Real-Time Collaborative Writing

Projected image of the document just before completion

In ICT recently the children have been learning about how the internet has changed communication and how people interact. We started by looking at how the internet has changed how a group works together.

We looked at two situations. The children had to pretend they were in a group of three and had to discuss how they could complete a document together on a single sheet of A3. We then discussed how the situation would change if we had 10 children all trying to work on the same document at the same time.

We then looked at how the internet actually
allows those situations to work! The children were asked to create a variety of documents depending on their class. Some attempted scripts, some attempted narrative stories while others attempted non-fiction texts. In ever example though, every document had not less than 12 children simultaneously contributing to our collaborative documents. Each "team" can be seen in the images here as being represented by different colours of text.

The children found the activity an eye-opener and challenging but also great fun!

Visiting Classroom Blogs

 
Recently several classes began a new unit about communicating over the internet. One of the ways we can communicate, apart from the more obvious methods like Skype and Facebook, is blogging.

During the start of the unit classes were introduced to blogs used by a variety of year groups at our school, the ICT blog and other blogs created and maintained by classes in other countries.

We then spent some time practicing how to write a good comment. Among the things we needed to remember and practice were, remembering not to use "sms language" when we wrote a comment (writing "you" instead of just "u") as well as making a connection with the writer, among a variety of others.

This was the first time most of us had visited class blogs before (that weren't our own) and many of us found it quite interesting to see the variety of activities and events the bloggers wrote about. In classes with smaller children we noticed the blogs were usually written by their teacher but with lots of interesting pictures and samples of work. For classes with older children, we noticed that the children in the class did most of the things we read and looked at, including answering comments!

Eventually we started to write comments to the children who had written blog posts we were particularly interested in. While writing our comments, we had to remember to do the following:
1. Compliment the writer and thank them for writing the post.
2. Make a connection with the blogger about what you have experience of.
3. Be specific about what you like about the post.
4. Add more information about the topic.
5. Proofread and watch your punctuation and spelling. Always use your best writing!
6. Ask a question at the end.
7. Always be polite.

Later on in the unit, we will look at a variety of communication methods, keeping in mind our internet safety rules!

They're In!

After a loooong wait, our much anticipated TechKids badges are finally in Mr. Lowe's sweaty, hairy hands! :)

Starting this Tuesday, TechKids will begin working towards earning each of the 5 badges before June!

Here they are:

The winning design was by Alexander!

To go along with our brand new badges and shirts, we have a brand new website called "The Real TechKids" please drop by and find out what we're all about!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to term 2! Several classes are working on creating Stop Motion Animated movies using SAM Animation on their netbooks. We first began the unit by looking at how movies work, and the difference between photos and movies. We then organised ourselves into groups with a director and created our storyboards to go along with our simple stories. We have experimented with a wide variety of ideas, props, story ideas and materials to get the effects we were looking for. We're having a great time and we are looking forward to our movie festival in two weeks!

Making Movies Year 1

 In Year 1 we have been learning about digital images and digital movies. We are starting to understand that video is a collection of still images put together and played really quickly.

To help us with making our first movies, we have been using a program from Textease called Textease Movies CT.

We have been learning our way around the program, learning to add and remove digital images, which we browsed for on our network, add transitions, edit the timeline and some simple titles. Some of us also learned how to add some simple sound effects to go along with our movies.

We had lots of fun reordering the images we used and deciding which images we wanted to include as well as which transitions we liked the best. Some of us worked with partners and some wanted to do our work independently.

The classes worked fabulously well together sharing their understanding and working collaboratively to find out their own answers to questions with their friends.

We also started recording our own short video clips which we will be putting into our Textease Movies CT program so we can further our understanding.

We are really looking forward to finishing our first movies!

Making Games in Year 2

Earlier this term Year 2 began creating their own games to start learning about graphics as well as an introduction game creation and programming.

We began the unit with a discussion of famous games and what made them interesting and exciting to play. We then moved on to a discussion of the importance of graphics and why we need to know how to create images and how to change and use them.

We then began experimenting with creating our own games based on our own experiences with games we enjoyed and how the games worked. The end results were an excellent collection of games created by Year 2 which have been edited over and over again!

We had a great time creating and playing our games and the games other students had created. We really enjoyed using the "2doit Yourself" programme from 2 Simple Software and we've learned a lot about creating an interesting and well-thought out game!

Year 4 Parachutes

Year 4 was testing parachutes today. Parachutes are large pieces of fabric, usually nylon, which catch large amounts of air and work as a brake to slow down fast moving objects. You may be asking yourself what do parachutes have to do with computers and technology? Parachutes have been used often in motor sports, skydiving and also space missions, which are controlled by on-board computers! Great job Year 4!

TechKids Podcast 7

TechKids Podcast 6

Flat Stanley Arrives In Brunei!

Today, year 3 was overjoyed at the surprise arrival of Flat Stanley from England! The students are very excited and can't wait to read the letter which came in the package.

Year Three Simulations

Over the past few lessons, Year 3 has been learning about different types of computer simulations which included using Microsoft Excel and BBC Science Clips. We've learned that simulations are used to simplify complicated concepts, or to help us make decisions in situations where experiments inreal-life might be too dangerous, expensive or difficult.

Research Inquirers

Year 5 has been honing their research skills lately, by investigating a contrasting city from a Commonwealth country. We learned to look for things which are facts or opinions, what information was required for our task and why it is important not to copy and paste information we find when researching. We will be continuing to improve our research skills over the next few weeks.

Year 2 Learns To Navigate A Website

Today Year 2 began learning how to navigate websites using the back button, how to type an address into the address bar and that web pages are linked through hyperlinks which when clicked, will take them to different places. We had a lot of fun exploring the National Geographic for Kids website and we learned a lot about endangered species.

Year 6 And Microsoft Excel

Today, Year 6 has started working on Excel. Over the next few weeks we will be looking at basic editing, charts formulas and some of the more advanced features of this program. We'll also look at Google documents and see how it is similar and how it can be used to help our learning.

TechKids Podcast #5

In Podcast #5, one of our youngest and newest TechKids took part in her first podcast. She did a great job selecting the topic, guest, and deciding on the questions she wanted to ask. She interviewed one of the lead actors in one of the school's recent stage plays.

The music for the podcast is:

Title: I've Had Them Closed (Full)
Artist: Tortue Super Sonic
License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License