St. Joseph's School

The first of a three day block here. Server still not up and running but we are able to access the local computers. Hard for the kids who are half way through their websites and can’t access their work. Gave them a brief tutorial on creating animations with Paint & PowerPoint – PowerPoint can be saved as an html file and linked to their web pages when they are able to access them again. Some are doing some great original work – creating virtual classrooms in Paint, though some could not get motivated into creating any original as they couldn’t get past not finding it in ClipArt!
Worked with Carol & the room 3 students who have just started a topic study on plants – had met with Carol to prepare last week and looked at what teacher resources were available online. Used a ICT Learning Experience – animation with Paint & PowerPoint for the students to illustrate the life cycle of a plant. Plenty of discussion and storyboarded first.
Continued working with Room 3 to produce their animation in “Flower Point” as one student called it. There was plenty of discussion as we made it as to the learning objectives – what a plant needs to grow, and the stages of growth – every time they added a new feature they would want to watch it again & so they talked their way through it. Perhaps an ambitious project for students of this age to tackle without supervision because of the number of steps involved and because each step built on the one before. Without my support it would have been necessary to have a senior buddy or computer mentor to assist and keep them on track. Lots of other theme activities happening at the same time so fitted in really well with the class programme.
Cybersense and Nonsense with the middle school – Michael’s class doing Action Learning & finding out about gathering information. Shared some tips and advise about finding information online and how to find good websites. We practiced by evaluating and comparing websites about different sports associated with the Olympic Games.
Spent some time with Bernadette who wants to work with her music resources so she can access and use them easily with a laptop and data projector. Thought that catalogued web pages would be the best way to organise and display her song sheets and PowerPoint would not hold a longer continuous page of music without having to click between and back again. Created a pathfinder of the steps we need to go through to digitalise and organise her music collection which will need some more help along the way. First step is scanning her work and saving as Word files. Need some OCR software loaded and to have the scanner attached to a faster networked computer otherwise it will take a lifetime to do! Once this has been done then I will be able to work with Bernadette again to set up her Music pages using FrontPage. An enjoyable few days at St. Josephs and nice to spend some continuous time in one school.