development, ICT and English and this activity would correlate well.

Dust Echoes

Dust Echoes is a series of twelve beautifully animated dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land, telling stories of love, loyalty, duty to country and aboriginal custom and law from ABC website.  We used the Print Screen function to take freeze frames of a particular animation.  We then pasted these into Paint, where we cropped them and then pasted the images into Inspire to create a story board.  This would be a great way to get students retelling narratives and assessing their understanding of texts while engaging them in more creative exercise.

 

Educational Soundness: Learning Federation & Thinking Curriculum Tools and ICT

In this week's lecture Greg introduced us to the Learning Federation website.

The Learning Federation is a project established by Education Services Australia, a ministerial company set up to deliver innovative, cost effective resources to education.


It aims to encourage and support schools to use these resources to embrace the digital revolution in education.